The Millions at BEA (X3)

I know that last year I expressed profound ambivalence about attending BEA, but in the end I've decided to go this year for a few reasons: It's in NYC, giving me the opportunity to see the numerous family and friends I have there; I'll get to meet up with some of the many cool people I met last year; Millions contributors Garth and Noah, NYC natives, will be along for the ride.

So, with that out of the way, let me tell you where we'll be. The Millions and many other litbloggers and literary luminaries will be at Kettle of Fish on 59 Christopher St. Thursday (tomorrow) from 8-11pm for the Litblog Co-op party. Come by and say hi.

The rest of our schedule, as best I can tell, is fairly wide open, but if there's an event we should know about, email me to let us know.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:34 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 55th in a Series (Future Blue Chips)

Ron writes in with this question:

The recent issue of Firsts magazine has an article on today's "blue chip" authors for book collectors: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. It made me wonder who writing today will be a blue chip author in the future. In the next 10 or 15 years, who will have books selling at the astronomical prices many great first editions books command?

I find old books fascinating, but I'm no book collector. It requires a fortitude and attention to detail that I simply don't possess. However, I was able to pass this question along to an expert, book shop owner Nigel who runs the fascinating book collecting blog, Bookride. Here's what Nigel had to say:

Predicting which authors will be collected in the future is a good game but slightly risky.

In the past people have tried to suggest authors worthy of financial investment and often got it sadly wrong. E.g. a few years ago Louis de Bernieres was being tipped as a highly collectable author. His prices did indeed shoot up in value so that at one point fine firsts of Captain Corelli were worth as much as $2000, but it is now readily buyable at less than half that. It could be because there has been a move against authors associated with Magic Realism, but also because the book is readily available and copies just keep turning up. The lesson is that however good a writer is - if there are too many copies of his or her works (and not enough collectors) the book will not prove a good bet. Supply and demand. That being said let me try and suggest a few writers.

Of the serious American novelists you should be OK with Don DeLillo, Brett Easton Ellis (especially the UK hardback first of American Psycho), Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, William Gibson, Toni Morrison, limited editions of Vollmann, signed stuff by Hunter Thompson. Of the mass market authors, I cannot see Stephen King falling into desuetude but you need to stick to the early stuff, thriller writers like Michael Connelly, Pelecanos, Lee Child, Laurie King, Ian Rankin are happening and may continue to resonate. The big money is now in photobooks, children's literature (Rowling, Pullman, Dahl) and artist's books (Koons, Hirst, Warhol, Emin, Prince). Photographer Robert Frank's The Americans has more than trebled in value this century now selling for $10000+ in great condition, same goes for some of the young Japanese photographers. Condition is, as always, paramount.

The Irish poets like Heaney, Muldoon, Mahon and Michael Longley are a goodish bet. I like Harold Pinter and think he will rise in value - other Nobel Prize Winners might do well like Gao Xingjian and Jose Saramago. South American writers are a little played out with the brilliant exception of Roberto Bolano (who, perversely, said that most writers who won Nobel prizes were "jerks"). Another great collectible iconoclast is the French enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq. US poet Philip Levine will hopefully be seriously collected, possibly Patti Smith and amongst the Brit poets I would back James Fenton.

A litany of Brit writers like Ian Mcewan, Hanif Kureishi, Julian Barnes and Irvine Welsh are unlikely to flatline and in the "world music" category dig Haruki Murakami, Aime Cesaire, Khaled Hosseini, and Naguib Mahfouz. Of older writers I think Flann O'Brien might well increase in value - his work is said to give clues to the real meaning of [the TV show] 'Lost'...

Thanks Nigel! If any book collecting types have thoughts to share, please do so in the comments.

Bonus Link: Finding First Editions - An "Ask a Book Question" from years past.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:25 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

New York Magazine Kicks Playa-tastic Game at World of Letters; World of Letters Says, "Uh...Thanks"; Good Time Had By All

The current issue of New York Magazine offers a typically glib handicapping of this summer's debut novels and hot young fabulists, as well as surveys of overlooked books and of writers likely to stand the test of time. I'm least sympathetic to this American Idol style of journalism when it covers well-trod territory; New York's a speculative "future canon" offers few surprises (Gary Lutz and Helena Maria Viramontes among them). But the lengthy "underrated" list does offer readers an introduction to new writers... as do the excerpts from works in progress by "tomorrow's literary stars" (including my friend Maaza Mengiste.)

It's refreshing to read fiction in New York; perhaps they should do this more often. Anyway, if the endless brouhaha surrounding the Times' attention-grabbing "Best Books of the Last 25 Years" failed to tire you out, click on over to New York and check out the offerings.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:07 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Options for Basement Booksellers

Last week, online used book retailer Alibris announced a new program called Alibris Basic targeting "small and moderate booksellers," i.e. non-professionals. The program appears to differ from Alibris' main offering in terms of pricing:

You can list up to 1,000 items for sale, and you only pay $1 plus a small commission for each one that you sell. If you don't sell anything, you don't pay anything except the annual subscription charge of $19.99.

This compares to the flat monthly fee (plus commissions) that larger scale booksellers are required to pay. For folks who have a lot of collectible books, the Alibris program is probably worth checking out, as the site specializes in this sort of inventory. As much as Alibris would like people to list all of their books for sale, however, there are better options for readers who are looking to unload their old non-collectible books.

Amazon lets you very easily list your books for sale in just a couple of steps through their "Sell Your Stuff" page. Amazon charges 99 cents plus a 15% commission on the books you sell. The main upside of going with Amazon, as I see it, is that it probably has the widest reach of all the bookselling programs out there.

Still, creating and managing listings for dozens of different books can be time consuming, and one must also deal with shipping off books that get sold to various individual buyers. If this sounds like a pain, then Barnes & Noble's book buying program might be a better bet. You need only enter the book's ISBN to get started. B&N will tell you if it's buying that title and how much it'll pay. After you've entered your books into the system, you print out an invoice and shipping label that allows you to send the books off to B&N for free. A few weeks later you get a check in the mail. I've tried B&N's program, and I found it remarkably simple. You may not be getting the best price for your books, but it's a lot easier than the other options. The main drawback I found is that B&N is somewhat limited in the books it is willing to buy. Textbooks are the best bet, and it's a good way to try to unload any older ones you might have lying around.

Beyond the above programs, there's always eBay, which in the realm of non-collectible books is more trouble than it's worth (though I have had luck putting up a few dozen books at once, charging $1 a piece to start, and cross-promoting across all my other listings as a "$1 book sale.") And then there's the local used book shop. Buying policies at these stores vary greatly, but some pay well - and often much better if you're willing to get paid in store credit. Of course, these "trade in" policies are how many of us ended up with such big collections of books in the first place.

Feel free to share any basement bookselling tips in the comments.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:43 AM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

In Profile: A Review of Reporting by David Remnick

My New Yorker is David Remnick's New Yorker. The magazine was around my house off and on when I was young. My sister and I, ignoring the witty captions, used to use the magazine's iconic cartoons as a sort of coloring book, spicing up a droll bedroom scene with our 24-color set of magic markers. As a high schooler with half-formed thoughts of a literary life, I began delving into the fiction each week, but it was only a matter of time before the rest of the magazine's contents began to tempt me, though I remained utterly unaware that I was discovering the magazine at its point of greatest turmoil, the Tina Brown years. By the time I went to college, I was an avid consumer of the magazine, though without the time to give it my full attention. Once I graduated, however, with only the responsibilities of undemanding jobs, I was able to give in and have read the magazine, more or less in its entirety ever since.

The Tina Brown era ended and David Remnick took the magazine's helm around the time I became a New Yorker regular, and he, to a certain extent, epitomizes my New Yorker. Beyond Remnick's editorial influence, any contemporary reader of the magazine has become familiar with his thorough profiles which tend to alight on a few different topics that he has covered closely over the years. Many of these are collected in his recent volume Reporting, which came out last year and is now available in paperback.

The book divides the articles, which are all taken from his years at the New Yorker, into five sections covering, roughly: politics/news, literary figures, Russia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and boxing. Nearly all of the articles in the collection are the long, in depth profiles that New Yorker readers will be familiar with. In Reporting, Remnick's subjects include Al Gore, Philip Roth, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (twice), Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyaho, and Mike Tyson.

These profiles are impressive in the access they offer - we have dinner with Al and Tipper, visit Roth's writing retreat, and play chess with Lennox Lewis. Taken together, one also notes that these profiles most prominent quality is their workmanlike thoroughness. Remnick takes us into his subjects' homes but he also grabs quotes from dozens of peripheral characters in his quest to offer as well-rounded a picture as possible. There's nothing flashy about Remnick's writing - he won't wow you - but then again his writing carries none of the annoying tics that mars some of his colleagues' work. Here I'm thinking of Adam Gopnick's tendency to view everything through the eyes of a parent or Anthony Lane's dandyish fussiness. For anyone who aspires to practice long-form magazine journalism, you could do a lot worse than starting with Remnick as a model.

My favorite part of the book was the last section on boxing. Here Remnick was able to drop some of the necessary serious that his other subjects demand and substitute it with some color. Setting the scene for the 2002 Tyson-Lewis fight in Memphis, Remnick writes:

On the night of the fight, the skies of above the Pyramid were choked with helicopters. It took a long time to get through the metal detectors and professional friskers, though it seemed that the women of uncertain profession, along with their raffish masculine handlers, were accorded more courtesy than the rest of us. There were certifiable celebrity types all around, mainly film stars like Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Samuel L. Jackson, and a flotilla of NBA players. There was much relief in finding out that one hadn't been given a seat behind Dikembe Mutombo or Magic Johnson.

In fact, Remnick's boxing pieces would have made for a nice, slim volume on their own. But Remnick doesn't seem like the type of reporter who, as he ages, will pursue writing only about his particular interests at the expense of taking on a broader array of topics. In its variety of subjects, Reporting is an ideal slice of Remnick's work.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:48 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Parched? Use my Canteen.

"Is starting a literary magazine a gamble?" editor Sean Finney asked a crowd of inebriated sophisticates and sophisticated inebriates at the NYC launch party for Canteen. The answer was lost in a wash of drink orders. Even if it turns out to be "yes," though, Canteen seems well positioned to walk away with a few chips. I'm not just saying that because publisher Stephen Pierson is funding this operation with his winnings as a poker pro, or because I contributed a story to the debut issue. Or okay, probably I am, at least partly. Still, Canteen offers readers an unusual mix of personal essays, fiction, poetry, and contemporary art.

Andrew Sean Greer's remembrance of failed novels past and chef Dennis Leary's truly weird manifesto about the Restaurant of the Future are both funny and original. But careful attention to the visual is what strikes me as most promising about Canteen. Few literary magazines lavish such attention on full-color photography, painting, and illustration. Often, this is because editors want to focus attention on the text... and more power to them. But visual art and literature should have as much to say to one another today as they did in the heyday of Gertrude Stein. Finlay Printing, which used to print the late, lamented Grand Street, has produced a handsome successor. For more information, check out www.canteenmag.com.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 9:58 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Amazon Bets on Audio

Amazon made a small acquisition this week, picking up Michigan-based audio books publisher Brilliance Audio. The move shows the increasing potential for the audio format in this era of digital distribution -- after all, you don't see Amazon making an effort to buy any traditional publishing houses. And digitally distributed or not, sales of audio books are growing much faster than the industry as a whole. In 2006, sales of audio books were up 11.4%, while sales of all books were down 0.2%, according to the Association of American Publishers.

I suspect that the growing popularity of audio books has more to do with the proliferation of iPods and and two-hours-each-way commutes than any decline in appreciation for the written word. It's also likely that in response to these trends there are more titles than ever available in the audio format. As someone who's about to become a commuter after working from home for a while, I may soon join the growing percentage of the reading public who are audio book consumers.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:53 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Quarterly Report: Book Industry Trends

Every three months I've been looking at Barnes & Noble's quarterly conference call to get some insight into recent book industry trends and to see which books were the big sellers over the past few months and which are expected to be big in the coming months. Barnes & Noble's first quarter ended May 5th. Here are the highlights from CEO Steve Riggio on the Q1 conference call (courtesy Seeking Alpha):

• In keeping with an ongoing trend, Barnes & Noble's margins were pressured as the chain continues to discount heavily to stave off competition from the likes of Wal-Mart and from Amazon's popular Amazon Prime program. Nonetheless, Wall Street seemed to like the overall numbers and pushed the stock higher.
• Sales in both the stores and online were better than expected. "Both benefited from a better new release schedule than we've seen in some time."
• "Rhonda Byrne's The Secret has the unique distinction of being our bestselling title in hardcover, audio book and DVD."
• Riggio said that Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist was the third straight "Barnes & Noble Recommends" selection to "become an instant fiction bestseller upon publication."
• Meanwhile, Oprah drove sales of Sydney Poitier's Measure of a Man and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
• The quarter's non-fiction bestsellers were Einstein by Walter Isaacson and In an Instant by Bob Woodruff.
• Looking ahead, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will hit the shelves at the end of Barnes & Noble's Q2. Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns just debuted "with very strong sales." There's also new fiction on the way from James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Robert Parker, and Ian McEwen (On Chesil Beach).
• On the non-fiction side of the ledger, new release The Reagan Diaries is already selling well. A pair of books on Hillary Clinton are coming shortly: A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein and Her Way by Jeff Garth. "We expect, of course, many more titles by and about the candidates for the presidential election season to be coming over the next year to 15 months," Riggio said.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:57 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 54th in a Series (Hunting for Short Stories)

"Troubled in Tacoma" writes in with this plea:

I find myself becoming increasingly upset about the fact that I can't figure out where someone is publishing their new short stories. For example, just today I came across George Saunders' new story, "Puppy" in the New Yorker. I was happy that I was able to come across it, but I was also upset by the fact that I came across it by sheer luck. I would love to know where and when writers are publishing. The best I do now is check out the latest issues of the literary journals and magazines that publish short stories. I also try to find writers' websites to see if they post when they are publishing. I have also emailed writers a few times and asked them directly (I emailed Tom Kealey at one point to ask when his short story "Coyote Thieves" was coming out. He responded to me quickly and graciously.) I am all out of other ideas. I was hoping you might have some more advice. Maybe you know some websites that track when and where writers publish? I know you had a similar question about five months ago concerning book tours. I really wish there was something called IWDB (Internet Writers Database). I would join immediately. I would buy a lifetime subscription.

I would, too. Unfortunately, as with many other aspects of the literary world, the ecosystem of literary magazines is hopelessly decentralized. Making matters worse, literary magazines tend to have very short lifespans. Beyond the bigger name magazines, it's hard to even know what's out there. To the best of my knowledge, there are various library indexes that track stories and reference sites, like The Locus Index to Science Fiction, devoted to genre stories, but as far as I know, none of these would afford a reader a forward-looking view of what is coming out from various writers. (If there are librarians or readers out there who are better informed on the topic, please share your advice in the comments.)

Beyond that, your makeshift efforts are probably the best bet. What I would do if I were you is identify the magazines and writers I'd like to track. Many will have mailing lists that will notify members of upcoming publications, others might have regularly updated sites with RSS feeds that you might subscribe to (here's how). In this way, you should be able to impose a little order on the helter skelter world of short stories to learn about new stories via email and RSS.

Anybody else have ideas?

- C. Max Magee @ 8:18 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Bitter Pill: The Modern Medicine Lament

"My Best Friend, my doctor, won't even say what it is I've got."
-Bob Dylan

I recently became aware of a trend, the Modern Medicine Lament, in which American writers struggle to make an uneasy peace with a system from which they feel alienated. And it begs the question: has it always been this way?

Doctors have enjoyed a colorful depiction in books and letters over the years. Kafka's brilliant short story "A Country Doctor" is still read and taught frequently. Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago was a man of principle in any language, in any time. Chekhov was a trained physician. I should also mention my favorite doctor in literature, Dr. Livesey, from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Stevenson, you'll recall, sketched another doctor, Dr. Jekyll, whose enthusiasm for chemicals took him off the rails (if Jekyll lived in America today he would surely declaim in a basement recovery meeting about the social transgressions committed by his intoxicated self). Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written almost 200 years ago, offers a remarkable foreshadowing of the moral and ethical challenges inherent to the practice of medicine, which has always had one ultimate goal: triumph over death. It is telling that we will in passing mistake the name of the title character for that of the monster.

In 1885 Louis Pasteur, a Frenchman, first administered vaccine to a human, a child bitten by a rabid dog. The treatment was successful. It was not an insignificant moment in human history. Giant scientific leaps forward like Pasteur's continue to inject health and medicine into the lives of everyday people. Vaccines and antibiotics changed the world, though today their administration is practically mundane. In America, where good health has always been considered something of a birthright, we resent doctors. They are a necessary evil, a reminder of the basic infirmity of our bodies and the inevitability of their decline. Sure, Americans love watching fictional doctors treat fictional patients on television, but in reality aren't doctors society's consummate whipping boys? After all, that goal - sticking it to death - has never yet been achieved. Good news from a doctor cannot amount to more than "you will live for maybe a few more years, all things being equal." And anyway, Americans don't want to live forever, they simply want their life on earth to be pain-free, and believe it should be.

Pills that govern the chemical workings of the brain are now at the forefront of our ever-advancing medical knowledge. They treat disorders like depression, schizophrenia, autism, addiction, panic, mania, and garden-variety anxiety. Neurochemistry remains the least understood field in medicine, but the sales figures of these drugs have exploded in the past twenty years. Pharmaceutical manufacturers employ direct advertising - and also work more quietly through doctors - to encourage the public to treat a psychological condition far enough from bliss as a disorder. Comparatively little attention is paid to the fresh array of stresses and overload of stimuli that burden the modern brain, and how these factors can capitalize on the ease of modern life, where we are at greater leisure to explore exactly how we feel, as opposed to wasting all of our energy on mere survival. Effexor, Wellbutrin, Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac: ugly mash-ups, yes, but also household words. The drugs have brought relief to millions of people suffering from mental duress.

But the rise of Psychotropic Nation has created a cultural preoccupation with pills here in the U.S., one that has in turn given rise to questions about the efficacy of our medical system (actually just one of many aspects of our system that provoke such questions). If you are writing a novel, say, and wish to introduce recreational drug use into the plot (you may want the characters to seem more subversive, irrational, hedonistic, or edgy), you might shy away from the ho-hum world of schedule 1 drugs: your pot, your cocaine and heroin - in favor of those that can be obtained with a doctor's note: pain pills, sedatives, amphetamines. The irony payoff is just too great, and writers love irony. The companies that make these drugs want you to want them, but as soon as you do, you probably should not have them. And maybe you, the writer (or the characters for that matter), don't have health insurance, or went through a period when you weren't covered - that just adds to the irony. Without insurance you're not seeing a doctor, making it a whole lot easier for you to go schedule 1 than to buy a bottle of valium. And, given the cost of such pills, cheaper too.

Jonathan Franzen wrote extensively on this aspect of American life (see also Ben Kunkel's Indecision, in which psychopharmacology plays no small roll). In The Corrections the drug is called Aslan, and its effects are somewhere between Prozac and ecstasy. At least two Lamberts use the drug, Chip during an unfortunate weekend sex binge, and Enid, Chip's mother, whose little helper gets her rather strung out over a longer period. Franzen's treatment is made more complete as Gary, eldest of the Lambert kids (and hilariously aware of the ebb and flow of his own serotonin and dopamine levels) invests money in the drug company that makes Aslan. Meanwhile, the pill is pushed by a leonine doctor with a creepy, guru-like aspect. And, of course, the one individual who could really use a pick-me-up, the crushingly depressed father Alfred, gets none. Collective dysphoria has never been so amusing.

Life imitates art, but it's no barrel of laughs. That said, the cover story of this month's Harper's, "Manufacturing Depression: A Journey into the Economy of Melancholy", by Gary Greenberg, does deliver the odd ironic chortle. Mr. Greenberg, a psychotherapist, is writing a book about the "misuses of medical diagnoses," and if his magazine piece is any indication, it may be worth reading. The piece opens with Mr. Greenberg cataloging the failures and dissatisfactions of his life to a kindly psychiatrist, Dr. George Papakostas, in order to see if he qualifies for an experimental drug study at the Depression Clinical and Research Program of Massachusetts General Hospital. And, after checking some boxes, the doctor delivers his diagnosis: Mr. Greenberg has Major Depression. Would he like to try Celexa, Lexapro, Mirapex, or omega-3 fish oil?

"It was hard to believe that Papakostas really thought I had major depression," writes Mr. Greenberg. Mr. Greenberg does feel bad sometimes, inadequate, feckless, and yes, his hair is thinning. His life is not blissful. But what is made abundantly clear to him is that the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of Depression, codified in the psychiatrist-developed Structured Clinical Interview, are bunk. Your score on this questionnaire, determined by the doctor, is totally subjective, the questions laughably interpretive. Dr. Papakostas, looking for subjects for a drug study driven by new medicines from Forest Laboratories, Inc. and paid for by the federal government, is predisposed towards a diagnosis of Clinical Depression. That's really what someone looking to join such a study wants to hear, right? "'Are you content with the amount of happiness that you get doing things that you like..?'" It is a standardized question asked by the doctor at one of Mr. Greenberg's weekly follow-ups. "'I'm not big on contentment,' I said. Is anyone? I wondered. Is anyone ever convinced that his or her pursuit of happiness has reached its goal? And what would happen to the consumer economy if we began to believe that any amount of happiness is enough?"

The uncomfortable intersection of the consumer economy and medicine is at the heart of an article by Bruce Stutz that appeared in the May 6 issue of the NY Times Magazine. Unlike Mr. Greenberg, who never believes that he is clinically depressed even as he dutifully takes his Mass General fish oil, Mr. Stutz begins from a different point of view: he, like millions of Americans, went through a period of debilitating depression for which he sought medical treatment. Talk therapy and a prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, Effexor, worked for him. Three years and a more positive outlook on life later, Mr. Stutz found himself shaking hands with his psychiatrist at the conclusion of his final session. But there was no mention of going off the drug.

"Somehow I couldn't believe I had to take this pill for the rest of my life," he writes. How many people taking such medication have had that thought? It's not just the side effects, the occasional bouts of impotence, the weight gain, the dulled sensory perceptions and emotions, and it's not just the monetary cost of the pills. It is also living with a stigmatizing reminder that one is sick and will never be well. But Mr. Stutz was well: he felt better; he was able to go one with his life. The stresses that had predicated his mental slide, the death of a parent, the breakup of a marriage, the loss of a job, were in the rearview. So he tapered his meds and hunkered down. Fierce withdrawal symptoms followed: mental torpor, physical discomfort, and the frightening "brain zaps," blinding, incapacitating insta-headaches. With the help of some experts in clinical biology, Mr. Stutz does an admirable job of elucidating the chemical processes that were at work in his brain, which was, without the help of the meds, running a serotonin deficit. What Mr. Stutz did not experience during that period was a return of his depression symptoms. And so he wonders, "does our long-term reliance on these drugs become more of a convenience than a cure?"

Drug companies and doctors have about as much interest in helping people go off their psych meds as tobacco execs have in helping people quit cigarettes. Still, the medical industry is simply giving us what we want, a quick fix. What happens when the quick fix goes bad? The title of Ann Bauer's May 18 article on Salon.com, "Psych Meds Drove My Son Crazy", is inelegant but to the point. Her story is gripping, horrifying, and ultimately infuriating. Mrs. Bauer's eldest son was born with autism. At the age of 17 this highly functional kid living in Minnesota became depressed, and his mother took him to a psychiatrist who prescribed an anti-depressant, which, she was assured, would not only snap him out of his funk, but also help control some of his autism-related obsessive tendencies. Instead, his condition grew worse. Doctors at a "respected neuropsychology clinic" reevaluated Mrs. Bauer's son, now 30 pounds heavier and sleeping 16 hours a day, and changed the original diagnosis: in addition to his autism, her son was experiencing "'psychomotor slowing' - a form of schizophrenia." And so a different drug was prescribed, Abilify, which was new (and, Mrs. Bauer notes, had been marketed direct-to-consumer in Time and Newsweek). Still her son's condition worsened, "humming, shifting foot to foot, screaming if anyone touched him or tried to move him." He would dialogue with voices that Mrs. Bauer could not hear. She tapered him off the Abilify.

Two days later he "got out of bed and stood in one place for a solid hour." When Mrs. Bauer placed a hand on him, he beat her up.

Amazingly, the doctors managed to convince Mrs. Bauer to try yet another drug, a powerful anti-psychotic, Geodon. Her son took to living on the street after that. Only by conducting her own research, and getting a lucky referral to the Mayo Clinic from a retired doctor in Stony Brook, N.Y., an expert in a little known condition called autistic catatonia, did Mrs. Bauer find her son proper medical care. It took two years. Five days after checking him into Mayo, Mrs. Bauer read a front-page story in the NY Times "about psychiatrists in Minnesota who were collecting money from drug manufacturers for prescribing atypical antipsychotics, including Abilify and Geodon." The article cited some hefty payout numbers, and also some serious risk factors for the drugs. It did not mention a fact that the doctors at Mayo confirmed: administered to an individual suffering from autistic catatonia, which they determined was the root cause of her son's initial decline, neuroleptics like Abilify and Geodon only amplify the effects of the disorder, and they can cause permanent neurological damage.

She doesn't say so, but I really hope Mrs. Bauer sued the pants off some folks. I would be interested to know.

There will be more Modern Medicine Laments to come. We will read them, and we will also watch with interest TV shows like "The Sopranos", in which the writers have taken an increasingly critical line on the treatment of depression in America, and films like Michael Moore's upcoming documentary about the ills of the American health care system. We will see more legal settlements against drug manufacturers like Purdue Pharma (OxyContin) and Pfizer (Celebrex) for misrepresenting the effects of their products to the consumer public. And, of course, we will continue to pop pills. We are a nation of armchair doctors. Sometimes it seems like a prescription pad is the only thing separating us from the real thing.

Update: The Libra in me desires balance. I do not want this post to seem an ad hoc dismissal of the medical profession as a whole. So I would steer folks to a book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, that had a profound impact on me when I read it. The book is about Dr. Paul Farmer, whose work battling T.B. while bringing basic medical care to corners of the world like Haiti and Peru where none existed before makes him something of a medical superhero. Kidder's profile of Dr. Farmer proves that modern medicine is still changing the world for the better.

- Noah Deutsch @ 10:47 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

The Spy: Ryszard Kapuscinski

News has emerged from Poland that renowned journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski may have at one time been a collaborator with the secret police there. Apparently he is the latest of several prominent figures in Poland whose past ties to the Communist regime have been revealed.

I've often wondered, when reading Kapuscinski's books, how he was able to travel so far and wide and write with what seemed to be freedom. This collaboration would have likely made his journalistic wanderings more palatable to the government. As Reuters notes, between 1967 and 1972, when Kapuscinski apparently cooperated with the secret police, "it was almost impossible to leave the country without signing a document to co-operate with the regime." Written after the fall of communism, Kapuscinski's book Imperium would seem to betray his true feelings. The book is a poignant indictment of Communist atrocities that begins with a recollection of Soviet troops overrunning his town when he was seven, though it does not speak much of the Polish government during the Communist era.

It seems clear that this was likely an impossible choice for Kapuscinski, either cooperate and write or resist and remain silent (or worse). Reuters quotes a friend and fellow reporter who says, "But Kapuscinski had to... If he didn't agree, he wouldn't have written his books. There would be no Kapuscinski." It seems, as well, that Kapuscinski wasn't a significant collaborator. Newsweek in Poland, which broke the news, quotes Kapuscinski's file as saying, "During his co-operation, he has demonstrated a lot of willingness but he has not supplied any significant documents." The revelations, meanwhile, come amid a wave of similar "purges" by Poland's current leaders, who some have suggested are pursuing the issue with excessive zeal as a political ploy.

Ultimately, the episode illuminates the terrible choices that many were forced to make behind the Iron Curtain, while also challenging our desire to identify the "good guys" and the "bad guys" under a regime where resistance of any kind was met with severe punishment. Given that Kapuscinski used his freedom, though it came at a price, to shed light on cruel governments in Iran and Ethiopia and on suffering and conflicts in many other parts of the world, it would seem that, based on what we know now, Kapuscinski achieved a karmic balance of sorts.

See also: The Reporter: Ryszard Kapuscinski and The Fabulist: Ryszard Kapuscinski

- C. Max Magee @ 6:59 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Never Mind the Golubchiks: Some Notes on Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx

Don DeLillo has said that his mammoth Underworld emerged from the juxtaposition of two headlines on the front page of a 1954 New York Times. One trumpeted a pennant-winning home run by the Giants' Bobby Thomson. The other announced that the Russians had tested their first atomic bomb. Each, in its own way, was a shot heard 'round the world.

For anyone paying attention, the International section of this Saturday's Times offered a similarly suggestive juxtaposition: three articles on a single page reported suspicious events in and around Vladimir Putin's Russia. To wit: The Kremlin informed a group of dissident journalists that they were going to be evicted from their offices. Leaders of an opposition party, detained by police on thin pretenses, were forced to miss a protest rally. And the government of Estonia, which had offended Russian nationalists by taking down a monument to Soviet soldiers, had its Internet service disrupted by a ferocious denial-of-service attack (which originated from Russian servers). In each case, the reporter hesitated to blame Putin directly, but the overall picture is grim. And this is not even to mention the radiation poisoning plots, or the Chechen conflict. Basically, the man our president once certified as "a good soul" is consolidating power with a kommissarial zeal. The mystery is why the Russian people, after seven decades of totalitarian misrule and centuries of feudalism, are putting up with it.

A quick answer might be that, after the economic deprivations of the Communist era, they're willing to trade freedom for a little prosperity. A more complicated one (not unrelated to the rise of ethnic gangs in Iraq) might involve the psychological toll totalitarianism exacts on its masses. Call it The Captive Mind, or Stockholm Syndrome, but it's basically a protection racket: authority seems to offer insurance against violence, where freedom seems to leave one exposed. Give a kid enough bruises, and he's likely to get in line behind the schoolyard bully. The problem comes when the bully runs out of other victims.

But a reading of Tatyana Tolstaya's splendid contemporary novel The Slynx reminds us that the thirst for freedom and the hunger for authority are not merely the byproducts of Russia's recent history. Rather, they are the reacting agents in much of the finest Russian literature. They lend the novels of Tolstaya's great-uncle Leo - and the poems quoted by her characters in The Slynx - their signature phosphorescence. In the great American novel, the imperative to submit to something larger than oneself - tradition, law, religion - is usually an obstacle. Our Augies and Ishmaels and Rabbits set out to find their freedom. In Tolstoy's Levin and Dostoevsky's Karamazovs, individualism alternates - sometimes on the same page - with a sense that a greater freedom comes in accepting one's duty and place in the world.

Is this a radical simplification? Of course. But I feel licensed to make it. No one likes to speculate about the Russian soul more than the Russians. I want to emphasize here that The Slynx succeeds, radiantly, as a self-contained work of art. But a view to Russia's literary and political history can only enrich one's reading.

The protagonist of The Slynx is a "golubchik" named Benedikt - born a century after a nuclear catastrophe has leveled Moscow and erased most cultural memory. Benedikt is a simple fellow, subsisting on mice and eking out an existence as a scrivener. He unquestioningly copies the decrees and poems written by Fyodor Kuzmich, the chief Murza of the village - even when those poems seem suspiciously Pushkinesque. Benedikt's life strikes us as a nightmare of deprivation, but because he has nothing to compare it to, he doesn't know it. His only inkling is a melancholy feeling that comes over him from time to time, which he blames on a mythical predator said to live in the forest... The Slynx.

Like a Russian George Saunders, Tolstaya creates a sci-fi bizarro world seemingly without effort - the details are there when she reaches for them. And, like Saunders, she renders her world in an entirely original idiom. Her depictions of life in the village of Fyodor-Kuzmichsk (natch) leaven poetic stream of consciousness with a salty and frequently hilarious orality. The effect Tolstaya creates, hovering between second- and third-person narration, is like nothing I've ever read. The narrator both is and isn't Benedikt. Benedikt both is and isn't us. Here's a little taste, in Jamey Gambrell's supple translation:

In the summer the Scribe is like an ordinary Golubchik - a sickle on his shoulder and into the fields and glades to cut goosefoot, horsetail. Bring in the sheaves. You tie them up - lug them to the shed, and go back again, another time, once more, all over, run, run, run. While he's gone the neighbors or a stranger will filch a couple of sheaves for sure, sometimes from the field, sometimes straight from the shed. But that's all right: they steal from me, and I'll get good and mad and steal from them, those guys will steal from these guys - and so it goes in a circle. It comes out fair. Everyone steals, but everyone ends up with their own. More or less.

For the first half of the book, we keep rooting for him to awaken, like his Anglo counterparts in 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, to the dystopia he's living in. As he discovers the source of Fyodor Kuzmich's poems, and develops an appetite for books, consciousness-raising starts to seem inevitable. But - spoiler alert - consciousness will not prove to be synonymous with freedom. In fact, after aiding a putsch, Benedikt will become "Deputy for Defense and Marine and Oceanic Affairs." Rather than living out his books, he seems content to live in them. More Bovary than Quixote.

Tolstaya is well-known in Russia as a television personality and an outspoken critic. She began her first and only novel under Gorbachev and finished it under Putin. In the West, where knowledge is seen as a path to freedom, the plot trajectory she arrived at may strike some readers as perverse. What at first seems an allegory of Communism becomes something more unsettling: an examination of our universal frailty.

In light of what's happening in Moscow right now, the final pages of The Slynx take on a resonance almost too painful to countenance. History is not only a nightmare... in Russia, it seems to be a recurring one. Tolstaya preserves the possibility of an awakening, of a more personal socialism or a more collective freedom. But she's not optimistic.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:27 AM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Scrimping on Syllables: Aikin's Unusual Adaptations

I got an email the other day from long-time Millions reader Laurie, who sends us links and dispatches from time to time. Her email included a link to a peculiar book called The Swiss Family Robinson in Words of One Syllable. "Have you seen this?" She asked. "Is this for real?" I hadn't seen it, but it is for real.

The book is exactly what it sounds like, the Johann Wyss classic The Swiss Family Robinson rendered entirely in monosyllabic words.

My first though was that the book was some kind of literary experiment like Georges Perec's A Void, a French novel written entirely without the letter "e", a feat impressively replicated in English by translator Gilbert Adair. Or perhaps it was a form of so-called erasure poetry.

As it turns out, the book dates back to the 19th century and was meant as an abridgment for young readers. The book was created by Lucy Aikin, a British historian and biographer who wrote and edited books for children under the pseudonym Mary Godolphin. In this capacity she created other "in One Syllable" books including Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim's Progress. Other classics were rendered in this form by other writers and there was a small series of these books marketed towards beginning readers and meant as an alternative to the dull reading primers of the time. As is written in the preface to her version of Swiss Family,

The author's object has been to provide what the reviewer of her former works in the Athenaeum has called "a field of exercise for a child who has just learnt to conquer words." "There is sure to be some success," he continues; "and it is a great point in all teaching to let the first independent exercise be one in which victory is really to be won by moderate effort."

Later, in the preface to Aikin's monosyllabic Pilgrim's Progress, the usefulness of such a construction is extended to adults as well:

I wish it to be clearly understood that it is intended for Adult Beginners, no less than for Children. There is a large class of persons who do not begin to acquire the art of reading till somewhat late in life, and it is for such that I think a book of this character is peculiarly applicable.

It appears as though this approach, a way to make more literature available for less accomplished readers, was deemed successful. One reviewer wrote that Aikin's Robinson Crusoe "ought to put primers out of countenance and make both teaching and learning to read a passtime." There were apparently early critics as well, however. Aikin addresses them in her preface to Pilgrim's Progress:

It may be objected that my system involves the use of words which, though short, are difficult to understand, and might be made more intelligible in polysyllabic language. But I have endeavoured as far as possible to avoid hard and technical expressions, and I cannot but think that the mere fact of the brevity of the words must be a great attraction to beginners of all ages.

It should be no surprise, however, that before long this rote approach to abridging classics fell out of favor. The in One Syllable books were published in the late-1860s (and possibly before that; Aikin died in 1864), but within a few decades they were held up as improper teaching tools. A 1903 teaching guide called Common Sense Didactics argues,

A book from which all life and vitality has been extracted; which, with view of bringing it down to the level of the child's mind, has been diluted until it has lost the vigor of thought and clearness of expression which characterize the author, is not a good book for children. The intent is to make it even more interesting and attractive than it was as it came from the author's hands, but it has been robbed of its power of inducing thought, and is no longer to be classed among books suitable for the district library. Robinson Crusoe in words of one syllable is not the same Robinson Crusoe which Defoe wrote.

Within a few decades after that, the monosyllabic book has been relegated to an antiquated example of a prior generations misguided approach to education. A 1922 teaching guide says "Some years ago it was believed that children could learn to read short words much more easily and quickly than long words," and it asks would-be teachers to point out ways in which an accompanying passage from Aikin's Crusoe uses unfamiliar monosyllabic words in order to stay within her guidelines. In other cases, the restriction leads to word choice that may give the wrong impression. A footnote in Bernard Porter's book The Absent-Minded Imperialist, points out that Aikin's Crusoe refers to the title character's servant Friday as a "slave," which clearly does not carry the same meaning as servant.

Still, the monosyllabic approach has a presence today. Most children's books emphasize single-syllable words in teaching children to read, and at the same time, abridged classics are still very much a part of the literature available to young readers. I read dozens of them when I was a kid. The long-gone rote approach pursued by Aikin and others, though well-intentioned, was an unnecessarily strict method that became a forgotten stepping stone on the way to the wealth of children's books available today.

See Also: Giving kids the classics

Footnote: Though I have written favorably about Google Books many times, compiling this post was the first time I had used it extensively as a research tool. It's really a quite remarkable feeling to have this much information at one's fingertips. Google's efforts (and others like them) should be supported. It's good for humanity.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:33 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

A Rare Treat for Murakami Fans: Pinball, 1973

If you need to get your Murakami fix, but can't stomach the idea of picking up After Dark, here's your solution.

Written in 1980, Pinball, 1973 was Murakmai's second novel. It was published by Kodansha and has been out of print for several years, although it's available at Amazon for a whopping $225.

The book is part of the "Trilogy of the Rat" (actually four books), which begins with Murakami's first book, Hear the Wind Sing and includes A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance (probably my favorite of his books). Apparently, Murakami refuses to allow either Hear the Wind Sing or Pinball, 1973 to be published outside of Japan, which is ironic, considering both of them are, in my opinion, far superior to either Sputnik Sweetheart or After Dark. This translation, linked below, along with Hear the Wind Sing, was done by Alfred Birnbaum for Japanese readers trying to learn English.

The story is classic Murakami, before that became a bad thing. A rootless man who loves Dostoevsky spends his days looking for a hard to find part for a classic pinball machine. Mysterious twins move into his apartment. There's a well and a cat. While it's no masterpiece, it's a good read for Murakami fans and those looking for a place to get started with his oeuvre.

Here's a link to a PDF of Birnbaum's translation of Murakami's Pinball, 1973.

Bonus link: Some fan-translated short stories I stumbled on while researching this.

Update 9/17: The link to the PDF has been fixed.

- Ben Dooley @ 6:59 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Thursday Links

• LA Weekly writes up the Los Angeles indie bookstore scene, of which I was once a part. Book Soup, my former place of employment, gets a nice and quite accurate writeup. I've never shared my stories on the blog, but, for example, the stuff about Faye Dunaway and Elton John is true. Tyson, the star of the article, was one of our more colorful newsstand employees when I was working there. The article's take on Book Soup owner Glenn, meanwhile, is hilarious and right on the nose. As a bonus, the LA Weekly's package includes a little bookstore tour of Los Angeles that serves as a nice counterpoint to the one that Garth created for NYC recently.
• Speaking of LA, obsessive film fans and those who love them should note that Amazon is having a big sale on Criterion Collection DVDs right now.
• Looking for a new place to live? The house in which Jack Kerouac was born is now for rent.
• TEV goes out on a "limn" with Michiko Kakutani.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:46 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Future of Publishing?

What's the pedigree of a bestseller? That's the question the New York Times asked last week in an article that, despite the endless waves of political scandal, remained on their most viewed list for the better part of a week. The article reveals the seamy side of publishing: publishers have foresworn the metrics used by marketers to study their audiences' buying habits, because they, much like Creationists, "don't believe in them," leading to an industry where million dollar advances are gambled on the Flying Spaghetti Monster of editors' intuition. So is it any surprise that an article about the billion-dollar, high-stakes world of publishing, with its talk of big bets and horse racing, comes off sounding like a description of a Gambler's Anonymous meeting? Won't someone stop the insanity? (Very nicely summed up here, btw.)

Enter Macmillan New Writing, the controversial imprint of the British publishing house Macmillan. New Writing was founded to promote works by unpublished writers, particularly writers who have produced the kind of experimental, unclassifiable or controversial books that are worth publishing, but might not have what it takes to become best sellers, in other words, books that don't have mass market appeal. The imprint publishes one book a month and currently comprises twenty titles, all of which are prominently featured in Macmillan's catalog. No agents are involved, the publishing house accepts direct submissions, and writers get no advance, but earn 20% royalties.

Sounds good, no? But it's not all upside. Not only are the writers' contracts non-negotiable, but Macmillan receives all subsidiary rights to the book and a first look at the author's second book. Critics have reacted strongly, calling the imprint "literary slave drivers" and "vanity publishers," and indulging in apocalyptic predictions of the end of publishing as we know it. (As if that would be a bad thing. The submissions, at least, are entirely electronic.) The negative press was so strong that the founder of the imprint, Michael Barnard, felt compelled to write Transparent Imprint, a book defending his idea. (Which the imprint, of course, published. See how that works?)

Why all the consternation? Sure, novelists lose their right to film rights, translations, and licensed merchandise (Ignatius J. Reilly trebuchets, anyone?), but is that so bad? Without an agent, they wouldn't be able to sell them anyway, and apparently Macmillan has been doing a good job so far, bagging a movie deal for the thriller The Manuscript and a decent advance on a German edition of the fantasy novel The Secret War. What's really at stake, it would seem, is the publishing industry's ego. Despite the fact that their best work is guesswork, they like to believe they know what they're doing when they get into a bidding war over a total unknown. The novelist Giles Foden, quoted by the Guardian, put it like this, New Writing's list is like "putting a bet on every horse in the race - but without paying for any of the bets." And that doesn't make us feel very special, does it?

But, if the New York Times is right, isn't that what publishers are doing anyway? If advances are the big gambles everyone says they are, then they only serve to make publishers risk averse. Much like Hollywood, which instead of looking for fresh material, increasingly hedges its bets by turning out retreads of once popular comic books and old TV shows, the publishing industry is in a rut. Bestsellers are inherently unpredictable, and yet, if a publishing exec had to choose between a cutting edge novel and another Harry Potter knockoff, you can bet that "Parry Hotter and The Sorcerer's Merkin" would be the one stacked on the front tables of Barnes and Nobles nationwide. By not giving writers advances, New Writing has found a way around this problem, allowing them to take a chance on a book, while reducing the considerable overhead attached. This system should be a boon for mid-list writers who, it's often said, are not nurtured by publishing houses in the way they once were. Sure, you'll hear writers grousing about being unable to make a living from their work, but, with the exception of the biggest literary stars, isn't that's how it's always been? For my part, I'd much rather have my books in print, giving my readership a chance to grow with me. After all, readers will seek out a good writer's backlist, and every book that sees print should increase royalties from previous efforts. And what a boon for those writers who don't have the savvy, connections, or good luck to get an agent. Hell, some writers, John Kennedy Toole comes to mind, are literally dying to get published.

It's been over a year since New Writing put out its first book, and the imprint's list of well-reviewed books seem to be proving the naysayers wrong. The writers' seem satisfied with the deal (here and here), and if Roger Morris's Taking Comfort (recently reviewed here at The Millions) is any indication of the quality of the books New Writing has on offer, they're doing the literary community a real service. It might be time for the rest of the publishing industry to put down their dice and take notice.

Bonus Link: The MacMillan New Writing titles currently available in the U.S.

- Ben Dooley @ 10:06 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Rootless Detachment: A Review of After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Whether or not you like Haruki Murakami's newest novel, After Dark, will probably depend on how many of his previous books you have read. If you've read two or less, you may enjoy it. If you've read three or four, you will almost certainly find it tedious. If you've read five or more you're incorrigible and nothing I say here will deter you.

For my part, I've read so much Murakami, it has ceased to be fun. I've read all of his books in translation, less Kafka on the Shore and South of the Border, West of the Sun, and several of his yet to be translated books in the original Japanese. My first journey into the curious land of his prose was Norwegian Wood, and liking it, I found myself drawn to his other novels, the best of which, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Windup Bird Chronicle, and Dance Dance Dance, more than made up for the tepid performances of books like Sputnik Sweetheart.

As in all Murakami novels, After Dark's plot is irrelevant. Nothing happens for a long time, then something creepy and inexplicable happens, then the book ends for no apparent reason, leaving any semblance of story unresolved. In the past, the pleasure in the majority of these books (with the notable exception of Dance Dance Dance, which adopted the form of a supernatural thriller) came from Murakami's almost uncanny ability to create atmosphere and capture physical longing - whether for a piece of cucumber wrapped in seaweed or for a lover's touch - with palpable virtuosity.

The problem confronting Murakami's readers has always been that, despite his otherworldly talents, he has nothing to say. Nothing of any real interest or significance, at least. Although his stories often hint at a metaphysics of unreality, the books are mostly surface and, unlike one of his professed influences, Raymond Carver, seem to lack any insight into the human condition (or any other condition, really). Instead, they content themselves with cataloging the discontents of the modern age, particularly the alarmingly numerous forms of ennui, all of which, after three or four volumes, begin to bear a striking resemblance to one another.

While this was all well and good when Murakami started his career, with After Dark it seems he has become so enamored of his own abilities that he has ceased to care whether what he has chosen to show us actually matters. Or is even interesting. The more I read Murakami, the less his work resembles genius, and the more it comes to resemble a symptom of autism or obsessive compulsion. As Murakami translator Jay Rubin notes in his biography Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, around the time Murakami finished A Wild Sheep Chase, he began to obsess over his writing, fearing that he might die before finishing the book, a thought he apparently found untenable. His anxiety led to a major overhaul of his life. He quit smoking, began to exercise regularly, changed his diet. Over time, his books have come to reflect this obsession with writing and not necessarily in a positive way. As Rubin explains it, Murakami works not because he has an idea for a book, but because he feels compelled to write. It's suggested that he often sits at his desk, writing whatever comes to mind, until the glimmerings of a story appear. Those who are familiar with Murakami's novels can see this process at work. Often, the first fifty to one hundred pages of his books feature characters loafing around, looking for something to do, a reflection, perhaps, of Murakami's own mental state. The result is a presumably faithful depiction of his inner life with an ironic lack of self-awareness.

After Dark is no exception: characters loaf, they engage in small talk, and something weird happens on TV (but not nearly as weird as "Flavor of Love.") The one major departure from previous novels is the style, which is somewhat reminiscent of a screenplay. The story is told in first person plural, complete with metafictional references to points of view and what seem to be camera directions. The end result could be pitched as Eraserhead (IMDb) meets Before Sunrise (IMDb), minus the good parts. If it weren't for Murakami's oath to never allow his works to be filmed (which I see has been broken, with the release of Tony Takatani (IMDb)), I would wonder if the book wasn't an attempt to salvage a failed screenplay.

Until recently, a few short stories and Kafka on the Shore represented the totality of Murakami's efforts to separate himself from the first person novel, the protagonists of which were all thinly veiled versions of Murakami himself, a cosmopolitan pasta aficionado with a love of jazz, Stendhal, and Dostoyevsky, and a cool, rootless detachment from all things Japanese. While Murakami should be applauded for his attempts to expand his range, they have, so far, only brought attention to the areas in which his work is most deficient: dialogue and his brittle attempts at symbolism, a personal mythology consisting of, among other things, cats and mirrors that does not fare well when set loose from the idiosyncratic workings of his first person narrators' minds. The dialogue in After Dark is particularly bad, with one character addressing a girl with the line "What's a girl like you doing hanging out all night in a place like this?" (The line is delivered in a bar and with a complete lack of irony.) Granted, the translation might be at fault, but Jay Rubin has done an admirable job with Murakami in the past, leaving us to assume the source material didn't leave much to work with. The story's alternations between the dully inscrutable and the ploddingly mundane seem to confirm this.

All of which begs the question, where does Murakami go from here? With the combination of his enormous popularity in Japan and critical acclaim in the United States and abroad, he could never write another word and still be guaranteed a roof over his head and a place in the literary pantheon of the 20th-ish century (at least for the foreseeable future). And writing one, or even a handful, of good books puts a novelist under no obligation to produce another. Yet, if the Murakami Rubin has shown us is the real one, we can expect he will continue to release novels until the day he dies (and if one takes into account his considerable back catalog of yet to be translated works, much longer). Will he insist on sticking with what he knows or will he find some way to transfer his preoccupations and considerable skills into a broader fictional universe? When you find out, let me know.

- Ben Dooley @ 8:48 PM ~ comments: 8 ~ Links to this post

 

Margaret Thatcher, Humanist Icon: Reflections on Clive James' Cultural Amnesia

I.
The year is young yet, but I'd like to direct your attention to what will no doubt be recognized as one of the finest short stories published in it. It is called "Walter Benjamin," and it appears in the Australian journalist Clive James' experimental omnibus, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. I use the term "experimental" advisedly; like the revelatory works of W.G. Sebald, Cultural Amnesia weaves history, fiction, and memoir so tightly together that it may be hard for the casual reader to tell the imaginary from the real... particularly as Cultural Amnesia purports to be a work of criticism. Compound this postmodern pliability with a classic unreliable narrator - James himself - and vertigo quickly sets in.

So how does an artist hold together such an ambitious edifice? "Style," James tells us, in one of his not infrequent moments of insight. And if some of James' critical pronouncements lead us to suspect him of a tin ear, his writing confirms that he has learned a great deal from Proust, from Gibbon, from Waugh. Cultural Amnesia, which at 850 pages looks like intellectual heavy lifting, turns out to be a lively read: clear, colloquial, provocative, and often funny. James the stylist prizes clean rhythms, practical diction, an air of erudition, and above all the art of aphorism. We discover early on that he is a fine coiner of apercus, and if fatigue sets in halfway through the book, we finish with exhausted admiration: the man is a mint, a machine churning out sheet after epigrammatic sheet.

Unfortunately, in literature, unlike science, elegance is no indicator of truth, and it's not always clear whether James' clever turns of phrase are backed by any standard other than authorial fiat. To put it another way (paraphrasing Virginia Woolf), Clive James seems willing to throw a few truths on the fire in order to make an essay blaze. Of Rilke, for example, he writes, "There is a dangerous moment when, in the [Duino] elegies, 'the tear trees, the fields of flowering sadness' start sounding like fine shades of meaning, instead of forced exercises in sentimentality." James' British resistance to even the mildly visionary does lend this assessment a bumptious snap, crackle, and pop. But in straining for a phrase to parallel "fine shades of meaning," the critic does violence to the poet he professes to admire. Whatever they are, the Elegies are less like "forced exercises" than anything else in the Rilke canon... possibly in 20th Century poetry. And this slip recursively undermines one of James' earlier aphorisms, decrying "ways of studying the arts so as to make the student feel as smart as the artist." (Because what else is James doing with Rilke here? (And do we really venerate artists for their "smarts?"))

We can forestall the dizzying cascade of parentheses that might ensue by reminding ourselves that Cultural Amnesia is, among many other things, a character study. Its subject: one Clive James. For the duration of our reading, we are in the presence of a voice no more self-aware than that of Nabokov's Kinbote. As with Pale Fire, we get to what is worthwhile not by nodding along with the narrator but by reading through him, by teasing out the contradictions he's straining to conceal. And because our narrator's subjects are seldom so small as a line of Rilke - because he rarely stoops to close reading - the potential rewards, are enormous.

Really, despite some introductory fulminations against "ideology" (a neat lift from the Marxism it purports to abhor), Cultural Amnesia aims at a kind of unified field theory of 20th Century history and culture. In alphabetized essays running from Anna Akhmatova through Dick Cavett all the way to Stefan Zweig, James returns again and again to the same questions: How did artists (not to say works of art) respond to the atrocities of Nazism and Communism? How should we value works of art, and why, and which ones?

II.
These are, as James suggests, humanist questions, and if the answers he arrives at don't quite meet that standard, there's much to admire in the attempt. Over and above the sheer pleasure of James' style stands his passionate moral engagement with history. He assays his new humanism on behalf of the millions and millions of victims of totalitarian movements. Like McDuff, he feels these losses as a man.

Indeed, writing about the suicide of Viennese polymath Egon Friedell, as storm troopers come "marching down the street," James sounds almost envious that he was born too late to have been there alongside Friedell, to prove his own mettle. Our current pieties and abstractions about the war in Iraq or the genocide in Darfur can sound hollow in comparison to James' moral outrage; there is much to learn from the way he takes massacres personally, and the critic owes it to him to take seriously the possibility that Stalin's gulags might be a "central product" of socialism, rather than an aberration. (There was a time when Jean-Paul Sartre did not take that possibility seriously, and if James' renunciation of everything Sartre wrote requires some willful misreading, at least it stands for something. James and Sartre have this in common: the belief that critical positions should never be lightly held.)

It bears saying, too, that we are lucky Clive James is on our side. Passion is crucial to thought - it's what makes thought matter - but it can also cloud judgment, and too frequently in Cultural Amnesia James' zeal for laissez-faire liberalism tips over into a ratification of corporate capitalism or a crotchety disdain for "economic determinism [and] dogmatic egalitarianism." In the Introduction, he writes,

"Bright, sympathetic young people who now face a time when innocent human beings are killed by the thousand can be excused for thinking that their elders do not care enough [...] but their elders grew to maturity in a time when innocent human beings were killed by the million."

Even as he ignores Rwanda and Darfur (syntactically blaming the bright young things for even bringing them up), James seems implicitly to dismiss the liberal, democratic catastrophe in Iraq by saying, in effect, "well, things could be worse." Such Panglossian sophistry, pronounced throughout the book, is a blot on the good name of humanism.

Nor does James quite follow through on his pluralist aspirations, which are the best and most deeply held part of his own ideology. He can imagine Duke Ellington jamming for Igor Stravinsky, but cannot hear the "we vs. they" contradictions in his assessment of leftist academics:

"The Procrustean enemies of our provokingly multifarious free society are bound to come, sometimes merely to preach obscurantist doctrine in our universities, at other times to fly our own airlines into towers of commerce. What they hate is the bewildering complexity of civilized life."

To align the "witch doctors" of Cultural Studies with Al Qaeda is to fail to understand either, and this failure is not just intellectual, it is moral.

In more supple hands, the conjoinment of conscience and illiberalism in James' essays - the way even his "descriptive" certainties shade toward systems of intolerance and control - might help illuminate the vexing ideological blind spots James exposes in subjects like Sartre. A fuller humanism, that is, might explore the ethical tensions of being human. But James, despite having his own person as good evidence to the contrary, conceives of human beings as unitary creatures, either cowardly or heroic. And, with sometimes disastrous results for his criticism, he resists the idea that generally lousy people can make genuinely great art.

III.
Given James' stern opposition to critical theory, it is both ironic and heartening to hear him decry the commodification of culture. In years past, an essayist's insistence on learning as its own virtue might have suggested a doctrine of art for art's sake. James, however, seems to view an artist's works as an accessory to his or her life. Beneath a veneer of newfangled catholicism, he is that most old-fashioned of creatures - a biographical critic. Reading carefully through his renunciations of ideology, it becomes possible to discern James' own. He does not believe that an artist with socialist sympathies can be as great as an artist who made do without them... or that a book colored by an objectionable ideology may also be a great one.

"Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the author of that amazing phantasmagoria Voyage au bout de la nuit, had also written Bagatelles pour un massacre, a breviary for racialist fanatics," he writes, blithely ignoring the incipient racism in the former. Why can't he see Journey to the End of the Night for what it is? Would remembering Celine's jaundiced account of the "primitives" in the novel's African section make Journey less of a book? Or does the dialogic form of the novel allow us to situate Celine's fictional alter-ego in a fully articulated ethical world, in which we can evaluate and possibly understand his misanthropy? Answering these questions would require a wholesale reexamination of James' precepts about art... and might even force him to borrow a trick or two from Marxist literary theory, or - horrors! - from deconstruction. But James, blithely assured that academic critics "have nothing in mind beyond their own advancement," can't entertain the notion that moral and ideological ambiguity might enrich, rather than reduce, a text.

Of course, evaluating a genius mainly in light of his stated views on totalitarianism can itself become a reductio ad absurdum. Here, for example, is James' version of Wittgenstein's Tractatus:

"Wittgenstein had thus constructed an instrument for discussing the totalitarian mentality, but he never used it. [...] There is evidence, however, that when he finally saw the photographs of the hideous aftermath in the concentration camps he forgot his famous rule about being silent on issues of which one cannot speak, and broke down in tears."

Aside from being a vulgar misapprehension of Wittgenstein's proposition about the limits of language (or, if James had the nerve, a gestural opening into Wittgenstein's later philosophical investigations), this moment of voyeurism is spectacularly beside the point, reducing Wittgenstein and the Holocaust to mere credentialing mechanisms for one another. James presupposes that a virtuous human being surprised by the evidence of totalitarian slaughter could be anything other than grief-stricken. (In James account, Sartre would be one of those human beings. Here bad historiography is the accessory to bad criticism, falsifying the way Stalin's propaganda machine worked... which is not to excuse Sartre, who should have known better.) Anyway, we end up learning more about Clive James than about Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Even those artists lucky enough to have died before the rise of totalitarianism are not spared the indignity of becoming Rorschach tests for James' various preoccupations. Gibbon gets taken to task for his prose (!) and Proust gets praised for all the wrong reasons. To hear James tell it, Proust's virtue is his essayistic "wisdom"; In Search of Lost Time has "no structure to speak of." This is heroically contrarian, but also dead wrong, and points to the blessing and curse of Cultural Amnesia. Unless we are inspired to remember the works of art James is nobly attempting to rescue, we'll be stuck having to take his word for it.

Proust's "wisdom" isn't contained in his discursive speculations, the critical essays (sometimes enchantingly specious) indebted to Ruskin and Bergson. The Search's essayistic passages are aesthetic movements, not entries in a philosophical rolodex (a critic who characterizes Wittgenstein as primarily a poet should understand this.) It is precisely the structure of In Search of Lost Time, mapped in miniature by the "Combray" section, that embodies Proust's species of wisdom. James, not surprisingly, sees Proust's book as a mirror of his own - "an imaginative encyclopedia" - and misses the ironic reversals, the ultimate recognition toward which Proust's grand structure tends.

But in James' own search, as in Proust's, the narrator's most dubious conclusions may serve to highlight deeper truths of psychology. The truth about Clive James is that he can't entertain the idea that his triumphalist brand of capitalist liberalism might have its own flaws to be guarded against, its own totalizing tendencies, its own rolls of the dead. James is wonderful on artists whose lives and work are ideologically in harmony with each other and with him, but is much less tolerant than his bete noire Georg Lukacs of those whose ideas challenge a laissez-faire global political order. James frequently and rightly affirms that a right to dissent saves liberal democracy from becoming a totalizing ideology, but can't conceal his resentment of the ungrateful few who exercise that right. And in the absence of Proust's structural wisdom - in the absence of a Recognition scene, in which the narrator belatedly discovers his own imperfect apprehension of things - Cultural Amnesia trembles with unresolved tensions, threatening to bring down even the heroes James has enlisted on behalf of his cause.

IV.
To borrow from his sketch of Egon Friedell, James "comes on like an actor and a thinker both." And sometimes the point of his performance seems to be to indemnify the capitalist West against any notion of progress. This leads him to the two tendencies that compromise, perhaps fatally, several of his essays.

The first tendency is to distort the legacies of the cultural figures he admires (those who fit comfortably within the current version of centrist, bourgeois tradition) through misplaced emphasis. In James' ode to Louis Armstrong, Armstrong's single greatest achievement appears to be that he admired Bix Beiderbecke. Margaret Thatcher, we are told, posed "a crisis for Britain's ideological feminists, who could no longer maintain that there was a glass ceiling." Thomas Mann? "A solid paterfamilias." One does not doubt that Mann confined his homosexual feelings to his fantasy life, that Thatcher vexed feminists, and that Armstrong approved of white musicians. But surely the collective achievements of this triumvirate amount to more than allowing straight white heirarchs to say, "Look, boys, he's one of us!"

Nor does James does reserve distortions for his fellow humanists. If he mischaracterizes artists who worked to shape the center, he fictionalizes those on the left.

A tortured eulogy for Edward Said dissolves into an orgy of bad faith, as our narrator tells himself that faint praise and outright damnation add up to an ingenuous farewell.

"There is no call to doubt [Said's] integrity just because he had been raised in transit on luxury liners, laurelled at Princeton and Harvard, and otherwise showered with all the rewards Western civilization can bestow. What can be doubted is his accuracy. [...] It is important to say that there were some Arab thinkers who [...] found Orientalism a wrong-headed book. According to them, it encouraged a victim mentality by enabling failed states to blame the West for their current plight: a patronizing idea, common to the Western left. Though most of Said's Western admirers were never aware of it, this ambiguity marked Said's written work throughout his career: he was continually telling the people he professed to be rescuing from Western influence that they were helpless in its embrace. A quality of self-defeating ambiguity also characterized Said's role as a practical diplomat."

This tangle of innuendo belies James' insistence elsewhere that transparency of prose and transparency of meaning are synonymous. Every possible charge against Said is given space on the page, even as James conceals his endorsement. The rhetorical coup de grace comes when James hides behind "some Arab thinkers." These nameless Arab thinkers' sole contribution to 20th Century culture seems to be that they make it easier for Clive James to write off a subaltern whose politics he finds threatening; in the rest of the book, James evinces no interest in Middle Eastern culture.

We are further informed, in the space of a paragraph, that "the Western and non-Western worlds of creativity had not been symmetrical"; that "no Orientalist had ever been more damagingly superficial than" Edward Said (again, according to non-Western scholars); that "Egypt had Napoleon to thank for everything it possessed" (said Naguib Mahfouz - and he won the Nobel Prize, so who can doubt him). James is nothing if not a marvel of compression:

"Said was right to this extent, however: Occidental intellectuals find out very little about what is thought and written in the Oriental world. Very few of Said's admirers in the West could begin to contemplate the fact that there are some bright people in the East who thought of Said as just another international operator doing well out of patronizing them, and with less excuse. I finished writing the piece that follows not long before Said finally succumbed to cancer, and I have left it in the present tense to help indicate that I was treating him as a living force, brave in a cause that was very short this kind of soldier."

We are witnessing here the birth of a new rhetorical mode: character assassination by friendly fire. Maybe James was right to suggest that Said should have stuck to playing piano.

James is even worse on Sartre, whom he hates above all others. His inability to give Sartre a fair reading is a shame, as Sartre, unlike Said, might actually have been convicted of the most of the charges against him. To wit:

"When Sartre broke with the Communists, he retained respect for their putatively benevolent social intentions, and was ready to say something exculpatory even if what he was exculpating was the Gulag network, whose existence, after he finally ceased to deny it, he never condemned as a central product of a totalitarian system, but only regretted as an incidental blemish."

But as excoriation curdles into invective, James sinks so low as to suggest that Sartre's "physical ugliness" shaped his cultural positions, that Sartre was "debarred by nature from telling the truth for long about anything that mattered." Sometimes it's hard to tell what really enrages James most: Sartre's apologies for Communism, or the fact that he beat James to the punch in opposing Nazism.

In light of Sartre's socialist sins, Being and Nothingness is written off here as an update of Heidegger's "high-flown philosophical flapdoodle"... the product of "a mind that could not grant itself freedom to speculate in [...] its own compromises with reality." Now, in Heidegger, we have a man whose conduct under totalitarian rule deserves all the opprobrium that can possibly be heaped upon it. But Being and Time cannot be dismissed as "flapdoodle" on the grounds of biography alone. Nor can Being and Nothingness, whose author has the advantage of having participated in the Resistance. In fact, both Sartre and Heidegger were keenly interested in the mind's compromises with reality, though they didn't conceive of it in those terms (see, for example, Being and Time, Part One, Division I, Section V).

It's likely that Heidegger's agnosticism on the subject the Other (later critiqued by that self-interested Witch-Doctor Emmanuel Lewinas) enabled his early political enthusiasm for Hitler. But it's also possible to hang Heidegger out to dry on the grounds of his own definition of authenticity. Sartre, too, for that matter . To the extent that they endorsed or excused (respectively) totalitarian regimes, Heidegger and Sartre could be seen to have fallen short of their own philosophies. But to reach this nuanced verdict, one has to have actually tried to understand the philosophies in question, and James can't be bothered with philosophy (not a great quality in a cultural critic). Even Hegel and Kant get his goat. I had always thought of the anti-intellectualism and paranoia as a combination peculiar to the American far right, but apparently it can afflict Aussie humanists, too.

V.
Which brings me to "Walter Benjamin," the essay I hailed above as a fine piece of fiction. It's not historical fiction, in that it doesn't hew closely enough to fact. But as a work of imagination, it's audacious.

Okay, I'll admit it... I'm being unfair to James. But only because James is unfair to Walter Benjamin. Apart from being a thinker whose sensibility - which can in no way be construed as ideological - has changed my life, Benjamin should be enrolled among James' angels. He was a victim of totalitarianism, killing himself in the Pyrenees when it seemed he wouldn't be able to escape the Reich. But because Benjamin practiced a syncretic version of Marxism, and would become popular, posthumously, with leftist academics, James can't let him die with dignity.

"It remains sadly true, however, that he is more often taken for granted than actually read. 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is the Benjamin essay that everybody knows a little about. Whether its central thesis is true is seldom questioned, just as the value of his work as a whole is seldom doubted. His untimely death was such a tragedy that nobody wants to think of his life as less than a triumph. But there had already been many thousands of Jewish tragedies before his turn came, and what is remarkable for the historically minded observer is just how slow so brilliant a man was to get the point about what the Nazis had in mind. About the other tragedy, the one in Russia, he never got the point at all."

How terrifying it is to see a fine mind in the grip of ideological fervor... I mean James', of course. How terrifying the totalizing flatness of the phrasing: "his turn came"; "Jewish tragedies." How awful the statement that Benjamin's death was less remarkable than his failure to get the hell away from Hitler, the tiny insinuation that somehow his death was his fault. And how bizarre to take Benjamin to task for not having "got the point" about a tragedy he didn't live to survey the extent of. And then James has the gall to tell us he's doing Benjamin a "courtesy!"

In real life, Benjamin is pretty widely read, and "The Work of Art" is well known precisely because its central thesis isn't really up for debate. A quick comparison of James' "proof" that this thesis is bogus with the thesis itself reveals that James hasn't understood what Benjamin means by "aura." Not even one bit. Normally, the James method would be to chalk this misunderstanding up to Benjamin's obscurity - he goes on and on about Benjamin's "all-inclusive obscurity" - but he's made the mistake of granting that "The Work of Art" features "a general point designed to be readily understood." So why can't James understand it? If I may expropriate some other lines from this essay. "His life story gives us the answer: he was cushioning reality. It needed cushioning."

Of course Benjamin's reality, James tells us, was anti-Semitism. (And if he knew what was good for him, the implication is, he'd have written about that, in the form of journalism, rather than theorizing about Parisian cafes (shopping arcades, actually.)) But what reality can a successful TV personality, in his (I'll say it) idiotic dismissal of a cultural giant, possibly be cushioning himself against?

VI.
That reality is the world we now find ourselves in. The Soviet bloc has collapsed, without affording Clive James the chance to prove himself worthy of his heroes. Nazism, though it still persists, has dwindled. Only in the past few years have the lines for a new global conflict have been drawn. That the good guys have so far not acquitted themselves heroically challenges James' picture of liberal democracy as a system that doesn't require progressive intervention or even vigilance (only totalitarian ideologies have such requirements, he thinks). And so, rather than refine his model, James saddles up and goes looking for enemies. Too often, he finds the wrong ones.

Given the amount of cannibalizing he's done of his own body of work here, an odd palimpsest effect sets in... as if James is trying to reshape decades of enthusiastic reading and writing into a brief against the new enemies of civilization. Between the fits of intemperance, ignorance, and magnificent self-satisfaction are principled reflections on those who actually have blood on their hands, on Trotsky and Goebbels and Mao. And though it's often said that it's easier to write a bad review than a good one, James writes insightfully about figures like Albert Camus, whose art and political record were both sterling. His encomiums extend to literary critics, philologists, and historians from all over the world, and have left me with a list of writers I'm eager to read. I don't know enough about Gianfranco Contini or Georg Christoph Lichtenberg to do anything other than enjoy James' writing on them.

In his role as a bourgeois provocateur, however, James is too willing to substitute ardor for attention, attention for smartness, smartness for intelligence. Cultural Amnesia is always ardent, often attentive, frequently smart, and sometimes intelligent. And boy is it learned. About the big things, it's absolutely right. As students of culture, we must connect the dots. We must take a stand against oppression, against mass murder.

But we know that already; we want our new humanism to help us with the details (with Guantanamo, with nuclear proliferation, with the ongoing totalitarian tragedies in North Korea and Iran). And it's the details where James' claims to humanism get dicey. He would rather praise that paragon of moral imagination, Mrs. Thatcher, than actually calibrate the human cost of the laissez-faire branch of economic determinism. (I can't resist quoting this little cascade of reasoning (read closely, now): "She should have trusted her instincts and shut out the smart voices [...] Her best instinct was to stick to a simple course of action once it had been chosen. That instinct became her enemy, and the enemy of the country, on those occasions when a simple course of action is not appropriate. In domestic policy it hardly ever is.")

What we can take from Cultural Amnesia, in the end, is a largeness of ambition, a breadth of learning, a catholic sensibility, and a heroic belief that culture can be a matter of life and death. But we must explore the finer points of art and history for ourselves, and reach our own conclusions. We must be intelligent readers. We must be careful not to let Clive James' "necessary memories" stand in for our own.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 10:17 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Tempering Expectations for the Great 9/11 Novel

Jerome Weeks has published a long, thoughtful essay asking why all the talk about our culture needing a great "9/11 novel." Don Delillo has this discussion back in the book pages with his new book, Falling Man, though Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Deborah Eisenberg's collection Twilight of the Superheroes among several others are examples of so-called "9/11 fiction." Weeks writes:

Why do we expect our writers to produce the "Great 9/11 novel" anyway? Has there ever been a "great" Pearl Harbor novel -- the event most often compared to the Towers' collapse? From Here to Eternity is about all that memory can conjure up, and it surely doesn't qualify as great.

I would argue that nearly every serious novel written since 9/11 is a "9/11 novel." Writers, artists, and filmmakers, consciously or subconsciously, react to the world around them some way, and 9/11, from many angles, is incontrovertibly a part of our world. For example, even Michael Chabon's