Tag Archives: Books

January links: Distraction, reading, routine, and more

January 19, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* I wrote a lot about distraction in this post, and now Cory Doctorow—the same one who wears a red cape and blogs from high-altitude balloons—has written another of these articles. I’m going call them a genre. Reblock Yourself the Polly Frost Way! in The Atlantic might be part of it.

* The Daily Routines of Interesting People, courtesy of Mental Floss. Most of them are writers of some sort. You can find similar material in Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times.

(I don’t remember where I picked up the link, but someone deserves a hat tip.)

* By way of the New York Times’ idea blog, a write up in New Scientist says Victorian literature might function in ways that demonstrate or reinforce positive social behavior:

WHY does storytelling endure across time and cultures? Perhaps the answer lies in our evolutionary roots. A study of the way that people respond to Victorian literature hints that novels act as a social glue, reinforcing the types of behaviour that benefit society.

Literature “could continually condition society so that we fight against base impulses and work in a cooperative way”, says Jonathan Gottschall of Washington and Jefferson College, Pennsylvania.

[…]

The team found that the characters fell into groups that mirrored the egalitarian dynamics of hunter-gather society, in which individual dominance is suppressed for the greater good (Evolutionary Psychology, vol 4, p 716). Protagonists, such as Elizabeth Bennett in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example, scored highly on conscientiousness and nurturing, while antagonists like Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula scored highly on status-seeking and social dominance.

I wonder how the writing of, say, Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis or Elmore Leonard would fit that theory. Maybe they’re showing us what not to do.

* Speculative Fiction and criticism is a nice complement to Science Fiction, literature, and the haters, my post on a topic that, I’m now starting to realize, is constantly discussed anew as though it hasn’t been analyzed before.

* The New Yorker has a simpering article about The Village Voice and its history. Although it’s not clear that the Voice did much to change journalism or is important beyond a New Yorker’s myopic vision, there are a few amusing pieces worth quoting:

Wolf considered his editorial policy as philosophy. “The Village Voice was originally conceived as a living, breathing attempt to demolish the notion that one needs to be a professional to accomplish something in a field as purportedly technical as journalism,” he wrote in the introduction to “The Village Voice Reader,” in 1962.

[…]

Since devaluing authority is one of the things journalism does, this [habit of internecine warfare among Voice writers] amounted to using the methods of journalism against the pretensions of mainstream journalism.

The same descriptions are frequently applied to bloggers.

* Another reason not to like the Kindle, this one from Philip Greenspun:

My Amazon Kindle is just slightly past its one year anniversary and showing signs of very ill health. Half of the pixels on the screen are stuck following a light knock. I called Amazon and they’re happy to fix it… for $180 plus $7 in shipping (free if you’re a Prime member). The Kindle is more fragile than a laptop computer but less likely to be pampered given that you use it in all the situations where you’d use a book.

I may have to rethink my enthusiasm for the electronic book. Realistically the way that people handle books, the Kindle is not going to last more than one year. That means you’re spending $360 for the initial purchase and $187 every year for hardware repairs. Some of the Kindle editions of books are edging their way up towards $20 […]

See my reasons here.

* Read Jason Fisher’s excellent post on The Imaginative and the Imaginary: Northrop Frye and Tolkien. Pay special attention to the second comment, which is from Glen Robert Gill.

* The Wall Street Journal asks, Blockbuster or Bust? about the incentives behind mega-advances in the publishing and other media industries (merely calling them industries feels dirty, but I guess everyone else does it, which makes it okay). Compare this to my recent post on how the Publishing Industry’s Gloom is Readers’ Gain and Why are so many awful movies so awful? 

* In the post on the publishing industry linked to above, I also linked to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, which is so good that I will point to it again here. See too Ann Patchett’s The Triumph of the Readers: The markets may be down, but fiction is on the rise in the Wall Street Journal. I agree with this sentence: “I am a firm believer in the fact that it isn’t so much what you read, it’s that you read.” Later, she says “Even if you’re stepping into “Valley of the Dolls,” it’s better than nothing. I’m all for reading bad books because I consider them to be a gateway drug.”)

Compare that to Reading: Wheaties, marijuana, or boring? You decide, my post from June 2008:

Let this be a lesson, by the way, to the natterers, including myself, on getting young people to read—instead of pushing reading ceaselessly like whole wheat bread, maybe it’s time to forbid it, and stock copies of Henry Miller and Bret Easton Ellis in the liquor store, thereby necessitating that teenagers get their older siblings or boyfriends or whatever to buy it for them. They might pass copies of [Alan Moore’s] Lost Girls around like furtive bongs at parties. I call this the “gateway drug” approach to reading, as opposed to the “whole wheat” approach.

There are shades of Orwell too. Here’s Patchett:

It’s true, as a source of entertainment reading ranks somewhere between cheap and free, depending on where you get your books. A movie can give you two hours of entertainment, but a book can go on for days or even weeks.

And here’s Orwell in 1942:

Reading is one of the cheapest and least wasteful recreations in existence. An edition of tens of thousands of copies of a book does not use up as much paper or labour as a single day’s issue of one newspaper, and each copy the book may pass through hundreds of hands before it goes back to the pulping mill.

* Reason #1041 why I dislike Tucson: no authors come here because the city’s literary culture is insufficient to draw them. One might think a town with a major university would do better, but, alas, it does not. Steven Berlin Johnson’s book tour for The Invention of Air doesn’t include Tucson—but Johnson will be in Seattle, L.A. and Portland.

* As long as I’m beating up Tucson, notice this post from Nigel Beale regarding the United States’ most literate cities. Minneapolis/St. Paul dominate, Seattle is number two, and Tucson doesn’t make the top 10. But at 32, it does beat Los Angeles (56) and Phoenix (57), although I would take literary L.A. over Tucson for the better bookstores if nothing else.

* PCWorld writes “Inside the World’s Greatest Keyboard” concerning the IBM Model M. I wrote about the Unicomp Customizer here; it’s a version of the Model M that’s still manufactured.

* I’ve linked to Paul Graham’s essay on Philosophy several times, but now someone has written an excellent post disagreeing.

* From Kate’s Book Blog quoting “What is Style?”:

There is no such thing as a writer who has escaped being influenced. I have never heard a professional writer of any quality or standing talk about “pure” style, or say he would not read this or that for fear of corrupting or affecting his own; but I have heard it from would-be writers and amateurs.

* Although politics don’t interest me much, this seems so insightful regarding the Middle East as to deserve a link:

IV. As a consequence of the above three trends, major political issues of importance to the people of this region are increasingly inconsequential to most people and powers around the world. The electoral politics of the Metn region in Lebanon, the tribal politics of Gaza, the human rights conditions in Syria and Morocco, and the forty years of Moammar Gaddafi’s rule in Libya are issues that no longer occupy any serious time or thought among leaders in the world’s most powerful countries, regardless of whether we accept that or not.

The worst ramifications of the Middle East’s dysfunctions — terrorism, illegal migration, ethnic strife, corruption, police states, and assorted atrocities perpetuated by both state and private actors — are only occasional irritants for the rest of the world, not pressing strategic threats. We have marginalized ourselves as serious players on the global political stage, and now assume the role of nagging annoyances and miscreants.

Indeed: and the pity is that too few seem to realize this.

(Hat tip Jeffrey Goldberg. Incidentally, his piece Why Israel Feels Threatened is worth reading too.)

* The Wall Street Journal discusses Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. See my analysis of the novel here.

Why are so many movies awful?

January 18, 2009 By in Books, Critics, Culture, Essays Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

The short answer: they’re ruled by marketing, not by art, feeling, or emotion, to the extent that those characteristics can’t be captured by marketing.

The longer answer comes from Tad Friend’s article in the January 19 2009 issue of The New Yorker, “The Cobra: Inside a movie marketer’s playbook,” which describes how movies get made. Today, the answer is nearly identical to the question of how movies get marketed. My favorite quote is a little less than midway through:

” ‘Studios now are pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates,’ one studio’s president of production says. ‘So at green-light meetings it’s a bunch of marketing and sales guys giving you educated guesses about what a property might gross. No one is saying, “This director was born to make this movie.” ‘ “

“Pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates:” it’s a great metaphor that conveys precisely how much vast corporations care about art as well as the relative power of those existing within studios. Creativity isn’t dead, even in major studios’ presidents of production, but neither is cynicism, as the article shows in too many places to enumerate. “Cynical” might be too light a word—if Julie Salamon’s ‘The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood is somewhat cynical, then nothing except perhaps nihilism describes the Hollywood marketer’s mind as portrayed by Friend.

Read the whole article for more: it never comes out and baldly states what’s obvious, as I have. This blog only occasionally strays into territory dealing with movies; this analysis of Cloverfield is my only extended treatment of one, although this post discusses movie versions of Ian McEwan’s Atonement and George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War. Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that the movies I tend to pay the most attention to are based off books; according to Friend’s article, such movies are “‘pre-awareness’ titles: movies like ‘Spider-Man’ whose stories the audience already knew from another medium […]” like virtually all that have made extraordinary amounts of money in the last decade. Movies also tend to raise a book’s profile enough to encourage me to read it when I otherwise wouldn’t; the movie version of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader is an example of this.

I suppose the same question regarding why so many are so bad could be applied to books too, but books are often less obvious: critics seem to have (slightly) more power, and the sheer number of books makes the bad ones easier to ignore. Call it strength in diversity. Movies are noisier, and because there are fewer of them, each one collects more attention. But because they cost so much to make, they become a numbers game; I care vastly more about aesthetic worth than opening weekends. But, at least as shown in this article, Hollywood cares about those numbers.

It shows in their product.

EDIT: Wynton Marsalis, by way of Alex Ross:

 

At the root of our current national dilemmas is an accepted lack of integrity. We are assaulted on all sides by corruption of such magnitude that it’s hard to fathom. Almost everything and everyone seems to be for sale. Value is assessed solely in terms of dollars. Quality is sacrificed to commerce and truthful communication is supplanted by marketing.

In addition, see my comments on Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood for more on how the way movies are made affects the movies that are made.

… I’m not the first or only one to have noticed Amazon.com’s utility

January 17, 2009 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

My recent post on how Publishing Industry Gloom is Readers’ Gain discussed the pervasive fear of used books. But now I’ve found an article from a decade ago concerning and predicting its rise, in Philip Greenspun’s hilarious (and depressing) piece about his experience writing a tech book. Towards the bottom, he included this:

Looking at the way my book was marketed made me realize that amazon.com is going to rule the world. A traditional bookstore is useful as an entertainment venue. You can arrange to meet someone there. You can kill 20 minutes browsing. But if you’re picky about what you want, the chance of them having the book is pretty small. They carry books that are being heavily hyped and books that were popular and relevant six months ago. Traditional bookstores can’t respond quickly to customer demand for new or newly popular titles. In dozens of cases, friends of mine would go into a store to ask after Database Backed Web Sites. Usually the book had not been ordered and the store had no intention of stocking the title. The front desk clerks had no mechanism to provide feedback to the buyers. If a person did not plunk down his credit card and special order the book, no record would exist of the inquiry.

Although I couldn’t find a date of original publication on his site, it appears to have been sometime around 1997. Talk about prescience. Not long ago I desperately wanted a copy of Chaim Potok’s The Gift of Asher Lev—which was a mistake—so I could start it immediately after finishing My Name is Asher Lev. None of the Bookman’s stores in Tucson had it. Antigone (of course) didn’t have it, but that didn’t stop me from calling. Eventually I found two stores, both inconveniently located, that did: a Barnes & Noble and a Borders. The Barnes & Noble didn’t actually have it, though their computer said they did. The Borders did have it for about $15. If I’d just started driving to bookstores, I would’ve been irate by the journey’s end. For the privilege, I paid a little more than $15.00. Amazon charges $10.20 as of this writing. A used copy costs $8.08 with shipping. Don’t get me started on the dearth New York Review of Books Press or Library of America titles, which are two of my favorite imprints.

This is why Amazon is growing in power.

In Seattle, I would go to Elliott Bay and the University Bookstore to hear authors. In Tucson, I lack even that reason.

Still, it appears that used books might not be substitutes for most Amazon buyers, according to Internet Exchanges for Used Books: An Empirical Analysis of Product Cannibalization and Welfare Impact, which says

Our analysis suggests that used books are poor substitutes for new books for most of Amazon’s customers. The cross-price elasticity of new book demand with respect to used book prices is only 0.088. As a result only 16% of used book sales at Amazon cannibalize new book purchases. The remaining 84% of used book sales apparently would not have occurred at Amazon’s new book prices. Further, our estimates suggest that this increase in book readership from Amazon’s used book marketplace increases consumer surplus by approximately $67.21 million annually.

Then again, it was also written in 2005, and I wouldn’t be surprised if reader behavior changes quickly.

… I'm not the first or only one to have noticed Amazon.com's utility

January 17, 2009 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

My recent post on how Publishing Industry Gloom is Readers’ Gain discussed the pervasive fear of used books. But now I’ve found an article from a decade ago concerning and predicting its rise, in Philip Greenspun’s hilarious (and depressing) piece about his experience writing a tech book. Towards the bottom, he included this:

Looking at the way my book was marketed made me realize that amazon.com is going to rule the world. A traditional bookstore is useful as an entertainment venue. You can arrange to meet someone there. You can kill 20 minutes browsing. But if you’re picky about what you want, the chance of them having the book is pretty small. They carry books that are being heavily hyped and books that were popular and relevant six months ago. Traditional bookstores can’t respond quickly to customer demand for new or newly popular titles. In dozens of cases, friends of mine would go into a store to ask after Database Backed Web Sites. Usually the book had not been ordered and the store had no intention of stocking the title. The front desk clerks had no mechanism to provide feedback to the buyers. If a person did not plunk down his credit card and special order the book, no record would exist of the inquiry.

Although I couldn’t find a date of original publication on his site, it appears to have been sometime around 1997. Talk about prescience. Not long ago I desperately wanted a copy of Chaim Potok’s The Gift of Asher Lev—which was a mistake—so I could start it immediately after finishing My Name is Asher Lev. None of the Bookman’s stores in Tucson had it. Antigone (of course) didn’t have it, but that didn’t stop me from calling. Eventually I found two stores, both inconveniently located, that did: a Barnes & Noble and a Borders. The Barnes & Noble didn’t actually have it, though their computer said they did. The Borders did have it for about $15. If I’d just started driving to bookstores, I would’ve been irate by the journey’s end. For the privilege, I paid a little more than $15.00. Amazon charges $10.20 as of this writing. A used copy costs $8.08 with shipping. Don’t get me started on the dearth New York Review of Books Press or Library of America titles, which are two of my favorite imprints.

This is why Amazon is growing in power.

In Seattle, I would go to Elliott Bay and the University Bookstore to hear authors. In Tucson, I lack even that reason.

Still, it appears that used books might not be substitutes for most Amazon buyers, according to Internet Exchanges for Used Books: An Empirical Analysis of Product Cannibalization and Welfare Impact, which says

Our analysis suggests that used books are poor substitutes for new books for most of Amazon’s customers. The cross-price elasticity of new book demand with respect to used book prices is only 0.088. As a result only 16% of used book sales at Amazon cannibalize new book purchases. The remaining 84% of used book sales apparently would not have occurred at Amazon’s new book prices. Further, our estimates suggest that this increase in book readership from Amazon’s used book marketplace increases consumer surplus by approximately $67.21 million annually.

Then again, it was also written in 2005, and I wouldn’t be surprised if reader behavior changes quickly.

Life: Critics and art edition

January 12, 2009 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“What’s the good of fighting critics? Mind you, some of them are very able… But only a few can form any opinion of a new work. Most of them are simply on the lookout for novelty. They hear too much, and they hear it the wrong way. They get like children who are peevish from having too many toys…”

“Nothing, nothing whatever really stands in the way of a creative artist except lack of talent.”

—Robertson Davies, A Mixture of Frailties

Publishing Industry Gloom is Readers’ Gain

January 6, 2009 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It almost perfectly describes my book habits. The major difference is that I carefully examine the used and new prices; if they are sufficiently close, especially given shipping charges, I go new. But they often aren’t. Read the article and note this:

And what of the woman who sold me the [used] book [over the Internet]? She told me via e-mail that her real name was Heather Mash and that she worked as a domestic violence case manager in a women’s shelter not too far from Berkeley. She didn’t set out to subvert the publishing and bookselling world, she said. Like most of us who sell online, Ms. Mash began because she had too many books and wanted to raise money to buy more. “I would rather sell a book for a penny and let someone enjoy it than keep it collecting dust,” she said.

Many of the scholarly books I own concerning Melville or Tolkien would once have been unavailable or, if they were available, ludicrously expensive, and reading them probably would’ve required a good university library. Now I can buy them relatively cheaply; instead of $20 for Jane Chance’s The Mythology of Power, I got it for $4 or $5, counting shipping. Once, such books probably wouldn’t even have been available in paperback; the only option would’ve been hardbacks costing $45 – $100.

Although the New York Times article implies this hurts the publishing industry, I wonder if it really helps: a decreasing reliance on old books (or the “catalog”) means that publishers will be forced to pay more attention to new books if they are to make any money. At the same time, the real question is the extent to which used books are substitutes or complements for real books. With some works—like the classics cited in the article—the answer seems to be substitutes. With others, though, I suspect that readers are more likely to buy more books because they can better afford it.

The article implies that Amazon is partially a problem, but I would observe that people use Amazon because Amazon is incredibly, extraordinarily easy and cheap. It’s also simple to learn, as if easy and cheap weren’t enough. And the selection is good; for example, I recently mentioned Norman Rush’s extraordinary novel Mating in a post on The Mind-Body Problem. At this Amazon link, a dozen hardcover copies are available for “$0.01,” although this is deceptive because the $3.99 in shipping means that you’re actually paying $4. Still, that’s incredibly cheap; in a Seattle used bookstore not long ago, I saw a hardcover copy for $11. Furthermore, you can’t even buy new hardcover copies of Mating, and a used hardcover will probably last longer than a new paperback. Is it any surprise that I react to this situation with self-interest?

What can or should publishers do? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it means competing with their own catalog in terms of price. Or it might mean something else; I’m reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent piece in Harper’s, Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading:

Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

[…]

I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. Elements of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. How-to books and the like have some market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature—art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.

And one more point, this one from The Zen of Graphics Programming by way of a Slashdot comment:

Anecdote the third: A while back, I had the good fortune to have lunch down by Seattle’s waterfront with Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (one of the best SF books I’ve come across in a long time). As he talked about the nature of networked technology and what he hoped to see emerge, he mentioned that a couple of blocks down the street was the pawn shop where Jimi Hendrix bought his first guitar. His point was that if a cheap guitar hadn’t been available, Hendrix’s unique talent would never have emerged. Similarly, he views the networking of society as a way to get affordable creative tools to many people, so as much talent as possible can be unearthed and developed.

This semester, the University of Arizona bookstore charged around $400 for class books, or around $340 used. A combination of new and used books from Amazon ran to about $250. I’ll keep the $150, thanks. But I’ll probably end up spending the rest on other books.

Publishing Industry Gloom is Readers' Gain

January 6, 2009 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It almost perfectly describes my book habits. The major difference is that I carefully examine the used and new prices; if they are sufficiently close, especially given shipping charges, I go new. But they often aren’t. Read the article and note this:

And what of the woman who sold me the [used] book [over the Internet]? She told me via e-mail that her real name was Heather Mash and that she worked as a domestic violence case manager in a women’s shelter not too far from Berkeley. She didn’t set out to subvert the publishing and bookselling world, she said. Like most of us who sell online, Ms. Mash began because she had too many books and wanted to raise money to buy more. “I would rather sell a book for a penny and let someone enjoy it than keep it collecting dust,” she said.

Many of the scholarly books I own concerning Melville or Tolkien would once have been unavailable or, if they were available, ludicrously expensive, and reading them probably would’ve required a good university library. Now I can buy them relatively cheaply; instead of $20 for Jane Chance’s The Mythology of Power, I got it for $4 or $5, counting shipping. Once, such books probably wouldn’t even have been available in paperback; the only option would’ve been hardbacks costing $45 – $100.

Although the New York Times article implies this hurts the publishing industry, I wonder if it really helps: a decreasing reliance on old books (or the “catalog”) means that publishers will be forced to pay more attention to new books if they are to make any money. At the same time, the real question is the extent to which used books are substitutes or complements for real books. With some works—like the classics cited in the article—the answer seems to be substitutes. With others, though, I suspect that readers are more likely to buy more books because they can better afford it.

The article implies that Amazon is partially a problem, but I would observe that people use Amazon because Amazon is incredibly, extraordinarily easy and cheap. It’s also simple to learn, as if easy and cheap weren’t enough. And the selection is good; for example, I recently mentioned Norman Rush’s extraordinary novel Mating in a post on The Mind-Body Problem. At this Amazon link, a dozen hardcover copies are available for “$0.01,” although this is deceptive because the $3.99 in shipping means that you’re actually paying $4. Still, that’s incredibly cheap; in a Seattle used bookstore not long ago, I saw a hardcover copy for $11. Furthermore, you can’t even buy new hardcover copies of Mating, and a used hardcover will probably last longer than a new paperback. Is it any surprise that I react to this situation with self-interest?

What can or should publishers do? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it means competing with their own catalog in terms of price. Or it might mean something else; I’m reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent piece in Harper’s, Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading:

Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

[…]

I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. Elements of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. How-to books and the like have some market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature—art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.

And one more point, this one from The Zen of Graphics Programming by way of a Slashdot comment:

Anecdote the third: A while back, I had the good fortune to have lunch down by Seattle’s waterfront with Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (one of the best SF books I’ve come across in a long time). As he talked about the nature of networked technology and what he hoped to see emerge, he mentioned that a couple of blocks down the street was the pawn shop where Jimi Hendrix bought his first guitar. His point was that if a cheap guitar hadn’t been available, Hendrix’s unique talent would never have emerged. Similarly, he views the networking of society as a way to get affordable creative tools to many people, so as much talent as possible can be unearthed and developed.

This semester, the University of Arizona bookstore charged around $400 for class books, or around $340 used. A combination of new and used books from Amazon ran to about $250. I’ll keep the $150, thanks. But I’ll probably end up spending the rest on other books.

Life: Art edition

January 2, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Life Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

“Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or rebel against it.”

—Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev

The Reader — Bernhard Schlink

December 29, 2008 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader is sensual and philosophical, moving from the former, which predominates in the beginning, toward the latter in a manner “both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile,” as Michael describes the journeys in the Odyssey. “What is else is the history of the law?” he asks, and one might ask the same of history, full stop, or of love; The Reader implies that there is no answer save that the law, history, or love have whatever purpose we graft onto it, just as one could argue for a sensual reading of the novel, especially in the first part, or a philosophic, especially as Michael grows older. A young man with an older woman named Hanna feels the sensual as well as their, and its, doom, while the second, comes from an older lawyer who finds that his first love, if one can call it that, is being tried for crimes that would seem astonishing if not for the time period and location. There is a third part I will demure from speaking much of; to do so would give too much away in a novel that often feels like it gives too little away, especially of its feelings. Chapters end with no sense of ending beyond the beginning of the next chapter. Chapters of Michael’s life end with a similar lack of fanfare, and The Reader is, at its base, a novel that almost demands readings as analytic as its protagonist is inclined to give.

Some descriptions in The Reader are simple and true enough not to need elaboration, and those who have undergone extensive trials will recognize what happens when Michael’s bout with hepatitis renders him hospitalized for months: “although friends still came to see me, I had been sick for so long that their visits could no longer bridge the gap between their daily lives and mine, and became shorter and shorter.” Then again, Michael does not make friends easily, and his eventual wife is a ghostly presence who seems to affect him less than the hepatitis, or, for that matter, the weather. Perhaps this event combined with natural temperament and his liaisons with Hanna make Michael himself. Or maybe he was always this way, and that’s what brought him to Hanna and her secrets. Alas: those apt sentences like the one describing Michael’s illness tantalize us for more, and yet they are not forthcoming.

This novel is hardly alone in its remote, abstract mode. What is it about these Europeans—Schlink, Milan Kundera, and Mario Vargas Llosa*—who write short, sheer novels in which scenes are described and then left, like shards of a pot or torn pages from a book, for us to construct, or reconstruct? The length of the mostly rhetorical question probably indicates how little of an answer I can give. It’s almost as if the denial of a character’s interpretation, or the uncertain certainty they display when they do give interpretations, are or should be a statement of what we won’t know. Although this is overly abstract, perhaps I’m given to say it by having just finished The Reader, which challenges us to read the unreadable, and my chief response to it has to be a level above the action itself. The book just ends with a statement so devoid of interpretation that the feeling it must submerge becomes enhanced all the more because of its hiddenness. Like a great novel, we are left to wonder.

But I purposefully say “like a great novel,” rather than calling the novel itself great.

* I know: Llosa was born in Peru. But he feels European and lives part-time in European countries, so I count him as one here.

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.