Whet You Whistle

* At The New Yorker, James Wood reviews Censoring an Iranian Love Story (well timed, I might add). He writes, 'Censoring an Iranian Love Story is not simply prohibited by censorship but made by it. For Mandanipour, the censor is a kind of co-writer of the book, and he appears often in this novel, under the alias of Porfiry Petrovich (the detective who chases Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov). We see him squabbling with Mandanipour, chatting to another Iranian writer, plotting alternative stories for Dara and Sara, striking out offensive phrases, and finally falling in love with Sara. He is a heavy presence in the novel, and is both creator and critic; the writer is always anticipating the imagination of prohibition even as he tries to outwit it. Even more interesting, the writer, in this situation, becomes his characters; he wants what they want. Their freedom is bound up with his. This interdependency does provocative things to the relation of fiction to reality. On the one hand, fiction becomes more real—real enough to strike lines through. On the other hand, fiction becomes more fictional—multiple writers (the author and his censors) are making up a collective story as they go along, improvising, cutting, editing, bargaining with each other. One of the great successes of this book is how thoroughly it persuades the reader that a novel about censorship could not help also being a novel about fiction-making; and it thus brings a political gravity to a fictive self-consciousness sometimes abused by the more weightless postmodernism.' I have not enjoyed a review by Wood so thoroughly, from its beginning to the very end, for some time.

* In City Journal, Roger Scruton argues that beauty, as a value in itself, has been lost to contemporary culture, and that it necessitates a revival. Like so many City Journal essays I come across, I agree with the basic outline of the author's point but not the clockwork of their argument. In this essay I was perhaps more disappointed than others. Scruton essentially places 'beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form' against the his conception of contemporary 'artistic self-expression' that is necessarily 'a transgression of ordinary moral norms.'

One can make innumerable claims about the relationship between beauty and values — his neo-Victorianism is no more convincing that it was in the 19th Century (unless you were rich, and British) — but to argue that postmodernism itself denies beauty seems, almost immediately, false. This is not to say that some artists do not enact such a purposeful inversion, and that some do it too often or poorly to be effective. Rather, postmodernism was, at its heart, a de-centering of traditional value systems. If Scruton went looking for the 'sensuous form' of Truth, Justice, and the Olde Imperial Way, it is no surprise to learn that postmodern arts disappoint him. To argue that they 'desecrate' beauty by definition is a fool's misapprehension of his own reaction.

Language poets — to call up an iconic postmodern example — can be rightfully accused of eradicating the meaningful constructions of language, but the work often achieved uniquely beautiful arrangements of words as a result; arrangements otherwise impossible without the eradication of meaningful syntax. Scruton desires something far more ethereal than beauty though: he desires that old homogeneity of cultural values. In his love of beauty, Scruton is among the many; in the surreptitious other he's plain out of luck.

* At Slate's economic section, The Big Money, Mark Gimein defends 'Google's extraordinary project of digitizing millions of books' against the 'folks fighting The Coming Google Monopoly.' It is basically a clash not of reasonable possibilities, but of ways of feeling — the fear of control against the hope of universal access. (Aside: Doesn't it always seem as if Slate wants to be antagonistic and contrarian?) In truth, the digitization will likely generate some more mundane and predictable reality. Given free near-universal access to a sort of Babylonian Library, most people will continue to be woeful dunces picking their noses way through a Super Duper WalMart. Utopia remains no place. On the other hand, if Google ratchets up prices and strong-arms authors and publishers, then the world remains as it is now, most people have no access to obscure books and people have to visit bookstores (assuming there are any left) or, more likely, that other unjolly giant, Amazon, to get what they want. Status quo.