Bookstorm

Proof that Philip Roth is a narcissist and a male chauvanist: in his novel Everyman, the main character--i.e., Roth himself--confesses, "Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body." That single line sums up the entire book, as well as most of Roth's literary output, quite nicely.

In Newsweek, Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, gleefully tears Sarah Palin apart. Maybe I'm the only one who'd find something like this even remotely amusing, but I'll admit it: Harris's piece, and the way he describes Palin's numerous gaffes, is quite funny ("In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience"). Given his disdainful tone--not without merit--I think he enjoyed taking jabs at her and her beliefs, even if it is an unfair fight. He may be an alarmist, which seems to grant Palin credibility and seriousness she doesn't deserve, but at least his deadpan intellectual snobbery is finally a little humorous.

I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with millions of Americans--but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country--even the welfare of our species--as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.

In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing--as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"?

Another weekend, another round-up ...

• The screenplay to the film adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest exists--but, as his agent confesses, he didn't have anything to do with it. (And the movie isn't coming out any time soon--sorry, kids.)
• I never pass up a new Michael Chabon essay.
• Esquire phones it in with a predictably unoriginal slideshow of the seventy-five books every man should read.
• Nerve interviews Graham Vickers, author of the new book Chasing Lolita: "[Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is] driven by sex, but I don't think it's sexy in the sense of being stimulating. I think people who picked it up with its reputation preceding it quickly put it down again, because it's shot through with sex certainly, but only if you buy into the way Nabokov has written it. He was very dismissive of books that set out to be titillating." ... 
• Waldo--yes, that same bastard you spent hours trying to find--turns twenty-one today.

I would be the first to admit that I don't understand the poetry of T. S. Eliot, but I'd also be lying if I told you that not understanding has made his work inherently unenjoyable. It has not. I can understand how something like The Waste Land might be construed as a colossal and maddening waste of reading time--our society has changed (devolved?) to one in which understanding and gratification is supposed to be instantaneous--not just ready to eat, but ready to be defecated. With everything else going on--picking up the kids, meeting the in-laws, shopping for various birthday/holiday/wedding/graduation parties, and balancing a sixty-hour workweek--who has the time or inclination to try and puzzle out the fractured weirdness that is T. S. Eliot?

I'd venture an even better question: who said T. S. Eliot--or any work of literarture, for that matter--had to be understood the first time around? Or, for that matter, understood at all?

Maybe it's just that I'm the kind of reader for whom ignorance truly is bliss. But over the years, I've come to appreciate not understanding some works of literature. I don't claim to understand the whole of James Joyce's Ulysses (and when it comes to Ulysses, given its reputation, you know what you're getting into beforehand), but that doesn't mean the book wasn't worth the effort. Joyce was one of those authors I'd only appreciated in retrospect: I didn't like Dubliners the first time around, but I've since dipped into the book from time to time and, over the years, have grown to love it. The same happened with Ulysses: even before sputtering to the finish line, I was already wondering why I'd even bothered. Sure, I got occasional fixes when something actually made sense, when I was able to match episodes in Ulysses with episodes in Homer's Odyssey. On the whole, I felt cheated: this chaotic mess was a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature?

But Ulysses nagged at me, and still does. I found myself casually flipping through it--usually with my copy of the Odyssey close by--and found that I wasn't the least bit bothered by its impenetrability, mostly because it's not entirely impenetrable. I found myself snickering at Joyce's dirty jokes and insults. Moreover, I began to view the book's literary allusions and erudition not as a wall between author and reader, but as a portrait--much like the sixteen stories that make up Dubliners--of normal people doing, thinking, and saying normal-people things. Leopold Bloom may be a pervert--he thinks about sex constantly--but there's nothing unusual about him. Joyce simply gave him the kinds of thoughts you and I and everyone else have on a regular, every-three-seconds basis. (For women unable to relate to a man-child like Bloom, there's Molly and the novel's famously long, unpunctuated final sentence.)

All this is only a preamble to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, particularly The Waste Land. Taken side-by-side, the two works couldn't be more dissimilar. While Ulysses revels in realism--it's told in episodes, just like the Odyssey, and just like in everyday life--The Waste Land, with its bizarre imagery and occult overtones, reads like a dark fantasy. (In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot cites a dizzying array of fantastical allusions, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio, the Bible, Richard Wagner's Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde, and John Webster's The White Devil.) But Eliot's poem should, by all rights, be even more intimidating than Ulysses: his notes only provide more confusion, and the literary allusions--which are so numerous as to be mind-boggling, when you consider how short the poem is--are so obscure that they defy interpretation. Granted, there's nothing pretentious about the poetry itself, but untangling it seems to require superhuman knowledge of esoterica and literature, and a willingness to dissect all four hundred thirty-four lines to puzzle out any sort of meaning. Consider:

A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

I'm not going to venture an interpretation. Taken as a whole, The Waste Land is notable for its head-spinning array of moods and themes--the poem is equal parts satire and prophecy--the way it shifts between narrators, places (though it's generally confined to London), languages, and times without any coherent pattern. (It's arguable as to whether Eliot intended The Waste Land to be a collection of poems or one long poem made up of five sections. Both sides are equally credible, but I favor the latter because, quite simply, that's how the final work was published.)

In considering The Waste Land, understanding, as it were, comes not because we know what's really going on, but because of what it evokes. Its imagery and expression conjures feelings of alienation, despair, and loneliness. In walking London, the narrator--or narrators--find that the world, hopelessly clinging to Old World ideals, still recovering from World War I, has been rudely shoved down a path--lined with factories, cars, and vast, uncaring cities--it wasn't necessarily ready for. With postwar literature expressing popular disillusionment, and rising totalitarianism feeding off discontent, The Waste Land isn't so much a work with a discernible story or a naked "this is how it is" realism as it is an evocation of a mood, one rife with confusion and a newfound rush to meet quotas and increase productivity. Along with Ulysses, it stands as a pivotal moment in modernist literature, and a necessary bridge to postmodernism.

To understand Vladimir Putin's "horrifying" view of Russian history--which might not be so horrifying when one considers that history is always being distorted and rewritten--one need only look to a controversial high school textbook recently commissioned by the Russian government--a textbook intended, first and foremost, to instill a sense of pride in Russia's schoolchildren by downplaying or ignoring key historical events.

The author of one of the chapters turned out to be Pavel Danilin, the editor-in-chief of the Kremlin.org website and deputy director of the Effective Politics Foundation, which is headed by the top Kremlin propagandist Gleb Pavlovsky. Danilin--who is also affiliated with the "Young Guard of the United Russia," the Komsomol-like helper of the United Russia "ruling" party--was quoted as saying that "our goal is to make the first textbook in which Russian history will look not as a depressing sequence of misfortunes and mistakes but as something to instill pride in one's country. It is in precisely this way that teachers must teach history and not smear the Motherland with mud." ...

[ ... ]

While pages and pages of The Modern History of Russia overflow with official statistics attesting to the dazzling achievements of Soviet economy--the production of mineral fertilizers grew six-fold; of electricity, five-fold; of steel, double--or with positively loving recitations of the quality and quantity of Soviet military hardware, the Gulag is mentioned by name once. And this sole mention is by way of cautioning the reader against the "exaggeration" of its "contribution" to the economy: after all, there were only 2.6 million prisoners (in 1950), compared with 40.4 million in the country's workforce outside the barbed wire.

Among the many eyewitness accounts inserted into the textbook's narrative under the rubric "How It Was" (Kak eto bylo), there is not a single one from the flood of memoirs published in the late 1980s about the hell of the camps or "investigative prisons," where "testimony" was beaten out of the arrested; not a single quotation from Kolyma Tales, or Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, or The Department of the Useless Things by Yuri Dombrovsky (another splendid Russian writer who miraculously survived three stints, amounting to a quarter of a century, in the Gulag), or from the brilliantly imagined prison and camp chapters in the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century, Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. The "Doctors' Plot" of 1953 merits a paragraph--but not the next step, which only Stalin's death thwarted: the planned public hangings of traitorous Jews on Red Square and a countrywide pogrom to be followed by the exile of more than two million Soviet Jews to the Far East.

I stole this link from Laryssa ...

Last David Foster Wallace bit, at least for the time being: here's his essay, "Consider the Lobster," for your reading enjoyment.

The New York Times looks back on David Foster Wallace's work and themes.

Although his books can be uproariously, laugh-out-loud funny, a dark threnody of sadness and despair also runs through Mr. Wallace's work. He said in one interview that he set out with "Infinite Jest" "to do something sad," and that novel not only paints a blackly comic portrait of an America run amok, but also features a tormented hero, who is reeling from his discovery of his father's bloody suicide--his head found splattered inside a microwave oven. Other books too depict characters grappling with depression, free-floating anxiety and plain old unhappiness. One of the stories in "Oblivion" revolved around a cable TV startup called "the Suffering Channel," which presented "still and moving images of the most intense available moments of human anguish."

David Foster Wallace: dead at forty-six.

I've been interested in reading his books for some time, so this comes as sad news, indeed.

I picked up a massive volume of Allen Ginsberg's poetry the other day--Collected Poems 1947-1997, a hardcover which clocks in at almost 1,200 pages--and I keep thinking it would be the perfect accompaniment to a long road-trip. This is my first introduction to the Beat movement of the 1950s--no, I've not yet read anything by Jack Kerouac, but The Dharma Bums is high on my list of must-read books. Yet the collection is fascinating because of the personal touches Ginsberg brings; Collected Poems 1947-1997 could be seen as an autobiography of sorts, but it's also a postmodern chronicle of America, starting with the post-war years and ending at the beginning of the Clinton era--and in that respect, the book seems to work best when read chronologically. There's a lyrical, subversive, and freewheeling beauty in Ginsberg's vernacular, with his imagery and language taking you back to the counterculture revolution and the halcyon days of drug-fueled free love and classic rock. (Had I grown up in the sixties or seventies, I probably would've been a hippie, dropping acid and smoking pot and trading girlfriends with my similarly stoned buddies.) It's the kind of verse that begs to be read aloud--preferrably while on the road, and by your literature-loving significant other.

That sounds better than fiddling with the radio dial and arguing over which station to listen to.

If Doris Lessing hadn't been awarded a Nobel last year, I would've bet that British playwright Tom Stoppard would be a strong contender as this year's Literature laureate. But Harold Pinter, also British, won in 2005, and considering how controversial the Nobel Literature Prize is, I don't think an over-representation of British laureates would go over well with the rest of the world. Maybe he should be awarded--someday--but as far as this year is concerned, I like Israeli author Amos Oz for the Nobel. I can't think of any other writer who better fits the description of a would-be laureate.

That said, here's some Nobel Literature trivia for you:

• Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature--yes, literature--in 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values."
• Of all one hundred four laureates, only eleven women have been awarded Nobels: Doris Lessing (2007, United Kingdom), Elfriede Jelinek (2004, Austria), Wislawa Szymborska (1996, Poland), Toni Morrison (1993, United States), Nadine Gordimer (1991, South Africa), Nelly Sachs (1966, Sweden), Gabriela Mistral (1945, Chile), Pearl S. Buck (1938, United States), Sigrid Undset (1928, Norway), Grazia Deledda (1926, Italy), and Selma Lagerlöf (1909, Sweden).
• The lists of nominated authors are sealed for fifty years.
• Authors considered and rejected for a Literature Nobel include Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur Miller, and Salman Rushdie.
• Why wasn't W. H. Auden ever awarded a Literature Nobel? Two reasons, perhaps: because of errors in his translation of 1961 Peace Prize winner Dag Hammarskjöld's Vägmärken, and for suggesting that Hammarskjöld was gay. (Auden himself was homosexual.)
• France claims the highest number of Literature laureates with thirteen. However, a laureate's country depends on where he or she did the majority of his or her work--not residence or birth country. (For example, American laureate Saul Bellow was Canadian by birth.)
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1964, France) was the only Literature laureate who voluntarily refused the Nobel.
• Only one physicist has been awarded the Literature Nobel: Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn (1970, Russia). (He taught physics and astronomy at Ryazan when A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published.)