Thoughts for the Weekend

* Wyatt Mason at Harper's has one of the better appraisals of John Updike as book critic that I've come across. 'His reviews were generous, but not in the sense that he regularly mollycoddled mediocrity. He tried to take at books on the terms they set for themselves, then tried to evaluate how well they managed on those terms, then looked at whether those terms were themselves adequate, useful, or beautiful. This habit of mind alone is unusual in the practice of long form literary criticism, which in lesser hands attached to meaner minds devolves into a sport of knaves.'

Author Gish Jen, whom Updike cited as his literary heir, also has reflection on the person and his importance at The New Republic. She writes that Updike was, 'a genuinely kind and generous human being. My editor, Ann Close, recently told me that for most of his career, Updike refused to take an advance from Knopf. He did everything in his power to help the house, and literary organizers of every stripe will attest to the time and effort he has poured into supporting literary culture. His death is All Wrong; no one would accept this in a novel; everything about it says, Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite!'

* The Library of America is having a nice 50% off sale that includes Paul Bowles, Yvor Winters, Kenneth Koch, John Dos Passos, and George Washington. Now that's a grab bag.

* Economists always make me chuckle a little bit. Even before this crisis, I was at least a skeptic. My question was always about the vicissitudes of human nature, How do you know what people will actually do? People aren't chemicals and there are no natural laws of behavior, so the results are pretty far from certain. Not only that, but it always seemed like economists were behind the curve a bit, and never more than in this Atlantic Monthly article by Bart Wilson. He writes about something called the Ultimatum Game, which is essentially a test-case of the groundbreaking, cutting-edge theories of Plato's Republic. He writes, 'The Ultimatum Game is so popular because it is simple to explain and simple to run, yet its results involve one of the most complex problems of society: what are we saying when we say something is "fair"?'

Being neither a mathmatician or a scientist, I think to myself now, 'How odd: economists have somehow stumbled upon the question of Justice.' This should be interesting, if unnecessarily complicated. I wonder if they're walking to Piraeus, too.

Wilson has at least heard of Plato (he must be a Harvard guy) and gives the old man nod with, 'it is not some pure platonic ideal of fairness,' but I think that he doesn't give enough credit to the work that Plato / Socrates is doing in that two-millennia–old text. In The Republic, each concept of Justice is put to a human test; the question is never asked in a pure-logic theoretical vacuum, even though there was no concept of a scientific method (that wouldn't come until Aristotle, and then fully worked out post-Renaissance). Socrates, in the text, discusses the concept in terms of agreement and argument, and what human beings might actually do. When they arrive at a definition upon which all can agree, the question — for the time, at least — is settled. This is Wilson's breakthrough as well, 'Fairness really boils down to an issue of agreement: can we agree on what rules this particular context calls for?' Well, yes: welcome to the Socratic Method, Bart.

Odds and ends

This has been a hell of a long week for some reason. I've been anticipating this weekend since, oh, around 9:00 am Monday morning.

* Alright, I'll bite: at Harriet, the fearless Wanda Coleman asks, if we had a national museum of American literature and writers, 'Who would finance such a venture and where should it be located? What kind of public would enjoy what kind of exhibits or make use of its archives? Who would be inducted and who would be overlooked?' All you perhaps-too-opinionated readers out there, let me know what you think, particularly on that last point.

* As I wrote at the newly-invigorated Godine Blog:
The New York Times reported yesterday that the Washington Post's long-standing and very well-regarded book review section, the Book World, is going to be rolled into the Opinion and Style & Arts sections, with the final stand-alone issue coming out February 15. While this isn't the first time that the Book World has found itself out of favor at the Post — Motoko Rich writes that it was similarly absorbed in 1973, only six years after its inception, before making a comeback in the early 1980s — it is certainly a bad sign for newspapers and book sections, and the book sections still in newspapers, when one of the contemporary pillars can't make it work. The number of reviews will only diminish slightly, they say, and the staff is not being cut, but still it's hard to imagine that the tenor and focus of reviews from here on will be unaffected by the material that now surrounds them; for myself, it would be strange to find Michael Dirda's column snug between a crossword and a review of "Lost." I do hope that the editors and staff there will be able to make up for lost column inches with online content.

* Esquire is a little bit ahead of the trend, with their list of five great online literary journals. I'd only ever come across Narrative and Guernica, both pretty good — the former is especially interesting for the use of PDFs to present their content — and will have to keep an eye on the others: Flatmancrooked, Anderbo, and The Adirondack Review.

John Updike, 1932—2009

I met John Updike briefly and only once, but I felt, as I think much of America does, that I already knew him well. He read at the old church in Harvard Square and it was summer, a typically humid New England day where even sitting was a strain upon us all. Updike was inordinately kind to the hundreds who waited for an autograph, a handshake, and a few words. He signed and smiled under the pulpit for at least an hour before this picture was taken, one in which his open and genial nature comes though so clearly people have occasionally thought we two were friends. I can not praise him more than to say that in all the articles, essays, and interviews I ever read, he seemed never to let the praising of his writerly talent overwhelm a genuine, if slightly naive, kindness. He passed away today at his home in Beverly, Massachusetts, at the age of 76, and we will miss him now, I think, and appreciate the writer that he was, more than we were able when he was conveniently at hand.

On Ted Williams' last game at Fenway

Margaret Atwood reviews The Witches of Eastwick

A 2000 interview with Updike

David R. Godine on Updike's passing

New Yorker writers remember John Updike

Review: Words in Air, The Complete Correspondence of Lowell & Bishop

'A Lower Olympus'
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

True friendships are as rare as good governments. As we pass through the many stages of life — school years, working life, marriage, family, retirement — we gather and leave behind just as many sets of friends, each important to that time but limited as well. We grow out of friendships sometimes as easily as a pair of slacks at Thanksgiving, or having a favorite band. Some bonds, however, deny the passing of time. They deny changes of situation, absence of contact, and physical distance. Aristotle wrote, 'The perfect form of friendship is that between good people who are alike in excellence and virtue' — if that is so, and I believe that it may be, then what Words in Air depicts is not simply the gossip and shop-talk of two poets, but the written chronicle of a friendship nearing perfection. For this, these letters are a treasure.

For thirty years Lowell and Bishop engaged in an international comedy of errors, outmaneuvering each other as they tried and more often than not failed to arrive in the same place at the same time. Bishop visited New York, Lowell was in Maine. Bishop went to summer in Maine, Lowell was on a European tour. It never seemed to matter, though; not to two people for whom the written word was vivid as the living world. Their bond existed where they were both most comfortable, in poems and letters. Sometimes, the daily existence of both poets seemed mainly to be a nuisance; in nearly all cases, their prominence in the public eye was a burden, a distraction, or at best a minor amusement. However, it is the public side of their lives that is also the most entertaining element of these letters.

Interaction with poets both young (Ginsberg, Plath, Rich) and old (Frost, Moore, Pound) are occasions for anecdotes and descriptions that exhibit the un-suppressible personalities of both poets. In one especially full letter, Lowell writes, 'We've just had a visit from Snodgrass, touched with the fire of heaven I feel in a few of his daughter poems, but green and hysterical personally and rather unhinged by ten days in New York after three years of being buried and unknown at Rutgers. He wore plaid socks, woolly white underwear-like trousers, a coat made of white fibers and carbon and Ithaca, New York tailoring, spoke in a profound persuasive, hypnotic Jarrell-like whisper, then giggled.'

No other person but Robert Lowell could have produced such a marvel of judgemental description. A few letters later, discussing the affection of female poets, Bishop writes, 'They have to make quite sure the reader is not going to mis-place them socially, first — and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they'd like to say. . . I wrote a story at Vassar that was too much admired by Miss Rose Peebles, my teacher, who was very proud of being an old-school Southern lady, and suddenly this fact about women's writing dawned on me, and has haunted me ever since.'

These passages reveal volumes about each writer, and the qualities are continuous with their poetry: Lowell maniacally engaged with the details of the world, his personality shooting through in shimmering moral colors; Bishop pondering a world that judges her, and she projecting her own poignant moments unabashedly back on the world. Unlike a biography or a critical study, however, the collection is not a thesis about these poets, nor is it meant to be read from cover to cover — I tired, and failed, to do so. Thirty years of almost constant correspondence (the most common draughts caused by illnesses and travel) feels too much like living lives vicariously when reading straight through.

The best approach is to leaf through at random, as the gems are dispersed evenly, to find the inspiration for a favorite poem, or to go and find your own favorite poet in the index. Interested to see what the inspiration for 'One Art' may have been? In July 1955, she wrote, 'The word for even a small accident here is "desastre,"' and although she wrote the poem years after it pleased me to see how long a notion takes to brew. Curious about the first meeting between Ginsberg and Lowell? April of 1959, 'They are phony in [a] way because they have made a lot of publicity out of very little talent. [. . .] I think they'll die of TB;' Bishop replies, 'Oh dear, your "Beat" guests do sound awful. I have read some of the poetry and find it hopeless — and yet I sympathize with them. The trouble is mostly ignorance, don't you think — and lack of education, as well as talent.' I just wish she'd told him how she really felt. (Of course, they both eventually came around to admire Ginsberg, at least.) Frost the 'bad gray poet', Marianne Moore in her Victorian stasis, Pound mis-translating Chinese; their literary portraits alone are worth the price of admission.

It is also heartening, as a fellow poet, to read Lowell and Bishop bemoan the poor state of literature, the selections of prizes, the choices for grants and positions. Their complaints sound like any of several dinner parties I've recently attended. Bishop quips, 'And now that I have damned everyone I feel awfully cheered up.' Apparently, it is true: nothing changes. Despite their obvious personal problems, the tragedies that seemed to shadow them both, and the one that eventually consumed Lowell, nothing between the two ever seemed to change, either. They were not perfect people, neither could make that claim — but they were equal in virtue, in goodness and talent, and have left behind a correspondence as unique as their perfect friendship.

Edgar Allen Poe, 200

I'm naturally superstitious but also rational, meaning that I admit nothing to anyone while hedging all bets by knocking on wood, crossing myself when I hear a siren, avoiding cracks in the pavement, etc. As a kid, my favorite author by a long mile was Edgar Allen Poe. I discovered him in a book of scary poems at the library, where appeared "Alone."

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then — in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

That demon appearing to a willful, lonely child mirrored my own sense that something about my childhood was perverse, and that something was both in myself and in the world around me. In all matters social I was deficient (and in many still am): poor at most sports and games, ignorant of styles and fads, moody and short-tempered. To no great surprise, I wasn't spared the cruelest ridicule. This poem spoke to me then, when neither classmate nor teacher could. I still read it with a fond memory of Poe, across nearly two centuries, writing as if especially to me.

But then, of course, I finally reached whatever grade one reads Poe, and that intimacy was all bleached to a bland, dull gray. I agree with Nick Mamatas at The Smart Set, 'We get to read Poe in school not because school defangs Poe; school defangs us so that we can't sink our fangs into his stories the way he wanted us to. Poe is torn to shreds by dopey assignments forcing us to compare and contrast the cat in "The Black Cat" to the bird in "The Raven," term papers about Roderick Usher's inability to tell fantasy from reality, and endless other demands that we take the ineffable in Poe's stories and try to make them effable. (It's eff-able all right!)'

Day One

Good luck in your first day, President Obama.

* At The New Republic, where he seems to have settled in nicely, Adam Kirsch takes stock of the inauguration poem by Elizabeth Alexander. 'This poem, written for a book and not for an inauguration, is already public in the worst sense — inauthentic, bureaucratic, rhetorical. So it was no surprise to hear Alexander begin her poem today with a cliché ("Each day we go about our business"), before going on to tell the nation "I know there's something better down the road"; and pose the knotty question, "What if the mightiest word is ‘love'?"; and conclude with a classic instance of elegant variation: "on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp." The poem's argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity. Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou's, Williams's, and even Robert Frost's inauguration poems already proved: that the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.' On the other hand, we have Frank Bidart's 'Inauguration Poem' at Slate, which is a much stronger poem but would have been no more appropriate for the grandeur of the event.

* Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading has an interview with Declan Spring, of New Directions, one of my favorite publishers. Scott asks whether the small publisher model is better equipped to last the recession, to which Declan responds, 'Definitely. We’re not beholden to stock owners, our overhead is pretty small, and we always count on just a pretty small profit every year anyway. Our staff has worked here for many years, mostly the same folks for twenty years, who are devoting much of their lives to the mission of ND. We see it as a profit-making business, but we are also realistic and dedicated to the cause. That makes it easier in this climate. Most important, while we always expect people to get excited about the new books we publish — many of the most innovative and exciting foreign authors, and some of the foremost avant-garde American poets — we have always had the luxury of being able to count on the steady sale of our luminous backlist. James Laughlin started New Directions in 1936 and since then, ND has built up one of the great literary lists in American publishing. Those books are essential texts in any worthy bookstore and are adopted on a wide scale in college courses across the country. No matter how the economy’s doing, those books are sold and read. And since we’re a small press with a long-time devoted staff, we can be creative and smart about keeping costs down and forging ahead as we’ve always done. One thing our President Peggy Fox reminds us about is that we’ve been through ups and downs before.'

* Edmund White at The Guardian writes about the literary world's worst house guest: Arthur Rimbaud. 'He took to nude sunbathing just outside the house. He turned his room into a squalid den. He mutilated an heirloom crucifix. He was proud of the lice infesting his long mane and even pretended he was encouraging the vermin to jump on to passers-by. Verlaine was delighted with Rimbaud's antisocial antics, which recalled to him his own younger excesses before his marriage.'

Inauguration Day

"In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted—for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things—some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom."

Read the entire speech at Slate

for MLK Jr

I think most people have never heard the entire speech: today is the day. Take a few minutes, it's worth your while.

News of My Demise

* Over at Conversations in the Book Trade, Finn Harvor has interviewed me on the contemporary book industry. Hope you enjoy!

* The New Atlantic has yet another apocalyptic article about the demise of the book / folio, this one by Christine Rosen. She writes, 'The market for e-books, although growing rapidly, is still less than 1 percent of the total publishing business: perhaps 400 million paper books will be sold in the United States in 2008, and Amazon expects to sell 380,000 Kindles in 2008, resulting in an unknown number of book downloads.' As I said in my interview with Finn, e-readers may have a future — they just don't have a present.

* The Times Literary Supplement reflects on Bolaño as the 2666 epidemic sweeps America. Michael Saler writes that the most coherent over-arching theme of the novel is: 'Can individuals confront evil, from the banal to the malignant, without retreating into comforting illusion or nihilistic collusion?' I've just begun part five now. It is hardly as overwhelming or 'pointless' as some reviews have made it out to be — I'm collecting my thoughts on it. This essay is a pretty good start though. I'm not sure that Saler really finds the right literary context, as far as authors to whom we could compare RB. Kurt Vonnegut keeps popping into my mind as I read, perhaps because of the Vonnegut-section structure — there's something else as well though. (Note to readers: at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Carlin Romano writes about the anti-glamorized popular conception of Mexico — remember, RB was Chilean, and there is a distinct unreality to his version of life in Mexico.)

* At the E-Verse Radio blog, a video of Derek Walcott reading his poem, 'Sea Grapes.' The phrase, 'This brings nobody peace,' is marquee Walcott. He's built the voice and scene to that point well enough that the line is both colloquial and epic. It moves away from this in the final few stanzas, which is a shame. Not necessarily his best poem, but a strong one.

WD Snodgrass, 1926–2009

I was sorry to hear of the passing of poet WD Snodgrass, reported by Edward Byrne at his blog, One Poet's Notes. Snodgrass was a student of Robert Lowell and Randal Jarrell, and wrote what might be termed 'late confessional verse'. Where Lowell's poetry became increasingly steeped in the facts of his own life, Snodgrass grew into the intimate posture of everyday revelations about family, home, and memory. The poem 'Heart's Needle', which can be found at The Academy of American Poets, appears in his Pulitzer Prize–winning first collection by the same name, and reflects the obvious influence of Lowell in its use of the familial relationship as an archetype and its New Criticism–influenced formal qualities. 'Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (1 April 1945)', at The Poetry Foundation, shows the same intimacy of tone but within a dramatic lyric, and with the same formal bent.

Slow-Starting Monday

My mind is not yet open for business, and i expect it's the same for many of you out there. Especially those who sent me a text message at 5:30 am yesterday — why were you awake? For those slow-starters, here is a kick in the pants.

* It seems contradictory that Melville House should report on the epic-level disastrous state of book sales, while, almost simultaneously, the Washington Post reports that American fiction readership rose by 5% this year. The Melville report indicates that people are not only strapped for cash and not buying books, but that they're generally less interested in literature; the National Endowment for the Arts, though, reports exactly the opposite trend. I'm curious to see what the returns are for publishers, as opposed to retailers.

* At Stoning the Devil, Adam Fieled does a close reading of a 'post-avant' poem by Andrew Duncan. On the issue of close-reading, he writes, 'I do not mean to suggest that artists cannot be theory-savvy, just that when theory takes the place of genuine, plain-spoken insight, what you have (often) is the work of an eager-beaver grad student, not a well-rounded, mature artist. . . . I have no intention of dissing theory altogether (especially as I will be using it to craft my dissertation), but I do think that this particular aspect of New Critical practice is ripe for re-integration and re-assimilation. Close reading does not have to be formalist reading; it can work in tandem with theoretical knowledge, they are not mutually exclusive.' Well stated.

* If you have never encountered the novella The Yellow Wallpaper, a late Victorian precursor to Faulkner's Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, I recommend it highly. Justine Picardie writes, 'The Yellow Wallpaper is often described as a masterpiece, though its authoress, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, might have objected to that particular term, for she was an early feminist who wrote the story, in part to escape the mastery of male doctors and to become the mistress of her own destiny. Since its rediscovery in the 1970s by a new generation of women, The Yellow Wallpaper has become a cult classic, passed on by word of mouth (even, somewhat bizarrely, inspiring Marios Schwab’s fashion collection last autumn); and its status is likely to grow now that Virago is reissuing a new edition. But when Gilman wrote this eerie novella in 1890, fictionalising her own catastrophic nervous breakdown after the birth of her daughter, and her treatment by a leading physician, Dr S. Weir Mitchell, she had to battle to get it into print.'

The White Flag

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the MLA is finally waving the proverbial white flag. Or at least, that maybe it should. I've never heard a positive description of the annual Modern Language Association conference — where literature and language teachers at the college level go to shill for jobs or tenure — so I wasn't surprised to hear that things aren't going well. The content of this article, however, deserves a few remarks.

First, a bit of background: David Horowitz happens to be asking an important, touchy, and unpopular question. He wants the academic world to openly discuss whether identity politics have, for all their good intentions, hindered academic freedom in America. (Identity politics mean, simply put, political correctness; it also means discussing a book in terms of the author's identity, usually in American racial and gender terms.) The question is part of a larger concern with academic freedom and social awareness, which is important and worth discussion. Horowitz probably chose the least productive way to raise the issue though, writing a polemical book that attacked a handful of specific professors, using highly questionable information and arguments to defame them as tools of political indoctrination. He may be the least popular person of all time in many literature departments, among professors of a certain age.

At this year's MLA conference, Mr. Horowitz finally was finally invited to sit in on a panel discussion. Chaos ensues. To wit, 'At one point, a member of the audience could be seen giving Mr. Horowitz the finger. Brian Kennelly of California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, who presided over the event, wrote on The Chronicle's web site that he observed an audience member repeatedly mouthing an obscenity to Mr. Horowitz — behavior he called "troublesome" and "repugnant." Even before the session began, members of the MLA Radical Caucus handed out a statement protesting the organization's decision to invite Mr. Horowitz to speak. Mr. Horowitz "consistently misrepresents the views of academics whom he wishes to discredit," the caucus said. "He is not a scholar but a liar of the Goebbels school."'

Over the top? The hipster rag n+1 has a pamphlet available on their website in which the editors discuss the ways their university experience was a waste of time and energy. One can imagine all of their teachers were in attendance at this panel. I don't think the scene above can be taken seriously, and nothing I could write would do justice to the inanity and childishness. Let's just say that the discussion never really went anywhere.

What took place at the MLA is a window into the so-called canon wars, and gives a good idea as to why no reasonable solution has ever come about. As The Chronical's author writes, 'the two camps seemed to talk past each other.' A telling moment in the panel (and well-noted by the author) comes when Horowitz defends himself from an attack, saying, 'I was in the civil-rights movement before Barbara Foley was even born.'

The defense is a non-sequitur, but the civil rights movement is a powerful symbol for people of his generation to invoke and his involvement is akin to baptism, releasing him from condemnation. It's like grace to many people, especially in academia, of that era. Of course, that's all foolishness: neither his age nor involvement gives his work any inherent credibility, and if he weren't being faced with such childish personal attacks in the first place this trick wouldn't have any effect. But his playing this particular angle is revealing in its generational context: he was appealing to the other side's morality, but still the whole debate is framed by a single generation's value system and experiences.

The academic world has reached a miserable impasse on an issue that, at the end of the day, is really of little importance. Of course professors always feel peer pressure, always influence some students and not others, always hold small-minded biases, etc. It unavoidable. The academic freedom discussion is worth having, but this debate has not been about academic freedom, the canon, certainly not about the best interest of the students, or even a set of principles: it's been about big egos.

One need only look at the ruckus that a proposed statement of solidarity with Israel and/or Palestine caused for an example of how much these academics believe they matter, and how little they really do. Is academic freedom important? Yes. Are identity politics anything like state censorship? Not even a shadow of it. Should the resources of the MLA and so many hours and thought be poured into this issue? Not any more.

The cannon war has become a manufactured spotlight, allowing the obsessions of our most notorious generation to remain at the center of issues both cultural and moral. It is unthinkable today that a critic would declare certain ethnicities or genders incapable of producing great literature, as once was true. There is no going back to the old assumptions, although new and equally pernicious beliefs are sure to bloom. The fears held by those such as Horowitz and his detractors are the fears of old age, a fear that their work all came to nothing, which is not the case. However, in order to move forward, the arguments (and the egos) of the past have to be put aside.

Rumble in The New Republic

This is getting to be a truly meaningful showdown. One one side you have Slavoj Zizek, the Eastern-European anti-West cultural personae; on the other, you have a young champion of the Western Liberal Tradition, Adam Kirsch. Bang that drum, let's get it on!

In his response at The New Republic (who really deserve some credit for this marvelous public exchange), 'Who Are You Calling Anti-Semitic?', Zizek writes, 'I simply never wrote that Islamic fundamentalists are in any sense on the Left — the whole point of my writing on this topic is that the "antagonism" between liberal tolerance and ethnic or religious fundamentalism is inherent to the universe of global capitalism: in their very opposition, they are the two faces of the same system. The true Left starts with the insight into this complicity.'

In that ultimate sentence, I find everything that repels me from taking Zizek seriously. I am inclined, as someone who is steeped in dialectical thinking, to agree with his analysis of the Liberal / Western thesis producing a natural antithesis (jihadism). Fine, but not new to him. It is Zizek's underlying pose as a magical prophet that grates on me. The phrasing itself implies that anyone who agrees with him is part of a 'true Left', an elite and exclusive–seeming group. No person is more insightful just for their political leanings. The 'true Left' — just as the Liberal, Fascist, Conservative, or any other — begins not with insight, but with bias. Call it 'Narrowed Focus', if you need a clever euphemism. It exists throughout his writing, a manipulative way of casting critics as less-than and placing him at the center of some revelation.

Zizek later claims no standing for this debate, and derides Kirsch's 'all-pervasive manipulations and falsifications' of his writing. But Kirsch's interpretation of Zizek's work over the course of his whole corpus is exactly that: an interpretation. It is not different from what Zizek does in regards to any of his subjects. It may not be right (and has obvious flaws, I think) but not only is this debate possible, it might be as necessary as any other public discourse happening today. This is not two opposing traditions, but one version of the tradition against another: Zizek's naïve obsession with undermining the capitalist system is as much a feature of our tradition as apple pie or taxation.

In 'Still the Most Dangerous Philosopher of the West', Adam Kirsch responds to Zizek directly. He points out a few, what seem to me, obviously racist passages, and writes, 'it is not Zizek's personal feelings that are significant, but his writing, where he does indeed conscript Jews and Judaism into a fantasy with poisonous roots in theological and philosophical anti-Semitism. This is the fantasy that holds Judaism to be a religion of mere law, stubbornly impeding the millennium of Christian love — whose contemporary incarnation, Zizek believes, is to be found in revolutionary communism.' Kirsch goes on to use Zizek's text against him, point by point, and it is awfully hard to argue against yourself.

Again, Kirsch does not allow Zizek to revise what is actually printed in the books, nor allow him to claim, as so many lazy psuedo-philosophers before him have, that his opponents simply 'don't understand'. (The German metaphysician Fichte threw a similar tantrum when Kant denounced his ill-constructed philosophy.) Insight isn't magical, it comes from bare honesty and work — except maybe in Zizek's case, where it seems to be very like stage magic: all misdirection and mirrors.

(nb: Zizek repeatedly refers to a 'precise sense of violence' that he means to use, but he has no precise sense; if he were more precise, he would use a different word than violence — what he means is 'deeply revolutionary act', or something alike. This is one small but exemplary point of manipulation that seems to be part and parcel of Zizek's appeal, and of the laziness of his thinking in general. When he isn't borrowing from another thinker or paraphrasing, he's nothing but crass entertainment, like the dumbed-down TV-movie version of a good book. I digress.)

Rounding Down

from fifty cents to a nickel.

* Motoko Rich at The New York Times reports on the demise of glamor in publishing: 'Between marathon meetings to discuss plans for new books, the sales reps were invited to take part in wine tastings and spa treatments. This year the meetings will be held via Webcam. In a memo to staff members announcing the layoffs on Dec. 15, John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, said the company would hold only one of its three annual sales conferences in person, and the other two would be conducted on the Web and by telephone. Amid a relentless string of layoffs and pay-freeze announcements, book publishers are clamping down on some of the business’s most glittery and cozy traditions. Austerity measures are rippling throughout the industry as it confronts the worst retailing landscape in memory.'

Austerity? How about reality. Anyone complaining that they don't get free massages and wine tastings — as their colleagues are being fired no less! — wouldn't know austerity if it bludgeoned them. (Actually, anyone who complains about their cushy publishing job should try heaving coal into a boiler for a few months.) I wonder if those fired staff members wouldn't be able to sue the company for improper allocation of funds. 'Nobody expects one of the staples of the business — the long lunch — to die off completely because of these straitened circumstances.' Ah!? Alright, I have to stop before I boil over into obscenity.

Rich goes on to report that HarperStudio 'is limiting advances to no more than $100,000 in exchange for giving authors half of the profits from book sales, as opposed to the 10 percent to 15 percent of the hardcover price they traditionally earn in royalties.' Limiting to a hundred grand? Yeah, that's reasonable . . . maybe. Sanity shines through briefly, 'Booksellers hope that the publishing industry can use the current downturn as an opportunity to publish fewer books.' Here's to that — fewer, better books!

* And speaking of fewer, better books, that self-same news organ, the New York Times, reports on the crisis in literary confidence, 'stresses in our leading writers have led to the current severe and systemic writer’s block that threatens to undermine access to books for working Americans. . . . We must implement these new programs with a strategy that allows us to adapt to changing circumstances, and attract the private inspiration which has always made our cultural system so resilient and innovative.' The essay is called 'A Modest Proposal for the Publishing Industry', but nowhere do I see a mention of eating babies — I'm just at a loss.

Resolute

The tradition of the new year's resolution is one in which nearly everyone I know, at least jokingly, takes part. It shows a certain amount of positive good will, and the rare ability to see life as an ongoing and unending project in the particularly American vein of Benjamin Franklin. I've taken on several resolutions for 2009. One of them is refilling the water jug before I put it back in the fridge, per request of The Beautiful Girl. Another is one for you folks: to resume posing more often here, even if it is only a link or two with a quicksilver comment or two. I'll still leave my longer reviews and essays up for a greater length of time though, and hopefully I'll have quite a few more to post in the coming year. Until then, welcome to 2009 — best of luck to you, your family, and all of us!

* At The New Yorker, George Packer writes, 'The great story of the past decade has been the failure of the elites and the institutions they lead — not just the media, but the military, intelligence, business, finance, and the federal government. But the answer to bad journalism isn’t more bad journalism. The cure for its failures is to insist that elites live up to their obligations. Sean Penn is no more qualified to be a foreign correspondent than Sarah Palin was to be a vice president. The idea that either of them could do the job without qualifications is a fake populism that’s a reaction to our fake meritocracy, and just as destructive. What we need is real meritocracy. I’d like to think that will be one of the positive effects of the Obama Presidency.' We all hope so, too, I think. It is a big first step to take the blame, though, and for that I think Packer deserves credit; it shows an amount of personal honesty that one finds lacking in the 'woe is us' crowd of former journalists. Perhaps it is just because he is gainfully employed.

Also in bright-ish media news, David Carr at The New York Times reports on a newspaper that is thriving by ignoring the internet completely: ' “Why would I put anything on the Web?” asked Dan Jacobson, the publisher and owner of the newspaper. “I don’t understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper. Why should we give our readers any incentive whatsoever to not look at our content along with our advertisements, a large number of which are beautiful and cheap full-page ads?” ' Well played, sir.

* At Slate, Adam Kirsch review the new modernization of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He writes, 'The secret of The Canterbury Tales is that it allows its characters to tear out its own pages, so to speak — to mock and complain about the rules they are supposed to live by. Because of this, the book has a holiday air, a tolerance for human appetites and frailties, that few modern works can rival. Our officially secular and hedonistic society seldom allows us to feel as free and happy as Chaucer's pilgrims seem to be.' We're all just children with one eye on mum in the parlour and three fingers in the cookie-jar, essentially — ain't life grand?

Kirsch closes the review by celebrating the minor difficulties and great reward that come from reading Chaucer's work in the middle-English, instead of this or any modernization, 'Chaucer is in many ways the progenitor of English fiction — he is closer to Dickens than to Keats — but he is also a great master of English poetry; and since poetry is what is lost in translation, why not take the trouble to read the original and avoid the loss? Besides, as the Pardoner says, "lewed peple loven tales olde;/ Swiche thynges kan they wel reporte and holde."'