So I really wish I didn’t love his writing quite so much. But what are you going to do? The heart wants what it wants, as Selena Gomez put it. And Emily Dickinson before her. And every irresponsible person ever.
Fantômes et vivants is a memoir, the first in a vast, six-volume sequence. Less a narrative than a series of acidic portraits—Proust called them ‘magnifiquement atroces�—the book provides what we might now call an alt-right perspective on cultural life under the Third Republic. The son of a famous writer, and once married to Hugo’s favourite granddaughter, Daudet was an established insider, with one foot in bohemia and another in the dingy back rooms of reactionary politics. He knew everybody, fell out with most of them, and wrote about them all: immortals of literature, party hacks, forgotten salonnards - dozens of these odd or incredible 19th-century figures float through the book, generally while being shat upon from the heights of Daudet’s contempt. The whole performance is bilious, intemperate and grossly unfair. It’s also great, just great. Whatever else he might have been, Daudet was a born writer, with a verbal gift out of all proportion to his humanity. He tosses the French language around with Rabelaisian gusto, mixing slang, archaisms and medical jargon into an inexhaustible slurry.
But even if punchy prose doesn’t turn you on, there’s another reason to read Daudet. He happened to be alive, and at the very centre of things, during one of the most dramatic periods in European history. The first few decades of his life saw: the painful birth of liberal democracy in France, the long agony of the Dreyfus Affair, a wave of anarchist terrorism, huge financial scandals and, just as a digestif, the invention of modern art and literature. And all of this leading, blindly and inexorably, to the hecatomb of Verdun and a million dead Frenchmen. Daudet was interested, involved or implicated in every one of these developments.
A guest on some podcast I was half-listening to the other day brought me up short with this arresting prophecy: “I feel like 2016 is that moment just A guest on some podcast I was half-listening to the other day brought me up short with this arresting prophecy: “I feel like 2016 is that moment just before an earthquake when dogs are barking like crazy, rats are fleeing the cities and gerbils are eating their young.� I may be paraphrasing slightly, but that was the gist of it. As a rule, I’m morally allergic to such talk: unless you’re St John or Yeats—and even then—the apocalyptic mode comes off as overwrought. Worse, it’s almost always wrong. “It’s closing time in the gardens of the West,� Cyril Connolly famously said. “Bollocks,� said the West, less famously.
But lately my sunny, Whiggish outlook has soured into a shitty buzz. And yes, it’s partly the fact that the GOP has bodied forth the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and sent him stomping his way across the American political landscape. But it’s also Orlando, Nice, Istanbul, Dallas, Dhaka…a decade’s worth of bad news packed into one tweaky summer. On top of everything else, they say the new Suicide Squad movie sucks balls, but then what were you expecting? Autumn Sonata?
So plunging into a Trollope novel at a time like this has to be seen as a more or less desperate evasion of reality. And I accept that. Millions of people are now using Pokemon Go for similar purposes; others have TM or rough sex or Magic: The Gathering to fall back on. No judgment here. We’re all guilty in the eyes of God. Spark one up.
Trollope’s books have always appealed to scared fuddy-duddies like me because they seem to project an ideal, unchanging universe of curates and duchesses and stately country houses. But this view depends on a slight misreading of Trollope and a massive misreading of the 19th century. If you think about it, Victorian England really isn’t the place for a nice, nostalgic wallow. That pose of unflappable sanity maintained by Trollope and his peers had to outface slums, dead babies, disenfranchisement, venereal disease and the stench of excrement pretty much everywhere. Trollope is too much of a gentleman to mention most of these horrors by name, but you can’t help sensing them at the back of things, and you sort of have to keep them in mind if you want to read him with any intelligence.
Even on its own terms, though, Phineas Redux is a total downer. True, the hero gets married off to a rich and sexy lady at the end, but along the way the meandering plot touches on madness, murder and shady politics. It also includes a sympathetic portrait of a woman stuck, hopelessly and tragically, in what we’d now call the friend zone, and this subplot has an almost unbearable emotional realism that affects the whole tone of the book. In general, Trollope is pretty smart about sex, even if he’s never explicit about it: his men and women are constantly circling each other, wary but fascinated, and when they finally pair off, the luckier couples find their way to a grim Clintonian accomodation. The rest are simply doomed. Which seems about right.
Phineas Redux isn’t a great novel. It isn’t even one of the better novels in the Palliser series. As usual with Trollope, there’s too much fox-hunting, too much sitting around in drawing rooms and too many damn letters. Maybe the most debilitating flaw is a dull and superfluous romance between two supporting characters, both of whom deserved to slip under the wheels of a hansom cab and die like the pretentious poodles they are. But I’ll save that for my fan fic.
Still, you go on reading somehow, getting caught up in this misshapen old triple-decker banged out by a long-dead postal worker. The gentle irony seeps into your soul, and for a while you can almost ignore the vast Gathering of the Juggalos that is going on out there, somewhere far away and mostly on Twitter. ...more
Now that the Internet and chronic solvent abuse have cruelly abridged my attention span, I can’t seem to concentrate on anything more demanding than aNow that the Internet and chronic solvent abuse have cruelly abridged my attention span, I can’t seem to concentrate on anything more demanding than a businesslike text message (“Where u at bro?�) I’ve come to accept that I’ll never read Sein und Zeit in German � or any other earthly language. I’ll probably never read another novel. I might not read this paragraph.
Which is why Rossetti and His Circle is perfect for me. It’s short, beautiful and practically wordless. It’s also amusing. How come nothing’s amusing anymore? The term itself has a slightly archaic ring, like ‘gallant� or ‘chaste�. I don’t think anyone’s even tried to be amusing since Dick Cavett went off the air. I watch something like the trailer for the new Mad Max movie and think, ‘Yes, yes, clearly awesome. But where’s the witty insouciance?� Then again, old George Miller didn’t exactly set out to remake His Girl Friday, did he? So I don’t know what I’m complaining about.
Rossetti and His Circle was first published in 1922. Although it could now almost pass for an avant-garde graphic novel, it must have struck its original audience as bizarrely quaint. In an England that was already reading Joyce and dancing to jazz, here was this dandified aesthete composing a series of cartoons about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an extinct bohemia as remote from Beerbohm’s contemporaries as the beatniks are from us. But instead of doing what most modern graphic novelists would do when presenting some dimly remembered historical period—i.e. dumbing it down—Beerbohm assumes, on the reader’s part, an impossibly granular knowledge of mid-Victorian culture. This, for instance, is a picture called ‘Blue China�:
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Thanks to an editor’s note, I can tell you that the dignified old gentleman here represents Thomas Carlyle and the little guy Whistler, while the vases point back to an old quarrel between the Aesthetes and the Ruskinites. So, yeah, if you happen to be an art historian, this scene might be unspeakably hilarious. Otherwise, though, not so much. And yet it still works somehow: you sense a moral seriousness behind the levity, even if the satire is partially occluded. It may be an inside joke, but the delivery is so perfect that you take the brilliance of the punchline on faith.
Not that it really matters, but I’ve never had the slightest interest in Pre-Raphaelite art. All those ethereal maidens drowning in rivers and whatnot appeal to the same vague romanticism that helped install Klimt’s ‘The Kiss� in a million dorm rooms (right next to the obligatory Robert Doisneau photo). But Beerbohm, a man saturated with irony, manages to make these disreputable painters both interesting and sympathetic. He even gets at the strange nobility of the titular Rossetti, turning that BBW-loving slacker into some kind of hero, a proto-Lebowski � mute, impassive, often recumbent, but still abiding:
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Believe it or not, that picture contains, among other virtues, a sly allusion to S&M. I won’t spoil it for you, though. Just read the book, preferably in a high-quality edition with intelligent endnotes. ...more
Karen Armstrong is a silly person who writes books about religion. She also appears to be a kindly soul, in a tea-and-crumpets sort of way, but she’s Karen Armstrong is a silly person who writes books about religion. She also appears to be a kindly soul, in a tea-and-crumpets sort of way, but she’s still, I repeat, a silly person. In a recent Salon interview, she bemoaned the atheistic impertinencies of Bill Maher and Sam Harris, comparing the two men to Nazis for their criticism of Islam. ‘It fills me with despair,� she said. ‘This is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps.�
Now, you don’t have to be a fan of either Maher or Harris to see how insane that is. Never mind that a supposedly respectable writer has so airily breached Godwin’s Law. Never mind that both men in question—a Hollywood liberal and a neuroscientist—are Jewish. And never mind that, unlike real Nazis, they’re not inciting violence or threatening anyone. The question here is simple: are we allowed to mock and criticize religious dogma, or are we not? Are we allowed to say things like ‘Islam [or Wicca or Scientology] is the mother lode of bad ideas,� or are we not? Armstrong’s answer is a curt no. And if you do, you’re obviously a Nazi.
Armstrong’s potshot represents an inconsequential skirmish in the culture wars, but it shows how imperfectly the whole Enlightenment thing has been assimilated by certain minds. If even a writer as sweetly reasonable as Armstrong claims to be can say such things, it means we’ve still got a ways to go before we beat down the old ¾±²Ô´Úâ³¾±ð. It’s still out there, snarling and slavering and pulling at its chain. It’s enough to fill you with despair, or some less melodramatic emotion.
But what the hell does any of this have to do with a book about 19th-century France? Quite a bit, actually. Many of our ideological squabbles today, like the one described above, are faint and distant echoes of a much nastier brawl that roiled French society from about 1870 onwards. Reading For the Soul of France, you see some familiar conflicts being rehearsed—left versus right, secularism versus religion and so on—but with way more drama, bomb-throwing and duels. Although the political groupings were shifting and complex, Frederick Brown maps out the frontline thus: on one side, you had liberals and socialists fighting for a democratic and above all secular republic; on the other side, you had a lot of reactionary assholes. (That’s a bit simplistic, obviously. To be more precise, the reactionary assholes included Catholics, royalists, and blood-and-soil nutjobs with a collective hard-on for Joan of Arc. Plus, of course, there were the inevitable drooling anti-Semites, but they didn’t make up a group so much as trail their slime over all the other ones � including those on the left.)
Summarized in this way, the book sounds like a bedtime story for liberals, with a Whiggish moral about the ultimate triumph of progressive ideas. And in fact, the narrative ends with the exoneration of Dreyfus and the official separation of church and state, lending a certain credibility to this reading. But as we know, history’s not that tidy. The crazed nationalists and Jew-haters never went away; they bided their time, churned out their pamphlets, and gradually swelled the muddy little tributaries that fed fascism, finally getting their revenge in 1940. But that’s another story � and one that Brown himself has recently told in a sequel. And in case you’re feeling all Whiggish and bien pensant yourself, you should know that the French left also went completely insane for a few decades � but that’s another story too, and I can only hope Brown is busy working on it. The blood feud that is French political history cries out for a trilogy, at the very least. ...more
Sad to say, but I’ve lived more intimately with this book than just about any other in my life. I used Learning Teaching on a daily basis in Korea, whSad to say, but I’ve lived more intimately with this book than just about any other in my life. I used Learning Teaching on a daily basis in Korea, where I spent a couple of years instilling the finer points of EFL pedagogy into trainee teachers to whom the finer points of the English language were themselves a little murky. But Koreans always make up in enthusiasm what they lack in know-how, so I have no complaints there. As for Learning Teaching, it’s not a bad resource. I mean, it’ll still suck a little joy out of your soul every day, like most textbooks, but at least it won’t lead you into the arid wastes of Jeremy Harmer’s How to Teach English , where passion goes to die (in the withered arms of hope). Unfortunately, there are certain brute, existential facts about teaching that even the best training manual won’t address, because to do so would undermine both its own raison d’etre and the tacit assumptions behind the whole education racket.
In job interviews over the years, I’ve often been asked to outline my teaching philosophy. There are two basic approaches to this question: there’s the ‘correct� one, composed of whatever bland and reassuring jargon you’ve picked up from books like Learning Teaching, and then there’s the truth. Of course, you can never tell the truth in a job interview, but you can sometimes tell it on the Internet. I’m going to tell the truth here.
For me, teaching has always been a form of seduction. Now, just in case my boss ever stumbles onto Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, I’ll add that this seduction ought to remain purely (and non-actionably) metaphorical. There’s a real conquest involved—if you’re doing it right—but it’s mostly a moral conquest, even before it becomes an intellectual one. When you walk into a classroom and get your first look at the lumpish human material you’ve been fated to work with—mere swaying slabs of boredom, nervousness or hostility, as the case may be—your overriding concern is simply to win those people over, to get them on your side. To do this, you need to draw on the same inner resource used by salesmen, pickup artists, entertainers and similar lowlifes: i.e. charisma. Authority and expertise are nice too, but they only come into play later on, once you’ve sold them on whatever jerry-rigged classroom persona you’ve outfitted yourself with.
Jim Scrivener, the author of Learning Teaching, naturally avoids the word ‘seduction�, but he does acknowledge that good teaching boils down to a cluster of winning personality traits such as empathy, honesty, a sense of humour etc. Where he goes wrong—where he gets downright mendacious—is in suggesting that all these qualities can be learned and improved upon by the diligent trainee. I don’t have a lot of hard data to back me up here (any more than Scrivener does), but from what I’ve seen of humanity, things like empathy and honesty are, beyond the age of seven or so, pretty much innate. Either you empathize with others or you don’t; either you’re reasonably honest or you’re a lying sack of shit; either you’re naturally funny or you’re Sinbad. Even assuming that lifelong, incremental progress is possible in some of these areas, it certainly won’t come about by skimming Jim Scrivener’s little handbook, or taking a TESOL class on weekends.
Teacher-training programs, then, are governed by the same cruel law as MFA programs: the really gifted students don't need them, and the really bad ones won’t profit from them, but are nonetheless sent out into the world, shiny diplomas in hand, to sow boredom and confusion wherever they go. In my years of training teachers, I never saw a shitty one get good; all you can do is try to help them become a little less egregiously shitty. Now maybe that failure is down to my inadequacies as a trainer, but I sincerely doubt that an Albert Pujols, for instance, could teach the weak and uncoordinated how to crush a hanging breaking ball, or that Elizabeth Bishop could show the verbally inept how to spin out brilliant metaphors. A gift for teaching may not be as remunerative as the ability to hit a curveball or as exalted as the ability to write a beautiful sestina, but like those other talents, it has its source in some deep-seated mojo that can’t be explained or passed on.
Despite my weary tone, I actually don’t have a huge problem with mediocrity. Every profession is beset by mediocrity. It’s the statistical mean to which human enterprise always regresses. I just have a small problem with covering it up and wishing it away. But then, my hunch is that these textbooks are usually written by teachers who are themselves mediocre. Most good teachers wouldn’t bother, because they know that what makes them good is, ironically enough, the one thing they can’t teach. ...more
This afternoon, looking for something quick and dirty to eat, I stepped into a grungy little buffet in downtown Gwangju. The lunch rush was just endinThis afternoon, looking for something quick and dirty to eat, I stepped into a grungy little buffet in downtown Gwangju. The lunch rush was just ending and the owner was sitting at his ease by the cash register, joshing with a few cronies. This particular joint must not get a lot of white customers, because I sensed a subtle shift in the vibe when I walked in. After some hesitation, the boss jumped up and gestured apologetically toward the empty buffet table. I could see his mouth working away before any words came out. “Chicken,� he finally managed, in halting English. “Sold out.� Everybody’s looking at me now, wondering how I’ll take this. I answer in Korean: “I see. Then I’ll come back another time.� The boss stops and gapes at me; his cronies are cracking up. I don’t want to spoil my triumph, so I turn and head out, but on my way up the stairs I hear somebody say, “Whoa, that foreigner speaks Korean!�
Well, it wasn’t much maybe, but that’s the kind of gratifying encounter that keeps me plugging away at this abominable language. Of course, it would be more true to my experience to tell an anecdote that ends with my complete humiliation and a bunch of Korean matrons tittering at me, but why dwell on the negatives? I’d have given up long ago if I couldn’t put that stuff behind me.
And now I’m going to geek out on Korean grammar for a while. The deeper I get into this textbook series, the more I appreciate it. I have no idea who wrote it, but there’s a really keen pedagogical intelligence at work behind it. You know how, when you watch a well-crafted show like The Wire, a plot point introduced in one episode will suddenly take on added significance five or six episodes down the line? That’s sort of what Sogang Korean is like, except that, instead of a plot, you’re watching the grammar of a language slowly ramify and crystalize. Okay, so it’s not as compelling as a high-end police procedural, but it has a peculiar beauty of its own.
The only problem I have with Sogang—and some of my classmates have made the same complaint—is that it doesn’t cover banmal (casual speech) until the upper-intermediate level. Unfortunately, in order to do anything really fun in Korean, like talking trash or getting laid, you need to know banmal. So the editors� decision seems kind of dumb � theoretically sound, no doubt, but pragmatically dumb.
Still, this volume introduces some other useful things, including conditional sentences and reported speech, the latter of which is even more kooky than most Korean grammatical items. And as always, there are dialogues featuring Andy, Mina and the other characters from the Sogang repertory, with their cartoonish good looks and surprisingly grown-up problems (one chick nervously tells her date she doesn’t want to watch Titanic with him because she’s already made plans to see it with another guy.)
By now I’ve been studying Korean for over a year and a half and it’s still kicking my ass on a regular basis. It seems like every time I figure out one little thing and get some purchase on the language, whole new vistas of darkness and ignorance open up somewhere else. But I can’t help loving it. If I leave this country with nothing but a few good memories and a working knowledge of its mixed-up language, I’ll have come out ahead. ...more
In university, I once overheard a couple of female friends talking about guys. One was trying to get the other to set her up with somebody. There was In university, I once overheard a couple of female friends talking about guys. One was trying to get the other to set her up with somebody. There was the usual question: ‘Well, what kind of guy are you looking for?� My one friend hemmed and hawed for a minute, and then said, ‘Oh, who am I kidding? I just need to get fucked.�
It was an eye-opening moment for me (granted, I was a pretty clueless 19-year old.) On one level, it was liberating to realize that women could be driven by the same imperious desires as men. On another level, it was kind of terrifying. And I think most men, if they’re honest, would admit to some ambivalence about female sexuality. We’re uneasily aware that there’s this powerful force out there that affects our lives in all sorts of ways, for good and ill, but we can’t even begin to understand it.
If there’s one consolation here, it’s that women themselves don’t understand it either. Or so says Daniel Bergner in this poppy but fascinating little book. In one of the more prurient experiments he summarizes, female subjects were shown a range of porn—gay, straight, animal, whatever—while hooked up to vaginal sensors that measured their state of arousal. When the women were asked which scenes turned them on, their answers wildly diverged from what the sensors were indicating (‘Nope, sorry, that bit with the monkeys didn’t do anything for me.�) Whereas, when men were shown the same clips, their reported reactions closely matched the sensor readings. So what’s going on here? Why do women apparently misconstrue what their own bodies are telling them? The sexologists don’t rightly know. It could be an effect of sociocultural repression. It could be some kind of psychosomatic disconnect between loins and brains. Or maybe women just don’t like having scientists mucking around in their lady bits.
My guess is that this book will make a lot of female readers feel a little better about themselves, a little less weird and ashamed. On the other hand, it’s going to freak out some male readers, especially those in long-term relationships. There’s emerging evidence that, contrary to popular belief, monogamy may be even harder on women than it is on men. Not that monogamy is necessarily wrong � just that its costs are very high and, for many women, simply intolerable. In that respect, What Do Women Want? is a surprisingly melancholy book. There are threads of sadness and desperation running through it. It’s a vivid reminder, in case you needed it, that life is tough, even for the luckiest among us.
Here’s my own two-bit theory, cobbled together out of Freud and failure: you’re never going to be satisfied � not for long, and probably only in retrospect. A Korean proverb goes: get married and you’ll regret it, stay single and you’ll regret it. Sounds about right. What Plato called ‘the pursuit of the whole� takes place down here, in the realm of the incomplete, among the half-assed. Frustration is the norm.
As I see it, this isn’t an invitation to cynicism. It’s an invitation to acceptance. In the ordinary course of things, there’s no mingling of souls. There’s Chinese takeout and perfunctory sex. And that’s still pretty good, isn’t it? ...more
After açaà berries and recycling, travel’s one of the most overrated things around. It’s just one long pain in the ass. There’s the expense, the indigAfter açaà berries and recycling, travel’s one of the most overrated things around. It’s just one long pain in the ass. There’s the expense, the indignities of airport security, the further indignities of economy class, crowds, sand in your crotch, very large people with very small fanny packs, and Two and a Half Men dubbed into Portuguese. And what do you get out of all this? A gnawing sense of disappointment and the realization that there’s just no escaping yourself, that your sagging spirit is tied to your weary flesh, like a deflated tetherball to a rusty pole, forever. Oh, and maybe some knickknacks. Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
As with so many things in life, then, travel is best enjoyed vicariously, through books. A book won’t steal your passport or kidnap you or give you a drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea (unless it’s a library book and you rub it against your privates, but why would you do that?)
Actually, A Visit to Don Otavio is almost worth risking gonorrhea for. It’s not only the best book I’ve ever read about Mexico; it may be the best travel book I’ve ever read, period. An odd, clever woman collides with a big, baroque country, and the result is a minor classic that’s better than a lot of major classics. In it, tequila is described as ‘raw alcohol with an underwhiff of festering sweetness as though chrysanthemums had rotted in gin.� (Unfair, I think, but possibly true of the 1940s vintage.) A man has ‘one of those inherited handsome faces of Goya’s minor courtiers, where the acumen, pride and will of an earlier mould have run to fatuity and craft.� (She adds: ‘He turned out one of the kindest men I ever met.�) A derelict hotel has ‘a thick smell of dead-town, faded splendours and present bankruptcy.�
Sybille Bedford is the author’s name. She died a few years back, in her 90s. The wiki version of her biography hints at the sheer fabulousness of her life. She loved Mexico, by the way, the land that has swallowed so many foreign writers. She saw it whole, the beauty and brutality of it, and came away composed, and wrote this quirky, gorgeous thing about it. I don’t encourage you to travel—that’s your business—but you should probably read the book. ...more
Not being American myself, I have no particular interest in US presidential history, unless that history can be shoehorned into an entertaining biopicNot being American myself, I have no particular interest in US presidential history, unless that history can be shoehorned into an entertaining biopic, preferably with a British actor in the lead role. (I wonder who they’ll get to play Obama when the time comes. Liam Neeson?)
This book, though. This book is something else. ‘Political biography� is too pissant a term for this Ahab-like undertaking. I’d call it a biographie-fleuve, but I don’t think that’s a real word even in French. Let’s just call it a great big fucking book, in every sense of the various adjectives.
It’s somehow fitting that, in the same week that The Path to Power was keeping me up till 3 or 4 a.m. every night, I was also working my way through the first two seasons of Breaking Bad. Seen side by side like this, LBJ the wheeler-dealer and Walter White the meth dealer share a certain resemblance; they inhabit the same moral penumbra. Both men get caught up in a dangerous game that they turn out to be really, really good at, and both have, shall we say, an open-door policy vis-à -vis the dark side. Of course, LBJ never strangled anyone with a bike lock (as far as we know) but he still had enough blood on his hands to incarnadine the multitudinous seas, or at least turn them a ghastly pink.
People are going to be arguing about Robert Caro’s portrayal of Lyndon Johnson for decades to come, but even on the most generous interpretation of the facts, it seems pretty clear that the 36th POTUS was at once a crook, a liar, a shameless toady, a serial adulterer and a complete physical coward. Just for starters. He was also, and equally clearly, a political genius who did more to liberate and enfranchise his fellow citizens than any president since Lincoln. So there’s that too.
Still, for all Johnson’s Shakespearean complexities, this wouldn’t be the great big fucking book it is if Robert Caro had stuck to his safe, biographical bailiwick. Almost more fascinating than its central figure are the rich little digressions and sidelights it contains. To use an unfashionable word, it’s an edifying book: it teaches you stuff you didn’t even know you wanted to know, stuff like the history of the Texas Hill Country, or the domestic chores of farmers' wives, or the rococo politics of dam-building under the New Deal, or the grotesque career of Pappy O’Daniel. And then there’s the plain old gossip, such as the astonishing fact that the young LBJ had a passionate and very illicit affair with one of the most beautiful women of the day, who, decades later, would end up burning all his love letters out of mortification over the Vietnam War. See? Who wouldn’t want to know that?
Bring on volume two! And season three! I'm starting to get a taste for all this skeevy ambivalence and moral murk....more
So this is weird, but it turns out Michelle Orange is my female doppelganger, at least in terms of her curriculum vitae, which mirrors mine in uncannySo this is weird, but it turns out Michelle Orange is my female doppelganger, at least in terms of her curriculum vitae, which mirrors mine in uncanny ways. We both grew up in London, Ontario, where we both rode the Gravitron at the Western Fair (though I wonder if she ever puked over the gunwale of the nearby Pirate Ship, as I once did). Then, in the 90s, we both moved to Toronto, studied English and became insufferable. Finally there’s the fact that both of us spent time on the West Coast, trying to find ourselves or whatever, but that’s almost obligatory for Canadians of our generation, so maybe it doesn’t count.
Still, I don’t want to make too much of our similarities, especially since Orange bristles, in one of her essays, at the very idea of having a doppelganger. In any case, our paths eventually diverged when she left for New York to pursue a writing career, while I...did not. Plus, on the evidence of this book, her youthful metaphysical crises were a bit more interesting than mine: in her twenties, she took up extreme jogging out of spiritual angst, whereas I, less original, took up recreational jogging because I was a fat-ass. So, yeah, different people.
There’s a certain dickish way in which I could imagine myself dismissing This Is Running for Your Life: 'Basically, it’s the sort of thing that smart women in New York tend to write: you know, personal essays about Facebook and movies and, like, the special problems of being a smart woman in New York. Joan Didion’s skirt must’ve rustled a bit when Orange fell out and hit Katie Roiphe on the way down.� That’s the dickish response, as I say, and there’s something to it. Orange is certainly clever, but it’s a manic, brittle cleverness that sometimes falls into bathos, as in this line: ‘Puberty can go off like an IED in the Iraqi desert: one morning you wake up in a German hospital and spend the next six years learning to walk and talk.� Not to commit the same solecism here, but that’s the kind of mesmerizing awkwardness I associate with Jennifer Lawrence at an awards ceremony.
But for the most part, I read this collection with real pleasure, complicated and distorted by real envy. As with the above-named Lawrence (sorry, but like every other loser on the planet, I can't stop thinking about her lately), Orange’s charm and talent cover any number of lapses. She takes some fairly unpromising subjects—a visit to her grandmother’s nursing home, Ethan Hawke’s face—and works out from there, ruminating, making connections, showing off her syntax and, in short, doing good, honest, essayistic-type stuff. I get the feeling Orange (like a certain young actress) has a brilliant career ahead of her. Which, I guess, is something else that sets her apart from me. But we’ll always have that stupid Gravitron.
The very existence of this book is faintly anomalous. Its subject, Viktor Shklovsky, shared the earth with Tolstoy, wrote game-changing literary theorThe very existence of this book is faintly anomalous. Its subject, Viktor Shklovsky, shared the earth with Tolstoy, wrote game-changing literary theory back in the 1910s, and belonged to the same doomed generation as Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva. So how is it that this man was still hobbling around Moscow as late as 1984, on the eve of perestroika, during the first season of Miami Vice? It’s all a bit Aspern Paper-ish.
But that’s Shklovsky for you. Everything about him seems to defy periodization. His amazing memoir, A Sentimental Journey, came out in 1923 but remains as friskily postmodern as anything published last month. In some ways, we’re still catching up to this guy. In other ways, I think we’ve stopped trying.
Near the end of his life, Shklovsky was visited by the Italian scholar Serena Vitale, who spent several afternoons interviewing the old man in his apartment, while his wife puttered around in the next room and the obligatory KGB escort waited outside in their cars. The resulting book, brief as it is, seems ridiculously frontloaded, with all the best lines and biggest revelations coming in the two prefaces (a very Shklovskian touch, that superfluous preface). But it’s an important and fascinating document, all the more precious for being so unlikely.
At first, Shklovsky comes on all gruff and cynical, still tossing off the sort of epigrams that made him the bad boy of the Russian avant garde back in the day:
I never had talent, just displaced fury.
The only thing I need to be fully appreciated is death. Actually, maybe that’s what other people need. I don’t need anything.
There are only two ways to survive: write for yourself and earn money from some other occupation, or lock yourself in your house and contemplate the meaning of existence. There is no third way. I chose the third.
That last line, aside from being intrinsically awesome, is also a coded reference to the impossible country in which he lived and wrote. The resounding subtext here is that practically everyone and everything Shklovsky cared about was destroyed by Stalin, and that his own survival required more or less atrocious compromises. Shklovsky is remarkably upfront about all this. Recalling a long-ago betrayal of Pasternak, he asks himself why he did it:
The most terrible thing is that I don’t remember anymore. The times? Sure, but we’re the times, I am, millions like me. One day everything will come to light: the records of those meetings, the letters from those years, the interrogation procedures, the denunciations—everything. And all that sewage will also dredge up the smell of fear.
The most affecting moment in the book comes in an unguarded, off-the-record moment recalled by Vitale. After their session one day, Shklovsky tells her about his brother, a talented linguist who died in the Gulag. It’s a wrenching, appalling story, like something out of Solzhenitsyn, and at the end of it, there’s just this:
"I still don’t know where he’s buried." He took a sip of water. "It’s a horror, isn’t it? Old people crying. It puts me off too." ...more
For me, the whole pathos of economics lies in the fact that it’s a science with the soul of an artist. It can never quite keep its emotions under contFor me, the whole pathos of economics lies in the fact that it’s a science with the soul of an artist. It can never quite keep its emotions under control, its politics in check or its shit together. It may flaunt the trappings of science—bar graphs, Nobel prizes, bow ties—but its conclusions are almost as subjective and contestable as those of literary criticism. There’s the same interpretive leeway in both disciplines, the same margin for rhetoric and ideology. The difference, of course, is that the stakes are so much higher in economics, for the simple reason that a John Maynard Keynes or a Milton Friedman can change the world in substantial ways, whereas a Harold Bloom mostly can’t, thanks be to God.
In Against Thrift, James Livingston has attempted something truly ballsy—or rather, two ballsy things: a complete revision of modern economic history, followed by a passionate defense of consumerism from a socialist perspective. The book duly blew my mind, but that could just be a function of my profound ignorance. I’d dearly like to lock up, say, Paul Krugman and Alan Greenspan in a room together, force them to read Against Thrift, and not let them out until they issued a joint book report in plain English. But I know I’d be mopping blood off the floor before they ever got that far, so I guess I’m on my own here.
Crudely compressed, Livingston’s argument goes something like this: basic economic theory, as enshrined in textbooks and party platforms, tells you that lowering taxes on corporate profits will free up capital for productive uses (building new factories, for example), thereby stimulating the economy and creating jobs. It’s a seductively simple theory that was probably true enough back in the days of the Industrial Revolution, and if reality had any manners at all, it would just keep playing along. But according to Livingston, this classical model has been obsolete since about 1919, when technological and managerial innovations started pushing productivity toward its effective limits. In concrete terms, by the 1920's American industry was already pumping out Model Ts and Dapper Dan pomade just about as efficiently as it could. There were no more big scores to be had in that direction.
Successful modern corporations are therefore faced with a delightful problem: they have all this cash on hand, but nowhere productive to reinvest it. So they park it in the banks, which hatch all sorts of sophisticated ‘instruments�, such as credit cards and hedge funds, to put it to work. The problem is that there simply aren’t enough safe outlets for this tide of lucre, so it starts flowing into ever sketchier areas and inflating huge speculative bubbles along the way (think subprime mortgages). On this reading, the banking clusterfuck of 2008—like that of 1929—was merely a symptom of disorder, not the cause. Fraud and incompetence aside, the banks did their rational best in a situation of morbid superfluity. There was just too much damn money in the system, and it got all bunged up.
So when governments, in thrall to conventional economists, cut corporate taxes, they only compound the problem. Instead of creating more jobs, they just send more surplus capital sloshing through the banks, distorting values everywhere, until the whole thing finally bursts. Idle profits are the devil’s playthings, would be the moral here.
What’s the solution then? This is where Livingston’s argument is going to get him into all sorts of trouble with all sorts of people. He claims that, since saving and investment are part of the problem, the only logical alternative is more consumption: i.e., more plasma screens, more Land Rovers, more Wal-Mart-bought gewgaws. Look, he says: instead of channeling surplus capital back into an already dropsical financial sector, why not redistribute it to the working and middle classes, who will take it and go buy more shit—which will have a ripple effect on the whole economy. This is essentially what FDR did it back in the 30's. When the New Deal kicked in and workers went on a spending spree, the American economy enjoyed some of its fastest growth rates in history (and kept on growing for 40 years).
As Livingston well knows, the biggest objections to this proposal are moral rather than economic, and will come from both sides of the political divide. The Right, which has always extolled the virtues of individualism and free enterprise, would hardly be thrilled at the prospect of a ‘socialization of investment�, while the Left, with its instinctive aversion to consumerism, would be equally appalled, albeit for different reasons. Leftists want to see workers prosper, of course; they just don’t want to see them actually spending money (least of all at Wal-Mart).
But another GR reviewer has already raised the most obvious objection to Livingston’s thesis. In a burst of passionate indignation against the author, he writes:
You honestly don’t see the destructive narcissism and apathy and self-centeredness that a consumerist culture breeds? Hasn’t it occurred to you that the people who are following your advice in earnest � glued to their TV for the latest utopian idiom and doing their weekend mall pilgrimage � won’t buy and read your book with its lofty ideas because � how else should I put this � they are too dumbed-down by the consumerist culture?
I don’t quote this as an example of abject stupidity. It isn’t. I’ve often had the same thought myself. So have most sentient people. But I’d suggest that this is precisely the sort of conventional thinking that Livingston is trying to argue us out of. As I read it, the book is a call to something more generous than mere snobbery and contempt.
I don’t know the man, but I’m guessing that the reviewer quoted above is a consumer himself (of books, if nothing else). And yet, I notice that he implicitly excludes himself from the zombie-eyed consumerist hordes of his caricature. And that’s okay. I’d prefer to exclude myself too. The question is, how do we make those Other People—and I take it he’s talking, more or less, about fat white people who love Jesus and NASCAR with equal fervor—how do we make Them more like Us? That is, how do we make Them as hip and enlightened and environmentally-conscious as We fondly imagine Ourselves to be? Is it by nagging them to death, tut-tutting over their fat intake, TV-viewing habits and unfortunate fashion choices? Well, that’s been tried already. (And how’s that working out?) Or is it—and this is Livingston’s gamble—by giving them more of everything: more money, first of all, but also more leisure, more education, and ultimately more opportunities to read the sorts of books and watch the sorts of movies that We would approve of?
I can’t speak to Livingston’s economics, or to the unfathomable deviations by which he’s arrived at his heretical, post-Marxist brand of socialism. His position may be, and probably is, a political dead end, but it feels like a more expansive and optimistic place than anything the orthodox Left or Right has dared to imagine lately. ...more
Is my itinerary of any conceivable interest to anyone? Hardly. But listen now: in the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, it’s recorded that a certain Cheka interrogator used to line up naked prisoners, make them bend over, and then deliver flying ‘football kicks� to their exposed testicles. Solzhenitsyn says the men usually passed out from the pain.
I don’t know if there’s a lesson here, other than the usual one about the everlasting shittiness of our species. But I choose to take a very simple message away from this story: any day on which your testicles are not being used for soccer practice is probably, on the whole, a pretty good one. That may sound horribly flippant, but Solzhenitsyn himself makes a similar point elsewhere in the book, claiming that it was precisely his years in the camps that gave him access to the miracle of normalcy, of mundanity.
So coming back to my blah, unblogworthy day: this quotidian bullshit—wandering around, drinking coffee, downloading sitcoms from iTunes—this is what it’s supposed to be like. This is fucking felicity. That vague, low-level dread you feel is just the background hum of a healthy, contented existence.
After ten months and a lot of heartbreak, I can finally claim, without equivocation, that I sort of, more or less, under certain circumstances, speak After ten months and a lot of heartbreak, I can finally claim, without equivocation, that I sort of, more or less, under certain circumstances, speak Korean. At any rate, I’m starting to get the odd compliment on my hangumal from natives, but you have to bear in mind that Koreans have ridiculously low standards in this regard. They don’t expect foreigners—least of all grotesquely Caucasian foreigners such as myself—to speak their language. So if you can stammer out a few broken sentences, they treat you like a prodigy of learning. It’s like what Dr. Johnson said about dogs walking on their hind legs: ‘It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.�
I’ve already reviewed the first textbook in this series and have nothing new to add about the second. So I’ll just throw in a quick plug for . It’s four delirious minutes of K-pop genius and a better advertisement for Korean culture than anything I could say. I’m totally serious. Shake ya ass, but watch ya self....more
Sorry, I just like saying his name, even though I have no idea what to do with that consonant cluster at the end. IGombrowicz, Gombrowicz, Gombrowicz.
Sorry, I just like saying his name, even though I have no idea what to do with that consonant cluster at the end. If I ever learn another language, it just might be Polish. This is somewhere between a whim and a resolution. It’s a whimsolution.
Anyway, Gombrowicz...This story is well known in certain circles, but it’s biographically inescapable. In the summer of 1939, Witold Gombrowicz, then a rising young Polish writer, goes on a cross-cultural junket to Argentina. He’s hardly off the boat when the Germans invade Poland, so he and his fellow countrymen get ready to sail back home and be patriotically slaughtered (in the best Polish traditions). Just as the ship is pulling away, Gombrowicz grabs his suitcase and jumps ashore. Thus, at the age of 35, with no money, no friends and no Spanish, he maroons himself in Argentina, where he will hang on, often penniless, for over two decades. He will never set foot in Poland again.
In a sense, though, Gombrowicz never really left his homeland. He carried the problem of Polishness with him into exile, scratching it like a persistent rash during his years in South America. It bored and infuriated him, but he kept going back to it.
As a Canadian, I’m no stranger to collective navel-gazing, but Polish self-consciousness seems to have a very different metaphysical heft to it. Whereas Gombrowicz experienced Polishness as this massive plenitude weighing down on him, Canadianness—and the very noun is awkward—tantalizes by its absence. Gombrowicz could spend decades interrogating his cultural identity, arguing with it, cursing it. A Canadian can only shrug, make a lame joke and change the subject.
Whatever you want to call it, this book provides yet more evidence that being a genius in a cultural backwater is a very dubious gift. Among other things, it means having nobody to talk to (just ask Kierkegaard, or one of his warring pseudonyms). But Gombrowicz suffered under a double obscurity: first as a major writer in a minor language, and then as an exile in a country even more peripheral than his own. Throw in the fact that, from his vantage point, communist Poland was little more than a giant sarcophagus, offering an unresponsive face to his cries and complaints, and you have all the conditions for an absolute, soul-destroying, career-killing solitude.
It would be too much to say that Gombrowicz triumphed over these circumstances—for one thing, triumph wasn’t his style—but the Diary represents a kind of artistic accommodation with disaster. He lost everything a writer can lose—country, language, audience—and he still turned it to account, making something beautiful and true out of the very marginality that should have silenced him.
Bernard Lewis has acquired more languages than most people have sexual partners.
That lead-in was intended as hyperbole, until I did the math and realiBernard Lewis has acquired more languages than most people have sexual partners.
That lead-in was intended as hyperbole, until I did the math and realized it was potentially true in my case, depending on how you count languages (and sexual partners). So now I feel like a slacker in both departments.
Lewis published this memoir just a few months ago, at the inconceivable age of 96. True, he had a bit of help putting it together, but so what? Even supposing I make it to 96, I don’t plan on doing much beyond drooling into my All-Bran, so I’m awarding him an extra star just for coming out.
Still, Notes on a Century isn’t a great memoir. While surprisingly brisk and lucid, it’s just not that interesting. The few times it threatens to get spicy, Lewis draws back, coyly drawing a veil over his wartime service in MI6 by invoking the Official Secrets Act, and later cutting short a discussion of academic taboos on the grounds that they are, after all, taboos. Come on, man! You’re older than God and, professionally speaking, almost as untouchable. Publish and be damned, I say. But maybe that’s just the insouciance of early middle age talking. ...more
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