Bookstorm

With short stories like "Tao Lin Raped Me," "I Fucked Jane Austen," and "Mary Gaitskill Makes Shitty Cupcakes," Oprah Read This should be required reading. Go!

I meant to link to this a few weeks ago, but things--such as the holidays--got in the way. In any case, here's Lydia Davis's "The Cows," belated and animated. Have a good new year, kids.

From Text 12 of Fernando Pessoa's (very quotable) The Book of Disquiet:

I envy--but I'm not sure that I envy--those for whom a biography could be written, or who could write their own. In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.

In somewhat-random order, here are the ten best books I read this year:

1. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
2. Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis.
3. Rasskazy by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker (editors).
4. Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones.
5. We Did Porn by Zak Smith.
6. Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut.
7. The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier.
8. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño.
9. The Exquisite by Laird Hunt.
10. Beowulf by Anonymous.

And, again in somewhat-random order, here are the ten worst books I read this year:

1. The Pact by Jodi Picoult.
2. The End of Alice by A. M. Homes.
3. The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont.
4. Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster.
5. All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen.
6. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.
7. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
8. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.
9. Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche.
10. Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara? by Jenny Bond and Chris Sheedy.

And there you have it, kids: the best and worst of over sixty books read this year. Happy trails.

Merry Christmas, from my blog to yours. Make your eggnog a little stronger, and don't neglect your holiday reading.

I've never given any thought to what might be the best poem ever written in the English language, but Sven Birkets, in an essay reprinted in The Story About the Story, edited by J. C. Hallman, considers a worthy contender: "To Autumn" by John Keats. As Birkets writes, "I have seen it cited many times as the most perfect poem in the language. A more suitable test case for beauty, it seems, would be hard to find."

I know, I know: I'm getting sick of hearing about the debacle behind Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura, too. By now, you're well-aware that the book has almost no literary worth, and that it was only published because Nabokov's son, Dmitri, is a greedy son of a bitch. (I'm certain, too, that the publisher had its eyes on the money prize, too. Of late, things haven't been easy for publishers.) I've said that those one hundred thirty-eight index cards should've been burned, but not because it was Nabokov's dying wish. My distaste for Dmitri went from the cynical kind to, more recently, resignation. It's done. The scumbag published it, and while no one's better off because of it, I confess I was a little curious to read it. Just a little.

I don't think curiosity justifies the book's thirty-five dollar suggested retail price. But I went to a bookstore earlier tonight and, as I was leaving, happened upon a display featuring the manuscript. It was bigger than I thought it'd be, just slightly smaller than a coffee table book--up to this point, I'd imagined it being a little bigger than a set of index cards--and thick. (Hence the thirty-five dollar price tag: the book is printed on heavy paper.) I opened it and noted, on the front page, (Dying is Fun). I was almost tempted to read Dmitri's excuse (or "introduction," as the jacket copy would have it), but decided it would probably be better if I let him stay quiet. (Gordon Gekko might be right, but Dmitri's wasn't the kind of greed he was referring to.) I opened the book at random and read the yellowed index card, then skimmed the printed text underneath. I flipped one page back and found more of the same.

I didn't bother reading any further, because I suddenly lost all interest in The Original of Laura. Sure, it was interesting to see the index cards, but as I left the store, I wondered why anyone would want to read all of them. I can appreciate the writing process--this might be The Original of Laura's only redeeming quality--but I'll go ahead and say it: I don't give a damn how a writer does his or her work. The writing process, from what I've heard and read, is boring, akin to a painter telling someone exactly how colors are mixed. I realized I didn't want to read Nabokov's unfinished manuscript any more than I wanted to read, say, James Joyce's handwritten manuscript of Ulysses. And I'm certainly not about to fund the prodigal son's latest (and, I hope, last) money-grab.

So go ahead. Ignore all the reviews and just find a copy of The Original of Laura. Flip through it. Read an index card or two: it loses what little mystique it may have had. Then close it. That's all you need to kill any lingering curiosity. You'll finally be able say you don't give a damn about it.

I've had to start and stop Ian Kershaw's Hitler over the last couple of months because it's so depressing, though not for the obvious reasons.

Kershaw's biography is less about Adolf Hitler and more about the conditions that made him possible. Post-World War I Germany amounted to anarchy: hyperinflation was rampant, and the government was so weak that it could barely keep law and order. (During his failed putsch, which was planned in less than a day, Hitler merely walked into the Reichstag with a pistol and a couple of henchmen and announced that the National Socialists were taking over government. No one argued with him.) The depressing thing, however, is that Hitler later won office legally--he was elected chancellor of Germany, and later elected president. He also managed to keep most of his main political promises: he invaded Russia, in an effort to combat Bolshevism and give Germany "living space"; he violated every principle outlined in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; and he stripped German Jews of their citizenship and sent millions of them to their deaths.

But Kershaw isn't interested in morality. He doesn't assign responsibility, and perhaps that's really his point: no single person or condition was responsible for Hitler and the actions of the National Socialist party. While describing a speech Hitler gave, in February of 1926, to a club of four hundred of Hamburg's "upper bourgeoisie," Kershaw writes, "The more Hitler preached intolerance, force, and hatred, as the solution to Germany's problems, the more his audience liked it." Hitler's worldview was filled with paranoid delusions (as shown in the vile and frightening Mein Kampf), which he always stripped to the lowest common denominator and tailored to specific audiences. Hitler was an actor, and his gift was propaganda: Kerhsaw brilliantly illustrates how complicated Germany's politics were at the time, then frames the atmosphere against Hitler's gross, and often wrong, oversimplification. The essence of Hitler's propaganda was to blame Germany's problems on outside forces, then advocate force in order to resolve them. After his speech to the Hamburg upper class--in which Hitler made no mention of Jews, and instead railed against Marxism--Kerhsaw writes:

Back among his 'own sort', little or nothing had changed. The tone was very different from that adopted in Hamburg. In closed party meetings or, after the speaking band had been lifted in early 1927, once more in Munich beerhalls or the Circus Krone, the attacks on the Jews were as vicious and unconstrained as ever. In speech after speech, as before the putsch, he launched brutal assaults against the Jews, bizarrely depicted both as the wire-pullers of finance capital and as poisoning the people with subversive Marxist doctrine. Explicit attacks on the Jews occurred more frequently and extensively in 1925 and 1926 than in the subsequent two years. Antisemitism seemed now rather more ritualistic and mechanistic. The main stress had moved to anti-Marxism. But only the presentation of ideas had been modified to some extent; their meaning had not. His pathological hatred of the Jews was unchanged. 'The Jew is and remains the world enemy,' he once more asserted in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter in February of 1927, 'and his weapon, Marxism, a plague on mankind.'

Hitler was the product and embodiment of very specific political circumstances. Kershaw's biography almost makes me believe in fate. With hindsight, we can wonder how a man like Hitler--uneducated, ignorant, and unqualified, could attain high office in Germany. But we say this by taking him out of context and by supplying the requisite moral outrage. Kershaw, by carefully outlining Germany's political culture at the time, by keeping Hitler squarely within the context of his era, and by dispelling his aura of myth and contradiction, not only makes him possible, but plausible; he isn't just the embodiment of a temporary stop in humanity's progress. Kershaw inadvertently dares us to imagine Hitler at any other time (reincarnated as Slobodan Milošević or Saddam Hussein, for example), then makes us realize there are no comparisons. Hitler, with his hate-filled rhetoric and his ability to get millions to believe in him, isn't possible under any other conditions. Germany's entire political climate, specific to that time in her history, and which had been brewing since Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, made him happen. But if you take away a single ingredient, you take away Hitler. And you're left with a very different historical picture.

The rooster is ready to crow: here's the longlist for the 2010 Tournament of Books.

(It's not a very surprising list; Barbara Kingsolver, Dan Chaon, Thomas Pynchon, and Hilary Mantel are all present. However, I'm surprised and delighted to see Stephen King's Under the Dome on the list. I haven't read it, and I'm not sure I will--it's a pretty big-ass book and I don't read King anymore--but I'm hearing good things about it.)

The late David Foster Wallace has new fiction, excerpted from his unfinished novel The Pale King, in this week's New Yorker.