The Difference Between Writers and Cobblers

My colleague at the Olive Reader already pointed it out, but it deserves all the pointing out it can get. The Guardian ran a long piece by Zadie Smith this past weekend about, among other things, the connection of a writer's character to the quality of his or her novels and the duties that fiction writers and readers have to one another. Here's a taste, but read the whole thing ("Clive" is a fictional aspiring author who Smith introduces in the beginning of the essay):

Writers know that between the platonic ideal of the novel and the actual novel there is always the pesky self -- vain, deluded, myopic, cowardly, compromised. That's why writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship: craftsmanship alone will not make a novel great. This is hard for young writers, like Clive, to grasp at first. A skilled cabinet-maker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones. There is a rogue element somewhere -- for convenience's sake we'll call it the self, although, in less metaphysically challenged times, the "soul" would have done just as well. In our public literary conversations we are squeamish about the connection between selves and novels.

Read This Book

One commenter asked me to post again if and when I finished Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, which I did this weekend. It immediately joined a list of my very favorite novels -- at least top 10, probably better, for those of you who only understand things in list form.

Stick with me while I try to describe part of its appeal... This weekend, a friend reminded me of a very funny excerpt in Sasha Frere-Jones' review of Justin Timberlake's latest album in The New Yorker. He wrote:

Justin Timberlake is under an equally strange impression on "SexyBack," the first single from his modest but satisfying new album, "FutureSex/LoveSounds," where he bafflingly claims to be "bringing sexy back." Does anything need bringing back less than sexy? It's like proposing to bring back petroleum, or the N.F.L.

Well, in Gilead (and in her previous novel, Housekeeping), Robinson is bringing back a few things that need reviving -- considered prose, humble reflection, focus on religious thought for its potential use in an individual's life rather than in a politician's office. Gilead is not flawless, but it's a stunningly beautiful book. Its pace and tone will be considered glacial by even some serious readers, much less those whose brains marinate only in celebrity-gossip blogs. But I can't recommend it highly enough. I think it's that rare thing: an enjoyable work of art that might also actually make you, in however small a way, a better person.

Here's another excerpt to try to convince you to pick it up, if you haven't already:

Your mother came up the road to tell us our supper was ready. It was a cold supper, she said, so there was no hurry. She agreed to sit with us for a few minutes. She always has to be coaxed to stay in company even a little while, and then it's all I can do to get a word from her. I believe she worries about the way she talks, or the way she talked when I first knew her. "It don't matter," she would say, in that low, soft voice of hers. That was what she said when she meant she forgave someone, but it had a sound of deeper, sadder resignation, as if she were forgiving the whole of the created order, forgiving the Lord Himself. It grieves me that I may never hear just those words spoken by her again. I believe Boughton made her self-conscious with that little trick of his of correcting people. Not that he ever corrected her.

"It don't matter." It was as if she were renouncing the world itself just in order to make nothing of some offense to her.

James Wood Reviews Sam Harris

I don't think you need a subscription to read the whole thing (so do), because James Wood's review of Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation is terrific. Wood is a non-believer, but in his usual smart way, he manages to be kind and respectful to any potential reader, something that polemicists like Harris aren't interested in. With half-hearted apologies for the length, here are three excerpts I found particularly thought-provoking, moving, in order, from critiquing religion to tackling some philosophy to critiquing the adamant atheists:

After years of hearing thousands of petitions offered to the Lord, I cannot recall a single answered prayer.

How would you know, asks the believer, since God's ways are inscrutable to us? But prayer is one of those cases where an inscrutability argument will not work, because one knows what one has oneself requested, and therefore what has been denied. If you pray for a member of your congregation to get better and she dies, your prayer was not answered. To retort that God's mysterious way of answering your prayer--"but God needed her by his side in heaven, that's why he let her die"--might involve not really answering your prayer at all is essentially to nullify prayer, to kill it. I knew that at fifteen. Years later I read Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, with its extraordinary image of the futility of prayer: a bee, inside a room, mistaking the floral wallpaper for the real thing and briefly attempting to extract its illusory pollen.

***

The model is Bertrand Russell's "celestial teapot," gleefully quoted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. If, says Russell, I told you that a celestial teapot was orbiting the sun but that you could not see it, nobody would be able to disprove me; "but if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense." God is like the teapot, we are supposed to infer. Dawkins uses Russell to argue that we cannot prove God's non-existence, but then we cannot prove anything's non-existence. "What matters," writes Dawkins, "is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't), but whether his existence is probable.... Some undisprovable things are sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things."

I agree with (Richard) Dawkins's conclusion, and consider God highly improbable, but I dislike the way he gets there. It seems to occur neither to him nor to Russell that belief in God is not like belief in a teapot. The referent--the content of the belief--matters here. God may be just as undisprovable as the teapot, but belief in God is a good deal more reasonable than belief in the teapot, precisely because God cannot be reified, cannot be turned into a mere thing, and thus entices our approximations. There is a reason, after all, that no one has ever worshiped a teapot: it does not allow enough room to pour the fluid of our incomprehension into it.

Interestingly, Dawkins himself seems to agree with this complaint. In a recent conversation in Time with the geneticist Francis Collins (who is a believing Christian), a conversation in which both men spoke eloquently, Dawkins was pushed by Collins to admit that, in Dawkins's words, "there could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible beyond our understanding." That's God, said Collins. Yes, but it could be any of billions of Gods, replied Dawkins: "the chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small." In other words, the God of a particular scripture and tradition is a parochial and inherently improbable notion. But the idea of some kind of creator, said Dawkins, "does seem to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect." To which one should add: by definition, then, this "grand and big" idea is not analogically disproved by referring to celestial teapots or vacuum cleaners, which lack the necessary bigness and grandeur.

***

(Harris') brand of public atheism is very good at the necessary disrespecting of religion, and it has a properly hygienic function. But how worthy of respect is it itself? The problem is that its bright certainty about the utter silliness of religion leads very quickly away from philosophy and argument. There is a dismaying gap, in these books, between the righteous anger of the critique of the many absurdities of religious belief and the attempts to account for why people have believed this apparent nonsense for so many centuries. I would rather that these writers refrained from speculation altogether than plunge into their flimsy anthropological kit bag. It is peculiar indeed to read (Richard) Dawkins's eloquent pages on evolution, and on how evolution may in the end solve the question of who created us, and then to find that very evolutionary theory being applied in the most hypothetical, rampantly unscientific ways to the question of why we have believed in God for so long.

Putting God to Bed, For Now

OK, this will be the last post about this subject, at least as inspired by Dawkins' book.

Probably.

There are two things I want to point out. The first is a clarification, given the state of plagiarism today. When I posted portions of Terry Eagleton's review of Dawkins' book a couple of weeks ago, I hadn't read the whole thing yet -- I had just posted the excerpts I found on another blog. Anyway, he wrote this: "...to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it." And I hadn't read that when I wrote my own fumbling distinction between love and a curveball, which you can find somewhere below. They're not even that similar as sentences go, but wanted to mention it.

The second thing is more important. I now have read Eagleton's full review and while it's quite eloquent, it's true that I wondered where to find all these hyper-intellectual believers he seems to be writing about. And I figured it was worth giving some space to someone who defends the idea of a Godless universe, since that's an idea I believe much more easily than the opposite. Here's a long but very good piece worth reading. Some highlights (even the highlights are long, but listen to me, your blogmaster -- they are worth reading):

The previous excerpt (of Eagleton's review), which defined God as "the condition of possibility," seemed to be warning against the dangers of anthropomorphizing the deity, ascribing to it features that we would normally associate with conscious individual beings such as ourselves. A question like "Does 'the condition of possibility' exist?" would never set off innumerable overheated arguments, even in a notoriously contentious blogosphere. If that were really what people meant by "God," nobody would much care. It doesn't really mean anything — like Spinoza's pantheism, identifying God with the natural world, it's just a set of words designed to give people a warm and fuzzy feeling. As a pragmatist, I might quibble that such a formulation has no operational consequences, as it doesn't affect anything relevant about how we think about the world or act within it; but if you would like to posit the existence of a category called "the condition of possibility," knock yourself out.

***

Once you start attributing to God the possibility of being interested in some way about the world and the people in it, you open the door to all of the nonsensical rules and regulations governing real human behavior that tend to accompany any particular manifestation of religious belief, from criminalizing abortion to hiding women’s faces to closing down the liquor stores on Sunday.

The problematic nature of this transition —- from God as ineffable, essentially static and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth — is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of “sophisticated theology.” It’s a millenia-old problem, inherited from the very earliest attempts to reconcile two fundamentally distinct notions of monotheism: the Unmoved Mover of ancient Greek philosophy, and the personal/tribal God of Biblical Judaism. Attempts to fit this square peg into a manifestly round hole lead us smack into all of the classical theological dilemmas: “Can God microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself cannot eat it?” The reason why problems such as this are so vexing is not because our limited human capacities fail to measure up when confronted with the divine; it’s because they are legitimately unanswerable questions, arising from a set of mutually inconsistent assumptions.

***

We are left with fundamentally incoherent descriptions of what God is, which deny that he “exists” in the same sense that hummingbirds and saxophones do, but nevertheless attribute to him qualities of “love” and “creativity” that conventionally belong to conscious individual beings. One might argue that it’s simply a hard problem, and our understanding is incomplete; after all, we haven’t come up with a fully satisfactory way to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, either. But there is a more likely possibility: there simply is no reconciliation to be had. The reason why it’s difficult to imagine how God can be eternally perfect and also occasionally wistful is that God doesn’t exist.

***

...for the most part, theologians have basically abandoned the project of “proving” God’s existence, which is probably a good move.

But they haven’t given up on believing in God’s existence (suitably defined), which is what drives atheists like Dawkins (and me) a little crazy. Two thousand years ago, believing in God made perfect sense; there was so much that we didn’t understand about the world, and an appeal to the divine seemed to help explain the otherwise inexplicable. Those original motivations have long since evaporated. In response, theologians have continued to alter what they mean by “God,” and struggled to reconcile the notion’s apparent internal contradictions — unwilling to take those contradictions as a signal of the fundamental incoherence of the idea.

To be fair, much of Dawkins’s book does indeed take aim at a rather unsophisticated form of belief, one that holds a much more literal (and wholly implausible, not to mention deeply distasteful) notion of what God means. That’s not a completely unwarranted focus, even if it does annoy the well-educated Terry Eagletons of the world; after all, that kind of naive theology is a guiding force among a very large and demonstrably influential fraction of the population. The reality of a religion is manifested in the actions of its adherents. But even an appeal to more nuanced thinking doesn’t save God from the dustbin of intellectual history.

I really do recommend reading the whole thing, and the comments below it, where you'll find people, among other things, defending Spinoza with links to math-philosophy.

And where people are leaving notes like this one:

in your last sentence you write
"The universe [..] peacefully solving its equations of motion [..]"

Is this not the same anthropomorphizing you critize (sic) in Eagleton's point of view?
And does it not somehow reveal that even an atheist is longing for a 'peaceful' universe in which 'we want to find meaning'?
And would this help explain your question 3, why people are religious?

Good times.

On the Origins and Purposes of the Universe. You Know, For Fun.

Richard Dawkins' latest book, The God Delusion, which I've posted about recently, is getting the widespread review attention I figured it would. Dawkins is, to use a scientific term, a smart and respected dude. It's not easy for me to criticize details without having read the book, but I do feel quite familiar with its core argument, having read many philosophical arguments against God when I was forming my own atheistic stance. But I've become more comfortable as an agnostic, and since I'm unsatisfied with the idea that science can tell us everything we need to know about how and why to live, I have a feeling Dawkins goes too far for my taste. Jim Holt reviewed the book last weekend in the New York Times Book Review, and Marilynne Robinson has a review in the new issue of Harper's. (Both have their criticisms of the book, but Robinson's title and subtitle, "Hysterical Scientism: The ecstasy of Richard Dawkins," betrays her stronger take.)

I thought I'd share a few excerpts from each, and since this is my blog, they're the excerpts to which I found myself nodding most vigorously. First, Holt:

It is far from clear which explanatory model makes sense for the deepest question, the one that, Dawkins complains, his theologian friends keep harping on: why does the universe exist at all? Darwinian processes can take you from simple to complex, but they can’t take you from Nothing to Something. If there is an ultimate explanation for our contingent and perishable world, it would seemingly have to appeal to something that is both necessary and imperishable, which one might label “God.” Of course, it can’t be known for sure that there is such an explanation. Perhaps, as Russell thought, “the universe is just there, and that’s all.”

***

But the objectivity of ethics is undermined by Dawkins’s logic just as surely as religion is. The evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, in a 1985 paper written with the philosopher Michael Ruse, put the point starkly: ethics “is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate,” and “the way our biology enforces its ends is by making us think that there is an objective higher code to which we are all subject.” In reducing ideas to “memes” that propagate by various kinds of “misfiring,” Dawkins is, willy-nilly, courting what some have called Darwinian nihilism.

***

Despite the many flashes of brilliance in this book, Dawkins’s failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience. As long as there are no decisive arguments for or against the existence of God, a certain number of smart people will go on believing in him, just as smart people reflexively believe in other things for which they have no knock-down philosophical arguments, like free will, or objective values, or the existence of other minds.

Robinson makes an obvious point, but makes it well, which is that Dawkins is pitting religion against science without allowing himself to acknowledge science's capacity to do harm:

...we know the terrors of all-out conflict between civilizations would include innovations, notably those dread weapons of mass destruction, being made by scientists for any country with access to their skills. Granting for the purposes of argument that Dawkins is correct in the view that the majority of great scientists are atheists, we may then exclude religion from among the factors that recruit them to this somber work. We are left with nationalism, steady employment, good pay, the chance to do research that is lavishly funded and, by definition, cutting edge -- familiar motives of a kind fully capable of disarming moral doubt.

I think it's brilliant the way she stresses that Dawkins himself would agree that religion plays no role in most scientists' motivations. Thus, it's easy to set up a dichotomy to prove a point, even if that point is that science is capable of bad results, too. That alone doesn't make a case for religion, but such a case doesn't seem to be Robinson's ultimate goal. She appears content to point out the most glaring contradictions and omissions in Dawkins' argument. She continues:

That both (religion and science) can do damage on a huge scale is clear. ... To Dawkins’ objection that Nazi science was not authentic science I would reply, first, that neither Nazis nor Germans had any monopoly on these theories, which were influential throughout the Western world, and second, that the research on human subjects carried out by those holding such assumptions was good enough science to appear in medical texts for fully half a century. This is not to single out science as exceptionally inclined to do harm, though its capacity for doing harm is by now unequaled.

And two more passages that develop different arguments, because they're too good not to cite. (A friend of mine likely edited this review by Robinson, and I can only hope she isn’t going to sue me for violating fair use. JS, remember, ASWOBA is a not-for-profit venture...solidarity!!)

Dawkins cannot concede, even hypothetically, a reality that is not time-bound, that does not conform to Darwinism as he understands it. Yet in an earlier book, Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins remarks that “further developments of the (big bang) theory, supported by all available evidence, suggest that time itself began in this mother of all cataclysms. You probably don’t understand, and I certainly don’t, what it can possibly mean to say that time itself began at a particular moment. But once again that is a limitation of our minds...” That God exists outside time as its creator is an ancient given of theology. The faithful are accustomed to expressions like “from everlasting to everlasting” in reference to God, language that the positivists would surely have considered nonsense but that does indeed express the intuition that time is an aspect of the created order. Again, I do not wish to abuse either theology or scientific theory by implying that either can be used as evidence in support of the other; I mean only that the big bang in fact provides a metaphor that might help Dawkins understand why his grand assault on the “God Hypothesis” has failed to impress the theists.

The importance of doubt seems to enter the picture here, to my mind. For quite a while now, Andrew Sullivan has been trumping for doubt as an essential part of any religious vision that won’t become dangerously fundamentalist. In order to avoid life-or-death struggles with those who believe otherwise, one has to be willing to grant the possibility that a belief is not unassailable Truth. So perhaps doubt isn’t the right word; it’s humility. It would seem to apply equally here to religion and science. Creationists should have the humility (not to mention common sense) to see that in the face of certain scientific facts we can conclude that some key parts of religious texts are to be read, at most, as metaphorical. This shouldn't have to destroy the value, or even truth, of those texts, unless one thinks that literal facts are the only way to express value and truth (which would mean that any fiction created is useless in terms of its potential to enrich or explain the human experience; a stance that I don't think any of us can comprehend, much less endorse).

But like Robinson, I don't see why science should be allowed off the same humility hook. The brightest thinkers alive can never return to the universe's origins, nor can they posit theories other than those like the Big Bang, which even if completely accurate are 1) essentially metaphorical given what we can conceive of, as Robinson points out, 2) still not adequate to allow even someone as smart as Dawkins to explain how time was "created" (see again Holt's reference above to Nothing into Something) and most importantly 3) not automatically incompatible with religious faith. Just because I "believe" in the Big Bang doesn't mean I can't be philosophically interested in (and undecided about) the notion of a god.

I've come to believe that science and art are both limited enterprises with the same essential goal, which is to help us think as ambitiously as we can in spite of the inherent "limitation of our minds" that Dawkins concedes above. As far as I can see, physicists are asking me to believe that the creation of the universe was "like," say, the arc of a curveball thrown in certain conditions, in the sense that its properties alone explain it. The less bombastic among the spiritual, though, might argue that the same creation was "like" falling in love, in the sense that its properties don't fully account for its significance.

I'll end on this next point, because I'm tired and almost certainly talking to myself by this time. Being a Militant Non-Believer for a long time (and still able to get awfully red-faced about it when I'm talking to an aggressive Bible-beater), I know that the mindset of the MNB's can create just as much arrogant (and dangerous) certainty as the mindset of the fundamentalist-religious. That, in short, where God is not allowed, powerful people will rush in to fill the void. But unsurprisingly, Robinson is more eloquent than I am about this, so I'll let her bring us home:

Finally, there is the matter of atheism itself. Dawkins finds it incapable of belligerent intent -- "why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?" It is a peculiarity of our language that by war we generally mean a conflict between nations, or at least one in which both sides are armed. There has been persistent violence against religion -- in the French Revolution, in the Spanish Civil War, in the Soviet Union, in China. In three of these instances the extirpation of religion was part of a program to reshape society by excluding certain forms of thought, by creating an absence of belief. Neither sanity nor happiness appears to have been served by these efforts. The kindest conclusion one can draw is that Dawkins has not acquainted himself with the history of modern authoritarianism.

The Certainty of Dawkinsism

Richard Dawkins’ views on religion are almost exactly as unapologetic and sure as mine were when I was 17 (and 21, and 26), and in this interview on Salon, he doesn’t pull any punches in defining them:

Well, technically, you cannot be any more than an agnostic. But I am as agnostic about God as I am about fairies and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You cannot actually disprove the existence of God. Therefore, to be a positive atheist is not technically possible. But you can be as atheist about God as you can be atheist about Thor or Apollo. Everybody nowadays is an atheist about Thor and Apollo. Some of us just go one god further.

Faced with a fundamentalist monotheist today, I’d say pretty much the same thing, being essentially, still, an atheist. But Dawkins also says this in the interview, when asked if his atheism stemmed from intellectual problems with religion:

Yes, purely intellectually. I was never much bothered about moral questions like, how could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world? For me, it was always an intellectual thing. I wanted to know the explanation for the existence of all things. I was particularly fascinated by living things. And when I discovered the Darwinian explanation, which is so stunningly elegant and powerful, I realized that you really don't need any kind of supernatural force to explain it.

I’ve never understood this notion that evidence refuting some specific explanatory element of one specific religion’s dogma somehow eliminates the individual need to grapple with larger spiritually philosophical issues. Maybe it’s because, looking back, even as a child I instinctively thought religion was at least partly metaphorical (not a popular stance with zealots, I know). As a non-believer, I suppose this only matters in a thought-experiment kind of way, but I for one don’t find that the truth of biological evolution, which I accept, does a single thing to assuage my curiosity about the broader existential issues raised by, in no particular order: the complexities of human consciousness, the beginnings of the universe, and basically any issue on which I don’t trust that Richard Dawkins has every scrap of information that I need.

(This reminds me of an absolutely classic Dave Chappelle stand-up moment, when he’s dissecting the cult of celebrity and says that MTV was interviewing rapper Ja Rule in the days after 9/11. Chappelle recalls his reaction: “Who gives a f*** what Ja Rule thinks at a time like this? I don't wanna dance, I'm scared to death. I want some answers that Ja Rule might not have right now.” Well, there are times when I’m looking for answers that Richard Dawkins might not have -- and I’m a hardcore agnostic when I’m not feeling like an atheist. I can only imagine that Dawkins’ stridency isn’t going to win over many people who actually believe.)

Dawkins’ new book, The God Delusion, is stirring up some strong feelings. Norman Geras, another non-believer (if I may call him that; I think I can) recently posted about Terry Eagleton’s take in the London Review of Books. I share Norm’s feeling when he says: “Not that I agree with all of what Terry says, but some of it is spot on.” Here’s some of it:

Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.

***

Such is Dawkins's unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history -- and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.

I think there’s relevance in this last point. It's obvious that far too many people -- many of them consistently making headlines for the past few years -- attach their worst, most ignorant and violent impulses to religion. They act badly under the cover of their faith. But as one Salon reader responding to the Dawkins interview put it:

I enjoy Dawkins ... but the one thing I can never get past, in him or thousands of others who haven't nearly his acuity, is the notion that religion causes bad stuff, like war and violence. I'm the farthest thing from an evolutionary biologist (my doctorate's in the humanities, so what would I know about people, right?), but even I can see this: The impulses and tendencies that have caused people to kill in the name of one deity or another for millennia are much, much more deeply-rooted than any given sect could ever hope to be. We fight and kill for land; we fight and kill for power; we fight and kill for resources; we fight and kill because we're human. It doesn't matter what patina of cause we put on it. It's something that, under certain circumstances--or sometimes for no discernible "reason" at all--we do. If getting rid of concepts of God could get rid of this . . . if only, as the saying goes, it were that easy.

If it’s true -- and mystifying, to me -- that people are deeply influenced by religion in negative ways, it’s equally true (and mystifying) that others access their best natures through the same inspiration. It might not be true that every soup-kitchen worker who ladles in the name of the lord, or every criminal who corrects his path to please Jesus, or every family that adopts disadvantaged children because of religious impulses would turn into an unmotivated, uncaring couch potato or recidivist criminal if the convincing notion of God disappeared from their minds, but I’m unwilling to just cast out the many good results that come from religion. And I’m unwilling not because of my own beliefs -- I find the notion of explanatory religions silly, and their certain, detailed stories completely uninspiring and even at odds with the idea of spiritual mystery and “faith” -- but just because it’s fair. If, when debating, I’m going to use the evils abetted by religion -- which I do, and fairly often -- it would be stacking the deck if I ignored the good done in its name.

Reading So You Don't Have To

I picked up this month’s Esquire after work tonight, and read a pretty good chunk of it on the ride home. Three things stuck out to me as compelling/funny/scary, and I figured I’d share them. This way, you don’t have to read the magazine. (Of course, you don’t have to read this post, either. Live free or die.)

1. The cover story is a profile of John McCain, and it begins with a description of his recent commencement speech at Madison Square Garden to the graduates of New York’s New School university. Many students of the very liberal institution silently protested McCain’s presence, turning their backs to him. Others were less polite:

The body of McCain’s speech -- a considered, sometimes arcanely eloquent evocation of tolerance and civility -- is interrupted by hecklers who are bold, loud, and sometimes obscene.

At a certain moment, McCain is talking about a friend, a “militant anti-Vietnam War activist” who died at 47 and left a young family behind. “At which point, a kid in the crowd points at McCain and cackles.”

Later, in the car, a staffer talks to McCain:

He asks his boss gently if he heard the student laughing. McCain is quiet. He did not, apparently. “I’m glad I didn’t,” he says after a long beat. “That could have been very bad.”

Is it just me, or is this exactly what we require after Bush’s reign? My fear is that the caricature of Bush’s “cowboy diplomacy” (and I’m not denying there’s a basis for the caricature) will cause voters to pretend it’s 1993 again, when what we really need is a credible president who approaches things with some measure of grace but won’t let us forget the world is an unstable, dangerous place, and also isn’t afraid to channel some well-deserved righteous anger to knock a few New School students upside the head.

(The article also features a very funny aside from McCain, describing the pathetic nature of Bush’s approval ratings: “When you get down to the twenties, you’re talking about paid staffers and blood relatives.”)

2. I laughed at this exchange in a sidebar interview with actor John C. Reilly. Reilly's in an upcoming comedy about NASCAR, a sport in which, as you know, sponsors' logos are plastered all over the automobiles:

Esq: Who would you want sponsoring you in real life?

JCR: To tell you the truth, I don’t believe in corporate sponsorship. I’ve been offered many times to do ads and promotional things. That’s not why I got into acting. I think it’s a slippery slope for actors to start trading on their personalities... You just asked a funny question, and I gave you an overly serious answer.

Esq: That’s okay--

JCR: Wilkin & Sons black-currant preserves. That’s my favorite jelly.

3. In an ask-the-doctor column, a reader inquires about the safety of playing iPods at high volume. Ahem.

The doctor writes: “The bottom line: Keep your iPod at or below 60 percent of its maximum volume.”

As an experiment, I tucked the magazine under my arm, reached into my pocket for the trusty iPod, and adjusted it to what might leniently be described as 70 percent of its capacity (in any case, it was definitely higher than 60). I could hear the music, but it helped that I knew it. If I was listening to something for the first time, I don’t think I could’ve quite made it out. Which, of course, told me two things. 1) I’m listening to my iPod too loudly almost whenever I listen to it. 2) The train noise must be at least as loud as my iPod at full volume, and I’m in the train, at bare minimum, an hour and a half every day. Oh, and so two other things, I guess: 3) I’m likely to lose most or all of my hearing any minute now, and 4) I should (even more) seriously think about relocating.

But today wasn’t all about Esquire. When I got home, I found an L.L. Bean catalog in my mailbox. Here’s my favorite excerpt from that puppy:

Our popular Comfort Mocs(TM)...in a lightweight, breathable style for summer. We built these with a smooth mesh upper that feels good against your skin and lets cool air circulate around your foot. They have the same flexible EVA cushioning as our original Comfort Mocs.

They damn well better.

Freshman Words, Ready for Hazing

Here's a sample of the words and phrases added to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, which will be released in the fall. Sadly, "mouse potato" is one of them. Even more sadly, seeing as how it defines someone who spends a lot of time using a computer, I am one of them.

The words are divided into categories, and under The Human Condition, we find two additions: "drama queen" and "unibrow." These are not good times for the human condition.

Under the ever-popular Miscellaneous, we find "polyamory" (which I think translates, roughly, into "lots of getting it on") and "sandwich generation" ("generation of people who are caring for their aging parents while supporting their own children"). I was thinking that last term had something to do with the proliferation of Subway and Quizno's franchises, but there's always time to add a definition, I suppose.

If you think this year's words are strange or unworthy, think of what people must have thought about these terms added in 1806. They must have asked, "Publicity? What the hell is publicity?" Oh, to live in those innocent days.

(Via Pop Candy)

"Wasting" and "Time" are 8,458 and 66, Respectively

I’m legitimately sorry for what I’m about to inflict on you -- namely, many hours tied up in a pretty simple web site. E.J. over at the Olive Reader -- my sister blog, in the way that nations have sister nations (we swap exchange students and stuff) -- posted today about Word Count, a site that lists, in easily searchable fashion, the 86,800 most frequently used words in the English language. In order.

“The” is first, and so on.

Pessimism is 20,386. Optimism is 7,960. That’s refreshing.

Peanut is 24,806. Butter is 4,091. I would have thought they’d be closer together.

This blog’s title, represented by the rank of each word, is represented thus:

5, 419, 96, 2, 109, 1716

Just for the exercise, I wanted to try to make a sentence (or two or three) out of 40 words -- the 20 most common and the 20 least common. So I set down the top 20: the, of, and, to, a, in, that, it, is, was, I, for, on, you, he, be, with, as, by, at.

Lots of ballast there.

Then I set down the last 20: conquistador, recrossed, workless, carniola, tangency, multilingualism, lauro, golgotha, homemakers, savills, tella, blick, inro, historiarum, moyne, criers, allocatively, chalkis, sibomana, tarrow.

Ruh-roh. At least 10 of those words look like Jupiterese to me.

And now I know what you’re thinking: What the hell is wrong with me, that I would be looking up these ridiculous things and creating these pointless exercises I'll never finish? Well, go to the site and then see how superior you are. I dare you.

Book Club: Vol. One, Chapter Three

You probably forgot we were doing this, this being an occasional discussion of Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, a book I was reading. (Shameful truth be told, the past tense doesn't apply. I'm still 15 pages from the finish line. This is because my job entails reading more than humanly possible. It's fun, during those brief periods when your eyes stop bleeding and your head stops throbbing.)

I saw this article over the weekend. It concerns the successful separation of 10-month-old conjoined twins. Here's one of the doctors:

"Our expectation is that they will recover from this completely and will go on to lead very, very normal lives," Dr. Stein said.

And here's the reaction of the girls' mother:

When Ms. Fierros was asked at the briefing what she wished (for) her children, she wiped away tears and answered in Spanish, "to see our daughters run, go to a normal school, to prepare themselves for life, to enjoy everything that life has to offer."

A touching sentiment, no doubt. But according to Gilbert, those are wishes that might be held more deeply by the mother than the children. This is from a provocative section on conjoined twins in Stumbling on Happiness:

As a prominent medical historian wrote: "Many singletons, especially surgeons, find it inconceivable that life is worth living as a conjoined twin, inconceivable that one would not be willing to risk all -- mobility, reproductive ability, the life of one or both twins -- to try for separation." In other words, not only does everyone know that conjoined twins will be dramatically less happy than normal people, but everyone also knows that conjoined lives are so utterly worthless that dangerous separation surgeries are an ethical imperative. And yet, standing against the backdrop of our certainty about these matters are the twins themselves. When we ask Lori and Reba how they feel about their situation, they tell us that they wouldn't have it any other way. In an exhaustive search of the medical literature, the same medical historian found the "desire to remain together to be so widespread among communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal."

There's further exploration of these findings in the book. Like I said, provocative.

Gatsby Passed Up, Like a Punk

I promised that Gatsby was in the on-deck circle, but then I went and picked up another book, which is the problem with trying to predict what one is going to read next. I'm now halfway through (and quite taken with) Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? It begins a bit deceptively, with a passage that, while well written, suggests that the novel is going to be about a disgruntled married woman watching her husband eat fancy food in Paris. And it is about her, but it quickly flashes back to her childhood and a particularly intense friendship. So far, it's great. Between this and Birds of America, I think Moore is one of my favorite contemporary American writers. At the risk of unnecessarily emphasizing gender, it's also becoming clear that she's my favorite contemporary female American writer.

Here's a passage from Frog Hospital for you. It's narrated by Berie, the narrator (duh), and it comes when she and her best friend, Sils, are driven home by Sils' new boyfriend, Mike, about whom Berie is less than excited.

Mike pulled down to the end of her street, right up into the entrance to the cemetery, and I got out and waited. I walked away from the car, to let them kiss. I had a lot of patience, I felt, for certain kinds of things. I hopped the low fence and roamed around the edge of the cemetery a little, but when I looked back, they were still in the car, kissing, so I walked farther out. I looked for little Estherina Foster's grave, and then sat there with her in the dark. I listened for a voice that might be hers, some whisper or peep, but there was nothing. I fiddled with a long-stemmed plastic rose that had gotten mashed there in the dirt. I brushed the mud off it, and bounced it around, tracing words in the air -- my name, Sils's name, Estherina's name. I couldn't think of other names. I wrote Happy Birthday, Fuck You, and Peace. Then I tossed the flower away, into the shadows. How silent the world was at night, the unbudded trees etched eerily into the sky, the branches reaching as if for something to hold and eat -- perhaps the dead and candied stars! The ground was cold, thatched with leaves; the nearby swamp had begun unthawing its sewagey smells. In the moonlight the sky seemed wild, bright, and marbled like the sea. People alone, trapped, country people, all looked at the sky, I knew. It was the way out somehow, that sky, but it was also the steady, changeless witness to the after and before of one's decisions -- it witnessed all the deaths that took people away to other worlds -- and so people had a tendency to talk to it. I turned away, sitting there, hugging my legs, pulling my jacket close. I plucked my earrings off and stuck them in my pocket, the cool air strangely still and mushroomy. I wondered whether I would ever be in love with a boy. Would I? Why not? Why not? Right then and there I vowed and dared and bet that sky and the trees -- I swore on Estherina Foster's grave -- that I would. But it wouldn't be a boy like Mike. Nobody like that. It would be a boy very far away -- and I would go there someday and find him. He would just be there. And I would love him. And he would love me. And we would simply be there together, loving like that, in that place, wherever it was. I had a whole life ahead. I had patience and faith and a headful of songs.

Times Poll Abstainer Speaks!

Turns out that Laura Miller is the critic who refrained from voting in the New York Times' recent poll to determine the Ultimate Fighting Champion of the last 25 years of American fiction. Here, Miller expounds on her silence, if that's not an oxymoron. She claims that her reluctance was not "namby-pamby" in nature, but despite her very sensible comments ("Some people I discussed this with had a hard time understanding that not wanting to exert an excess of judgment isn't the same thing as refusing to make any judgment at all. I don't know why this is so difficult to grasp; it's like the difference between being decently neat and having obsessive-compulsive disorder."), it still comes off seeming a bit...namby-pamby. She writes:

An editor at the Book Review assured me that the list was really a parlor game that I should view in a more cavalier light, like something the obsessive characters in "Diner" or "High Fidelity" might indulge in. But those guys take themselves pretty seriously, and damn if the letter didn't ask for the "most distinguished" American novel of the past 25 years, which sounds pretty sober. I wasn't going to do it as a game when it was likely to be taken in earnest.

Well, OK, yes. But really, the only people more earnest than the guys in High Fidelity are those who, upon entering their record store and being asked to join the discussion of favorite side-ones/track-ones, would refrain out of a sense of obligation to the manner in which they parcel out their critical acumen. I mean: Snore.

(Plus, "Diner" and "High Fidelity"? Totally candidates for my list of 25 favorite movies -- which will be posted soon, Dezmond, I promise. No miserliness with the critical acumen here. No way.)

Plus-plus, this blogger in North Carolina laments the "provincialism" of the vote, since 75 percent of the judges live within "75 miles of Manhattan." My response? Threefold:

1. This guy must have spent way too much time with Google Earth figuring this out.

2. If he's not careful, we'll eliminate southerners altogether next time.

3. On one hand, it's a petty complaint, since it makes sense that a lot of major writers would live near the publishing hub of NYC, the same way top film actors and directors would live near L.A. On the other hand, he's right. Manhattan is probably the most provincial place in the country. On the other hand (if you're deformed), it gets less provincial (in the way we're talking about) well before you've gone 75 miles outside the city, so stretching the boundary of his complaint this way seems particularly weak.

Book Club: Vol. One, Chapter Two

I haven't made as much progress in Daniel Gilbert's book as I would have liked this week. I'll have time to play catch-up over the weekend, though. (I've been wondering if Malcolm Gladwell would be reviewing it in The New Yorker, because it's tailor-made for his style, but it seems he has "guest reviewed" it on Amazon, which I imagine disqualifies a weightier review in the magazine. Too bad.)

I have reached a point where Gilbert discusses the way in which the human brain is designed to take certain actions before knowing why. The example he uses involves a rabid wolverine. If such a creature was, say, in the other corner of my living room right now, there's a good chance I would run away before my senses had fully pieced together just what it was that inspired me to flee. As Gilbert puts it:

Rabid wolverines, crying babies, hurled rocks, beckoning mates, cowering prey--these things count for a lot in the game of survival, which requires that we take immediate action when we happen upon them and do not dally to contemplate the finer points of their identities. As such, our brains are designed to decide first whether objects count and to decide later what those objects are.

This is a neat way for initially formless anxiety to help us avoid certain situations, like being tackled by a wolverine before we can lock ourselves in the bathroom. As a person who's often nervous and anxious for very little reason, though, I think my system might work a little too well in this way... Is that a rabid wolverine!? Whew, no; just the microwave.

My One-Man Book Club: Vol. One, Chapter One

St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village is a dangerous place to browse. Some stores are just set up in some inexplicable way (or probably an explicable way, but I’m too lazy to suss it out) that almost guarantees impulse buying, and this is one of them. Tonight, before heading over to a friend’s birthday dinner, I popped in and made just such a buy, but I think this one might be a keeper. It’s called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard.

Before you go thinking that I’m so desperate as to be reaching for self-healing platitudes, here is Gilbert’s defense of the book’s title in the foreword:

Despite the third word of the title, this is not an instruction manual that will tell you anything useful about how to be happy. Those books are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once you’ve bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why. Instead, this is a book that describes what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy.

Luckily, I’m not miserable, but I’ve been making a few day trips into misery’s outlying territories lately, and I’ve also been thinking a lot about what role anticipation and future-thinking have in creating happiness (or its approximation). Anticipation is a stimulant for everyone to some degree, I imagine, but I’ve always been acutely aware of just how strong its influence is on me. I think for some people anticipation is 80 or 90 percent of an event’s appeal (or lack thereof), which doesn’t seem healthy, and I think I might be one of those people. To take two examples, one from each pole:

I don’t have a particularly strong fear of flying. When I’m on a plane, that is. Once seated, barring horrific turbulence, I’m actually pretty relaxed in the air. But for the week or two leading up to a flight, I’m a semi-nervous-wreck about the whole thing. On the other hand, every year I anticipate a certain fantasy baseball draft with childlike glee. The actual draft, of course, is three or four hours of me making a series of choices that I almost immediately recognize as boneheaded, surrounded by men older and even more bitter than I am, cursing at each other in mostly unfriendly ways. Experiencing this time and again does nothing to diminish my eager anticipation of it eleven and a half months later.

It’s always been my suspicion that this trait says something important about the ways in which I’m satisfied and disappointed with the world, alternately, and so, as I’m sharply interested in increasing the satisfaction level these days, this seems like the right book at the right time, and I think I’ll occasionally share my thoughts with you as I make my way through it. Think of it as a book club, but without all the people and snacks.

(It will seem more club-like if some of you participate in the comments section, which could take the form of you reading the book along with me; I’d certainly understand, though, if it takes the form of your personal, non-book-related thoughts and anecdotes about the H word.)

Tonight, though, it’s getting late, so I’m almost sure that what will make me happy is going to bed. I’m anticipating it greatly. I’ll leave you with an abridged excerpt (again from the foreword; I haven’t gotten very far, considering that I bought the book four hours ago, so for the purposes of this project I’m taking it on faith that it will remain interesting and funny). More soon.

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves...

Yeah, yeah. Don’t hold your breath. Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that....

How can this happen? Shouldn’t we know the tastes, preferences, needs, and desires of the people we will be next year -- or at least later this afternoon? Shouldn’t we understand our future selves well enough to shape their lives -- to find careers and lovers whom they will cherish, to buy slipcovers for the sofa that they will treasure for years to come? So why do they end up with attics and lives that are full of stuff that we considered indispensable and that they consider painful, embarrassing, or useless? Why do they criticize our choice of romantic partners, second-guess our strategies for professional advancement, and pay good money to remove the tattoos that we paid good money to get?

Richard Ford, Underlining, and Me

The Humorless Feminist recently posted a paragraph from one of my favorite novels, The Sportswriter by Richard Ford. Here is her selection.

I point you to it for two reasons. First, because it's a great choice from a great book. If you haven't read the whole thing, do.

But secondly, it inspired me to pull my copy from the shelf and look at what I had highlighted. Until I was about 25 or so, I pretty consistently marked up books, underlining sentences and bracketing paragraphs that I was sure I would want to revisit. When I wonder why I stopped this as a regular habit (I still do it on occasion), all I have to do is go back and look at the marked books. Good lord. The Sportswriter is a perfect example. The passage cited by the aforementioned feminist is beautifully written and certainly sad enough for the somewhat dreary college student I was when I originally read it. But no, the majority of my signposts were planted to guide me back to surpassingly lovelorn moments, moments that could lead a shrewd reader to guess probably 80% of my record collection at the time (OK, fine, 80% of my record collection now). Here are three such moments chosen not-quite-randomly:

She kisses my ear until my legs tingle, and I want to squeeze my eyes shut and give up control. This is enough to bring us back up to ground level, and send us to the airport with all my old hopes ascendant.
I am easily rescued, it's true.

Genuinely good conversations with your ex-wife are limited by the widening territories of intimacy from which you're restricted.

And lastly (good lord, good lord):

In some of the heart's business there is really no net gain.

Who the hell did I think I was, Werther?

Luckily, by the time I read the sequel a few years later (Independence Day, another great book, maybe even better; and not about Will Smith battling space aliens), I had started to shake off my wistfulness (at least the outer layer of it; in fact, yes, it was more like I was molting to make way for a new wistfulness), and perhaps Ford had started lightening up more as well. Even the dialogue between exes that I checked off was a bit snappier:

"Everything's in quotes with you, Frank. Nothing's really solid. Every time I talk to you I feel like everything's being written by you. Even my lines. That's awful. Isn't it? Or sad?"

"Not if you liked them."

And then there are many solid, witty paragraphs like this one, which I'll mercifully end on:

...I had been uneasily aware that I had never done very much in my life that was honestly good except for myself and my loved ones (and not all of them would agree even with that). Writing sports, as anyone can tell you who's ever done it or read it, is at best offering a harmless way to burn up a few unpromising brain cells while someone eats breakfast cereal, waits nervously in the doctor's office for CAT-scan results or mulls away dreamy, solitary minutes in the can. And as far as my own hometown was concerned, apart from transporting the occasional half-flattened squirrel to the vet, or calling the fire department once when my elderly neighbors the Deffeyes let their gas barbecue set their back porch on fire and threatened the neighborhood, or some other act of tepid suburban heroism, I'd probably contributed as little to the commonweal as it was possible for a busy man to contribute without being plain evil.

Life-Changing Reads

My colleague EJ over at the Olive Reader, where we blog about bookish matters, recently linked to this piece in The Guardian about influential novels.

The piece leads with this:

The novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. That which means most to women is about deeply held feelings, a struggle to overcome circumstances and passion, research by the University of London has found.

This might seem a bit obvious to those who know the genders, but it becomes even more so when it's revealed that the poll asked respondents -- many of them at least tangentially involved with literature on a professional level -- to name "novels that had changed their lives." It seems clear to me that this would bias the results toward books read at an impressionable age. I still love a lot of books upon reading them, but I'd say the bar for "changing my life" has been raised considerably since I was 22 or so.

Lisa Jardine, one of the project's leaders, said, "The men's list was all angst and Orwell. Sort of puberty reading." Orwell can be summed up as puberty reading? Jeez. That's a bit tough, no? (Granted, they're talking about 1984 in particular, I think, but seeing Orwell dismissed alongside the entire category of "angst" smarted a little.)

The point is made that the men's list is full of male writers, while the females interviewed mentioned Jane Austen, George Eliot, and other great women writers. Again, the idea is that these books affected respondents at a young age, so of course men chose books of alienation (Catch 22) and rage against the machine (Slaughterhouse Five) and heartache (High Fidelity), because many young male readers are heartbroken, alienated dudes who are impotently raging against various machines, real and imagined.

Anyone care to share their most life-changing reads? The few that come to mind for me: Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut, The Risk Pool by Richard Russo, and The Brothers K by David James Duncan, all of which, at the time I read them, not only moved me but gave me the inkling that writing fiction might be something I wanted to do. It's an inkling I'm still trying to shake, mostly by not doing anything about it.

Then there's this paragraph in the Guardian piece, as if I needed more reason to doubt the necessity or wisdom of my participation in the publishing industry:

"On the whole, men between the ages of 20 and 50 do not read fiction. This should have some impact on the book trade. There was a moment when car manufacturers realised that it was women who bought the family car, and the whole industry changed. We need fiction publishers -- many of whom are women -- to go through the same kind of recognition," Prof Jardine said.

Book Recommendation

I've been joking that the recent science/religion thread on the blog represents a new preoccupation for me, but it doesn't really. One of my favorite books, which I read six or seven years ago, is Afterwards, You're a Genius by Chip Brown, more usefully described by its subtitle: Faith, Medicine, and the Metaphysics of Healing. In it, Brown visits faith healers whose practices are grounded in Eastern spiritual traditions (those are the serious ones; the flakier practitioners in the book clearly come from the School of Quackery).

The story he tells is my favorite type of rambling first-person narrative: knowledgeable about its subject; full of entertaining digressions; motivated by, and seen through the prism of, highly personal concerns (in Brown's case, the desire to come to terms with romantic heartbreak, learn more about his own spiritual thinking or lack thereof, and explore the relationship between modern science and ancient thoughts about health.)

The book meanders a bit through its middle section, but not enough to put a dent in my love for it. Its opening paragraph is one of my all-time favorites, and perfectly sets the tone for everything to come. Here it is. Think of it as today's archive, if you must:

More than a few years ago, when I was in a bad way, wallowing in a sob story about an actress who'd exchanged me for a used-car salesman in California, I went to see a psychic. It was half a lark, or so I thought at the time. The heartache that inspired the visit was real enough, but I was not able to make any sense of it until much later, when I happened on Borges's description of love as a religion organized around a fallible god. For the millions of us who press on in a secular age, under Darwin's empty heaven, love may be all we ever know of religion, and the loss of love is that much more wrenching for its likeness to a crisis of faith. What else but a confusion of divine and human realms can account for the pain of misplaced devotion? Pain made worse by the ludicrousness of it all, the ersatz savior and the preposterous church and the disillusioned parishioner, who stumbles around in the aftermath -- stupefied, in my case, by the sight of his highly beloved on Channel 7 in a Fruit of the Loom commercial. There she was! Dressed as a guava or possibly a passion fruit. Something tropical. I couldn't see clearly. I was too busy gasping for air. She turned up again a few weeks later as a guest star on a cheesy detective show, but this time there was an offsetting, even therapeutic, consolation: She got shot in the head.

(Sadly, it seems like the book is out of print. Happily, you can get a used copy cheaply on Amazon. It's a steal.)

My Favorite Novel

If any of you plan on linking to my questionnaire on normblog, or already did and are trying to block out the experience in therapy, I just have one small addendum:

Norm asked for favorite song and movie, but best novel. Fair enough. And being a stickler for semantics (ed. note: changed from "linguistics" thanks to a sharp-minded friend), I listed Atonement as the best novel I've read. And I stand by that, structurally, sentence for sentence, etc. But my favorite novel is The Brothers K by David James Duncan, and I thought it deserved a mention. It's bigger and sloppier than Atonement (in ways good and bad, but for the best overall), but by dealing with sibling and parental relationships, baseball, and religion, and in doing so in a Big Earnest American tone, it's tailor-made for me. Plus, Everett, one of the brothers, is my favorite fictional character.

Banville on Larkin

Terrific piece in the latest New York Review of Books by John Banville about Philip Larkin, the unwitting creator of this blog's name. Read it here.

I wanted to note two excerpts for those of you who don't read the whole thing. (But really, you should. What else do you have to do? You're already reading my blog, which means you have some serious free time on your hands.)

First, this paragraph by Clive James, which Banville cites after discussing how many people dismiss Larkin's poetry because of his less appealing private views:

Philip Larkin really was the greatest poet of his time, and he really did say noxious things. But he didn't say them in his poems, which he thought of as a realm of responsibility in which he would have to answer for what he said, and answer forever. He also thought there was a temporary and less responsible realm called privacy. Alas, he was wrong about that. Always averse to the requirements of celebrity, he didn't find out enough about them, and never realized that beyond a certain point of fame you not only don't have a private life any more, you never had one.

This made me think I should be reading everything Clive James has written as soon as possible.

Then, buried in Banville's footnotes, is this quote from Larkin about travel, which expresses a sentiment I share almost entirely: “I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day."

Oprah and Frey: The Last Post (One Fervently Hopes)

For those who missed it, Oprah reduced James Frey to a stoic-looking-but-quivering-on-the-inside mass on her show today, even forcing him, in the waning minutes, to say things like, "After today, hopefully I'm a better person." (I'm paraphrasing; I would've written down exactly what he said, but I was too busy zipping up the body bag on Western civilization.)

I only caught the final segment. I'm told that most of the show was devoted to a panel of cultural talking heads taking Frey to task. The schoolmarms included Frank Rich (America’s schoolmarm laureate) and an anonymous geek from the Poynter Institute tying the moment to a larger social trend of dishonesty. As my friend Nick rightfully asked, “What’s new about lying?” Sadly, it seems that what’s new is lying to Oprah. No one will directly say that, of course, but this entire story arc -- from the book’s enormous commercial success to the blow-up about its fabrications to today’s circus of castigation and insincere atonement -- only exists because of O’s orchestration. I’ve always thought her self-righteousness was her least appealing trait, and I had seen signs that it was abating, despite her ever-increasing fame. But today had to be a new low, when she allowed people to say, with a straight face, that discovering the truth of this situation is partly important because of movements like Holocaust denial. Because, you see, a fame-hungry memoirist’s self-aggrandizing is the equivalent of people denying systematic genocide. (And don’t bring up slippery slopes -- to me, this correlation is as absurd as implying that gay marriage will lead to the union of man and cat.)

The more platitudinous and therapeutic the whole thing became, the more the exercise backfired on Oprah, reinforcing her role as the dupe rather than turning her into a healer (more accurately, she sought to become a double-healer today -- first helping save her audience by introducing it to Frey's tale of redemption, and then rushing, if sternly, to FREY'S aid when it turned out he, the pathological liar, was the one who needed her). But anyone who knows anyone with similar ambitions could see that Frey had been triumphant and would remain so, despite what must have been the most humiliating 60 minutes of his life. This was not a member of the parade of everyday Americans who kneel with good intentions before Oprah or Dr. Phil hoping to magically learn how to shed pounds, or save more money, or get along better with their spouse. Frey's a calculating, ego-driven writer who’s been milking his lies in the media since the day the book was published, and his goal was to write something that got him national attention, truckloads of money, and another bestselling book or two. He didn't get much of any of those at first, since the consensus seemed to be that the book, entirely true or not, wasn't particularly good. But thanks to Oprah, he got all of it, and no matter how many times she puts him on the couch, she can’t reverse that. Both of them can only look worse and worse from here on out, and they seem devoted to doing just that.


***

Meanwhile, Nick and I trawled through some past Oprah transcripts and found that falling prey to famous works of literature is nothing new for her. With the help of our pal PF, we exhumed a few other examples of original titles that somehow became inflated in the editing and publishing process. I think you’ll be shocked:

Forty-five Minutes of Solitude

The Pretty Good Gatsby

Love in the Time of Post-Nasal Drip

The Second Cousins Karamazov

The Middle-Aged Man and the Pond

Duluth According to Garp

Indigestion of a Salesman

To Catch and Release a Mockingbird

Breakfast at Macy’s

Squabble on the Bounty

Gulliver's Armchair

As I Lay Napping

Bright Lights, Philadelphia

Zhivago the Med Student