Bookstorm

NPR is going to save you from all those mindless summer blockbusters.

I couldn't even begin to tell you how many times I've bought John Milton's Paradise Lost. It's one of those works that I always seem to misplace, and this inevitably leads me to think, God must really hate me.

But the other night, while listening to Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral and rooting through a closet, I happened across a battered copy of Milton's epic, one that, strangely enough, I didn't remember owning. But it's mine: all my favorite passages are highlighted, including, "Long is the way / And hard, that out of hell leads up to light," with a simple note in the margin: "Seven!," obviously referring to David Fincher's gruesome serial killer movie Se7en. But I was puzzled to discover, upon further inspection, that my favorite passage, from Book I, wasn't highlighted:

... Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor! One who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

I quickly rectified the situation, with an arrow and added marginalia: "To be recited at funeral."

The A.V. Club's monthly book club has chosen Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as its next topic of discussion. The shootout begins on June eighth. Get reading, kids.

Esquire reviews the forthcoming (meaning this fall's) film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road: "You won't want to see this one twice." That's very reassuring, actually.

The Road is no tease. It is a brilliantly directed adaptation of a beloved novel, a delicate and anachronistically loving look at the immodest and brutish end of us all. You want them to get there, you want them to get there, you want them to get there--and yet you do not want it, any of it, to end.

James Joyce: pervert. Actually, this is quite funny. But we need a little backstory first:

Joyce's erotic output takes the form a brief series of letters that he wrote in late 1909 to Nora Barnacle, his long-time partner, mother to his two children, and eventual wife. Separated when Joyce returned to Dublin in attempt to sell his manuscript for Dubliners and to open a movie theatre, Joyce wrote these emphatically erotic letters to his Nora, who had remained in Trieste, then part of Austro-Hungary, now part of Italy. The letters were first published in 1975 as part of Richard Ellmann's Select Joyce Letters (since out of print); Stephen Joyce has refused to let them be published since.

But the cat is certainly out of the bag, for the letters remain, and in just three short years, the copyright on them will expire. In the meantime their contents remain in print, a silent, florid, earthy testament to Joyce's profoundly fleshy love of his wife, anal sex, female masturbation, spanking, poop, white cotton underthings and farts, in no specific order. You read these letters and you get a visceral sense of Joyce's passion for his wife--her "rank red cunt," her "fat thighs," the "whorish movement" of her mouth, and her "naughty bare bum." You read these letters, and you get a glimpse into what masturbatory machinations sent Joyce reeling--his profound mixture of the sacred and the profane, his need for the most filthy sort of sanctification, and his conflicted joy over the cuckoldry playing out on the walls of his mind.

Oh, my. Tell us more, you dear, dirty Dubliner!

"I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways," Joyce writes on 8 December. Recalling a specific night of anal sex, he writes,

"It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole."

A day later, Joyce would command Nora to write a naughty letter back to him; he instructed her, "hold [the letter] for a moment to your sweet hot cunt, darling, and also pull up your dress a moment and hold them in under your dear little farting bum. Do more if you wish and send the letter then to me, my darling brown-arsed fuckbird."

I take issue with how Nicholson Baker presents Human Smoke--very little of the book is shown in context, and he oversimplifies the start and duration of World War II, focusing on the violence and atrocities committed by the participants and often reducing the war to a series of bombing raids where Germany attacked legitimate military targets during daylight hours, while Great Britain targeted civilian populations at night, but like so many others have pointed out, Baker is not a historian, and his book shouldn't be taken as pure history. He writes his book in small, trivial anecdotes, quoting from an array of sources and presenting them in chronological order. Baker's position is a moral one--and, by extension, an emotional one--and Human Smoke is intended to raise moral questions. His inversion of roles--presenting Adolf Hitler as a peace-seeker and Winston Churchill as a warmonger--is troubling. We can easily label Baker as a Nazi sympathizer (he's not--his sympathy lies with the pacifists), but this only misses the point. He's not only blurring the line between good and evil--so much so that one wonders if there was ever a line to begin with--but he's challenging what we're taught about World War II. And he does so to devastating effect.

In light of what we know, it's easy to contextualize World War II, and we can safely take a moral stance on it. We say, The ends justify the means, but Baker asks, Do they ever? Pacifism wasn't the answer to armament. Gandhi's calls for peaceful resistance would've achieved nothing. To let the Nazis march across Europe, promulgating Aryan racial superiority and leaving millions dead, without lifting a finger, is akin to standing by while your neighbor is beaten and raped right before your eyes. But keep in mind that history is taught and presented in retrospect. As the war raged, how was the world to know the consequences of non-action? The Nazis certainly didn't announce their plans for the Jews, or the condition of concentration camps (much of the extent and horror of Nazi policies didn't come to light until the Nuremberg trials), and with good reason; in Human Smoke, Germany, like the Allies, believes it has the moral high ground. (And, if we're to take Baker at face value, would the anti-Semitism of Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt have roused them to stop the Nazis from exterminating the Jews?) Instead, Baker presents the Allied and Axis powers in their respective moral positions, with an emphasis on hegemony. Churchill, determined to fight the war to the last man, rebuffs all of Germany's attempts at peace. Hitler attacks "cowardly" Great Britain in retaliation. About Jewish refugees, the constant question for the Allies isn't how to save them, but how to avoid taking responsibility for them. Both sides were equally guilty of war crimes. Instead of showing World War II as a war of ideals, Baker presents it as a war of pride.

Winston Churchill, taking his office as prime minister and minister of defence, offered blood, toil, tears, and sweat. What was his policy going to be? Very simple: war--war against "a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime." What was the aim of waging war? To win. The House gave him an ovation. Catching the eye of an aide as he walked out, Churchill said: "That got the sods, didn't it?"

As history, Human Smoke is disappointing. Baker doesn't explicitly demonize the Nazis--in fact, there's very little commentary from him--and he only shows the immediate result of certain battles and decisions. The Allies, contrary to longheld belief, are shown to be bloodthirsty, trigger-happy anti-Semites. The Axis nations try to keep the war contained, without prolonging it. (After learning about the Lend-Lease Act, wherein a neutral United States sold arms to Great Britain with the stipulation that the arms be returned or replaced after the war, and after hearing about America's "peacetime draft," an irritated Hitler gives a speech stating that he has no quarrel with the U.S., and warns Roosevelt to stay out of the war.) The purpose of Human Smoke is twofold: to show how war can bring even the most democratic governments to the brink of totalitarianism, and to give voice to the pacifists who, remembering the horrors of World War I, strenuously argued against fighting another long war. In retrospect, neither world war achieved its ideological objective--making the world safe for democracy. And, as Baker argues, that was never the war's goal to begin with.

Of late, I've been on a Vladimir Nabokov bender. First, I (finally) started reading Lolita this morning. Second, I'll soon be reviewing his new book The Original of Laura. And third, last month, on what would have been his 110th birthday, The New Republic put together a selection of Nabokov essays, including some literary reviews he published between 1940 and 1944. There's much to be had here. I hope you have a lot of time on your hands.

I've been waiting years for the English translation of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, but now that it's out, I'm second-guessing myself. I know I'll read it eventually, but I wonder if it's worth its thirty-dollar pricetag. (Roberto Bolaño's 2666 sure as hell was, and I never thought twice about it.) Now, however, I think the purchase might be justified:

When you're talking about novels, the word for a completely worked-out world in which the characters act according to a grand design is escapist; when you're talking about life, the word for a world like that is totalitarian. The totalitarian state possesses infinite knowledge, and it perpetrates infinite crime, authorized by the leader's godlike will; its end products are mass death and documentation, which are the two means by which the fictitious world of its ideology are extended. Reality falls--or is pushed--out of the picture; what you have is an obsessively elaborated world that seems all the more real because it's shot through with myth. The totalitarian state is engrossing the way certain books, The Kindly Ones among them, are engrossing: it offers a complete world that masks the reader’s incompleteness; its fantastic descriptions set ablaze those lazy (or young, or sad) minds that want nothing to be left to the imagination.