Going for Broke; or, Back in Black

Some good news on the retail front: The New Yorker book bench reports, 'Books had a great Black Friday, according to the National Retail Federation, accounting for 40.3 % of sales, and coming in second to clothing. Reports trickled in of Going Rogue, the Twilight series, and the Vampire Academy series selling well; the Kindle rounded out its best sales month ever, and the Nook would have, had it not sold out earlier in the week.' Of course, as the writer points out, the retailers were forced to cut into their margins with steep discounts (at half-off all bestsellers, Amazon probably only cut a 10% profit on each sale).

On the other hand, and proving that locals here have an excellent sense of the absurd, 'Lorem Ipsum bookstore, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offered an “Anti-Sale”: “In this special, one-day only event, the bookstore with 19,000+ gently used books will be offering none of them for sale at a discount,” the press release read.' You just can't beat a deal like that.

Rilke at The Nation

At The Nation, Ange Mlinko reviews the new Edward Snow edition of The Poems of Rilke, 'But one must be careful not to let the controversy obscure something important: if English translations of Duino Elegies remain contested, it's because Rilke has become indispensable. We read Rilke for the figures: "And all things were her sleep," he says of the girl who makes a bed in his ear; that would also be the same sleep from his epitaph: "no one's sleep under so many / eyelids." We read Rilke for a vocabulary that transcends our little, individual languages to a universal (and premodern) figural vocabulary of the lyric. If it is an illusion, it is an optimistically American one — and still generative.'

I reviewed this volume myself at The Critical Flame.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

You Have the End of the Novel, and I Got a Bridge for Sale

At The Guardian, Zadie Smith writes about what she calls 'novel-nausea', framed as something what might be called a review, of Reality Hunger by ex-novelist David Shields. Smith writes, 'The pages are filled with anti-fiction fighting talk: "The creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe." And: "All the best stories are true." And: "The world exists. Why recreate it?" It's tempting to chalk this up to one author's personal disappointments with the novel as a form (Shields hasn't written a novel since the early 90s), but in expressing his novel-nausea so frankly he hopes to show that he is not alone in having such feelings – and my sense is that he's right. [. . .] In these arguments the new received wisdom is that all plots are "conventional" and all characters sentimental and bourgeois, and all settings bad theatrical backdrops, wooden and painted. Such objections are, I think, sincere responses to the experience of reading bad novels'.

It's telling that Smith chooses to focus in her essay not on sales and readership to find the novel's bellweather, but on authors and students of writing (future authors I suppose) who exist in an almost comically blasé inner circle of the literary world. They eat and breath the craft. The novel is their product, and writing their production line. However the general reading public, the students of literature, and the more intelligent readers are all in love with the novel: with its structures and narratives, and the imagined characters who inhabit them. Even memoir and nonfiction has won its recent popularity by taking on the structure and techniques of the novel.

Worse than that — at least, worse for Smith's notion and for those who are hypnotized by hip deconstructions — is that the majority of those readers really love bad novels. Love them, and buy them, and beg for more of them. The bad novels they love range from the somewhat-bad pretension-to-literature to the truly cringe-inducing vampire love stories and what have you. Only rarely does a good novel grab our imagination by the shirt collar and jostle the weary, mediocrity-bored reading masses awake. In this sense, the novel form is very much alive.

So it isn't the reading of bad novels that leads to 'novel-nausea', or they wouldn't be as undeniably popular as they are, and it wouldn't be just the 'rare reader' who seeks essays out 'with any sense of urgency'. No, it's the tired, workaday vulgarity of the writing life, the writing profession, that makes a person sick of novels as familiarity breeds contempt, or at least disdain — as magicians can't enjoy another's tricks: they can only see the mechanics; they feel envy instead of awe. Smith eventually admits as much: 'Simply put, my imagination had run dry, and I couldn't seem to bring myself to write the necessary "and then, and then" which sits at the heart of all imagined narratives. When you're in this state – commonly called "writer's block" – the very idea of fiction turns sour.' The novel's sour taste is a malady of the insider, I think; not the form.

on Amelia Rosselli

At the Center for Art of Translation blog, Scott Esposito introduces us to Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996), 'one of the most important experimental Italian poets of the 20th century, often associated with Gruppo 63 and the Italian avant-garde. First trained as a composer and musicologist, she turned to writing in her early twenties. She was fluent in Italian, French and English, and in her early writings, such as Diario in tre lingue (”Diary in Three Languages”), she reflected this linguistic background by switching from one language to another. Later, Rosselli’s poetry came to reflect this multilinguality in a more nuanced way: she began to write primarily in an idiosyncratic Italian that pushed the boundaries of the language to encompass her particular vocabulary. She incorporates syntactical traces of French and English in her Italian verse, and is famous for employing what Pier Paolo Pasolini called a “lapsus”: a slippage between languages that makes her poetry strange to the Italian ear.'

Double X is Prepping Me

At Double X, it's almost like they're running articles aimed at the betrothed among us. Sarah Richards writes, 'Couples who used analytical language, such as “think,” “understand,” “because,” or “reason,” during heated arguments were able to keep important stress-related chemicals in check, according to research published in the latest issue of the journal Health Psychology. Cytokines are inflammatory chemicals that spike during periods of prolonged tension and can lower your immunity and lead to early frailty, Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, and some cancers. The authors noted a curious gender twist in their results. Husbands benefitted [sic] from their wives’ measured language, but a man’s carefully chosen words had little effect on a woman’s cytokine balance.' The takeaway: there is nothing I can do to calm her down (kidding, TBG, kidding).

Keith Waldrop's Day in the Sun

'It makes people happy when the good guys win. And it makes people happy when somebody who is genuinely humble & likewise terrific at what he does gets public acknowledgement for being the great force for good that he is. Giving Keith Waldrop the National Book Award accomplishes all of the above.' — Ron Silliman

Keith Waldrop won the National Book Award this year for his collection Transcendental Studies: a Trilogy (preview below). It seems to have been met with general applause because, as can be seen above, people hold the view that Mr. Waldrop is a wonderful man who has supported poetry for decades and deserves this honorarium if only for the person he is. Take a browse through the book and decide for yourself, but I'm happy to see such a fairly universal positive reaction. Even the Troll knoll at the Poetry Foundation is salubrious!

An e-Book Sage

At Booksquare, Kassia Krozser discusses e-books and digital rights management — the most common security measure companies use to control things like e-books and mp3. 'In the traditional book transaction, author and publisher control over the book ends when I hand over my money for the book. All the hopes that content will be used in the manner the publisher and/or author envision are gone when I am handed a receipt by the cashier. I can do anything I want with the (print) book, including using it as a pillow (hat tip to Lawrence Lessig). I can lend it. Resell it. Make art from it. Rent it.

'Digital is different. I know I say it a lot. I believe ebooks / digital are a wholly new market with new rules and regulations (maybe I should say markets?). This marketplace should not be treated nor expected to conform to business as usual. Yes, this poses challenges; it also creates opportunities. Porting the “book” mentality to digital limits the imagination.'

When I say 'sage', by the way, I mean I could not have written this post better myself. It articulates all of the issues that are going to make or break book publishing in the 21st century, and frames them in just the right terms: DRM affects consumers the most, not publishers; books become more desirable when e-books are common, as objects of craft; the digital market created a new paradigm, and attempts to wrangle it into old-fashioned models will be met with failure, fast and sharp. This is worth a read for anyone young in publishing today.

Expat Literature

Over at her blog, Anastasia Ashman relates a conversation she had via Twitter about whether expatriate literature ought to be its own literary category, alongside various national literatures and separate from travel literature. Ashman writes, 'Expat lit is not travel literature since writing about life from outside a homeland does not mean writing from a state of travel. We’re coping with extended life in a foreign culture, navigating subtleties, adapting to find harmony. Personal assimilation / identity issues dominate expat writing, and filter their world. If travel writing is a chance to travel vicariously, expat lit is a chance to live abroad vicariously.'

To be fair, this is only a surface conversation on the issue so I won't bother much with it except as a starting point. The question is interesting enough: whether there is any use or propriety to a category such as "expatriate literature." How often does expatriation become immigration without any decisive action? How much do economic circumstances predicate one's identity as an expat versus an immigrant? What role does one's home nation, and one's own politics, play?

I think there is a naivete to the term "expatriate" that precludes complications which might be key to understanding a text. It seems to undermine other characteristics (sexual, racial, economic) as well as other critical approaches (particularly the postcolonial). I'm not sure that there isn't a place the category of expatriate literature, not necessarily; but, if there is to be one — if we are to think of a series of books and authors as having certain qualities that link them together into a literature distinct from others in some way useful to scholars, students, or readers — it will be eminently problematic, more so I think than national designations already are.

Vendler on Robert Lowell

A new Art Institute of Chicago lecture by Helen Vendler on the late- or post-Modernist poet — who also happens to be one of my favorite poets — Robert Lowell, made available from The Poetry Foundation. Her lecture is, as her talks and writing always are, learned and thoroughly researched, giving it authority where it lacks some aspect of daring originality. She says, in contrast to the anti-democratic Pound and Eliot, "when Lowell becomes democratic . . . he becomes democratic in seeing other people as ruined creatures like himself."

Tóibín on Cheever at the LRB

At the London Review of Books, Colm Tóibín reviews Cheever: a Life. He takes the following quotation from Cheever's journal for 1963: 'My grandfather is supposed to have died, alone, unknown, a stranger to his wife and his sons, in a furnished room on Charles Street. My own father spent two or three years in his late seventies alone at the farm in Hanover. The only heat was a fireplace; his only companion a halfwit who lived up the road. I lived as a young man in cold, ugly and forsaken places yearning for a house, a wife, the voices of my sons, and having all of this I find myself, when I am engorged with petulance, thinking that after all, after the Easter egg hunts and the merry singing at Christmas, after the loving and the surprises and the summer afternoons, after the laughter and the open fires, I will end up cold, alone, dishonoured, forgotten by my children, an old man approaching death without a companion.'

Tóibín later writes of Cheever's novel The Falconer, 'The novel, which is short, has a relentlessness in tone, a gravity and seriousness, which is unlike anything else Cheever wrote. It is as though the book were not merely a strained metaphor for all the anguish Cheever felt and caused in his life, but a dark exploration and recognition of that anguish, presented in a style which was factual but also heightened and controlled and then filled with pain. The style is risky in the way it allows bald statement to brush against an overall vision which is like something from the Psalms. The sense of violence, hatred, pain and deep alienation is offered raw; beside this, love, or something like love, comes as dark redemption or another form of power. In the middle somewhere are the grim ordinariness of prison life and some brilliant sex scenes. If you ignore the upbeat, cheesy ending, Falconer is the best Russian novel in the English language.'

Objectivity in the Media

The Poynter has an interesting article on the role of The Daily Show, according to the show's producers and writers: 'When both sides are represented, writer Elliott Kalan said, there needs to be more fact-checking and deeper questioning: "A senator or governor will be on the news and will say something completely biased, and newscasters won't call them on it. They should be checking these people. Instead they don't want to alienate them and they let them say whatever they want."

'He argued that the news media — and political commentators — need to look more critically at both sides of an issue, and spend more time breaking down complicated talking points for news consumers. Too often, Kalan said, journalists adhere to neutrality to the point where it paralyzes their ability to ask tough questions and undermines the power of objective, informed opinion.

'Kalan described objectivity as having opinions that are pro-facts, and neutrality as meaning you have no stake and no say. The Daily Show, he said, aims to be objective. And funny.'

Linguistic Currency

At The Nation, Ange Mlinko writes about language and economics, and the 1970 novel Metropole: 'In Metropole, the 1970 novel by Ferenc Karinthy, a linguist named Budai traveling to a conference in Helsinki boards the wrong plane and finds himself in a country whose language, despite all his training, he can't begin to parse. Budai tries out a variety of common languages on hotel staff, with no success; he starts posting signs in different alphabets, only to see them ripped down. He spies what looks to be a phone directory, swipes it, and does the rational thing: he sets about writing down "all the different characters he could find" and calms himself with the thought that once he has a restricted range of data, he can start deciphering their writing system and find his way back home to his wife and young son. But "he soon realized that he had noted over one hundred characters and that he was still discovering more."

'[. . .] Karinthy, himself a linguist, was born in 1921 in Budapest to one of the most difficult mother tongues in Europe. His sympathy is keen, then, as he tracks the progress of Budai's logic, factoring all the variables that a linguist would juggle: should he read the newspaper left to right (like Hungarian), right to left (like Arabic), horizontally (like Hungarian) or vertically (like Chinese)? What if it is in boustrophedon (like ancient Greek)? He starts to look for articles: statistically probable, short recurring words. But when he doesn't find any, he remembers that in some languages (like Romanian) end-signs take the place of articles, and in other languages (like Russian) there is no article. Numbers elude him: "Maybe there were several words for the same number, just as in certain languages the figure 0 can be indicated by nil, zero, nought or even love?" On the crowded street trying to navigate, he realizes "maybe they employed the kind of name that did not need a qualifier, such as the Strand and Piccadilly in London, Broadway and the Bowery in New York, Rond-Point in Paris, the Graben in Vienna and the Korond or the old Oktogon in Budapest." Even the attempt to isolate common words on street signs is a dead end.'

Sounds very interesting — anyone else read this novel?

Efficient University Guidelines

At the Times Literary Supplement, Stefan Colini discusses the new British research funding evaluation guidelines, which 'explicitly exclude the kinds of impact generally considered of most immediate relevance to work in the humanities – namely, influence on the work of other scholars and influence on the content of teaching. (Those are said to be covered by the assessment of the publications themselves.) For the purposes of this part of the exercise, “impact” means “on research users outside universities”. General readers do not appear to count as such “research users”. So, 25 per cent of the assessment of the “excellence” of research in the humanities in British universities will depend on the evidence provided of “impact” understood in a rather particular way.'

These new guidelines are, by Colini's account, about 65% economic and 25% public policy; and they are, in that regard, a quirkily British response to a problem of allocation: every answer to any problem is practical and, forever underlying practicality, economic. Colini writes, 'we need to try to use a more adequate language in public discussion lest these officious abstractions start to colonize our minds. One reason why measures such as these do not now provoke more vociferous opposition is that over the past three decades our sensibilities have been numbed by the proliferation of economistic officialese – “user satisfaction”, “market forces”, “accountability”, and so on.'

By 'our', Stefan means only his colleagues in academia, but the same could be said of any member of the general public: the terminology of economic activity have certainly come to dominate English since the Victorian era, a process Colini refers to (ironically?) as colonization. It is not only the 'liberal academics' who are perturbed by this, either. The relatively conservative ethicist Alasdair McIntyre, in his 1981 volume, After Virtue, — joining the ranks of innumerable progressive and Marxist critics — similarly scolds the modern age for placing efficiency, and not virtue, as its core cultural value.

The economization of language (reflecting the centrality of efficiency) exacerbates larger issues plaguing universities today, particularly of private institutions in the United States. As with all institutions, universities are only designed to operate efficiently at certain proportions; when they outgrow their own ability to balance infrastructure, income, and services promised, they begin to fail. Endowments alleviated the problem for a time, allowing other values to displace efficiency, but since the crash the vale has been removed: private universities are a kind of company, paying for goods and being paid for services, and they rely on efficiency to persist. Today, universities are going broke; the business side of higher education is getting ugly. Economic values are being pushed to the fore again as a solution.

Most academics would rather ignore this — claim a neutrality of the ivory tower. But unless the business aspect is acknowledged, and addressed, one can easily imagine efficiency-minded bureaucrats laying out similar evaluative guidelines. I agree with Colini that the UK's evaluative principles simply don't make sense for the humanities (I'm not sure that directive- and results-oriented science research is effective either), and I doubt that we would see them duplicated exactly. Still, if I were a humanities scholar, I would be looking for ways to nip this idea in the bud.

Really Go[dine]od Deal

From now until December 20, David R. Godine, Publisher, is offering the five titles above — Nobel Prize–winner Le Clézio's novel The Prospector; New York Times and New Yorker essayist Arthur Krystal's collection Half-Life of an American Essayist; comic cult favorite Russel Hoban's Linger Awhile; and poetry from Lynn McMahon and Clayton Eschleman — all for $35.00, more than $60.00 off the list price! It's really is a good deal, get it while it lasts, only through the Godine website.

Brady on Boston Noir

At PopMatters, former high school and college classmate (and the only guy I know what can pronounce Dorchester the way my grandfather did) Michael Patrick Brady reviews Boston Noir, a new anthology edited by new-classic author Denis Lehane. Brady writes, 'Boston is a city that long reveled in its underdog status; its citizens wore their disappointment like a badge, and now struggle with the embarrassment and guilt of being spoiled with prosperity and comfort. In the place of ugly, oppressive elevated freeways, they find lush greenways. Where once stood abandoned, burned out buildings now sit luxury condominiums and haute eateries. Sports teams who dashed hopes time and time again are now laden with trophies, their celebratory parades considered quotidian. It’s a transformation that Dennis Lehane, accomplished crime novelist and the editor of Boston Noir, says has made the city a less interesting place to live. “As the city continues to lose its old-school parochialism and overt immigrant tribalism,” he writes in a brief introduction, “it’s also losing a lot of its character.”

'It’s a sentiment that’s undoubtedly true, but blithely elides the real cost of such local color and character. From the boring, beige present, it’s dangerously easy to romanticize the city’s history as one of chummy, close-knit neighborhoods and gritty excitement while casually forgetting the racial animus, crime, corruption, and economic hardship that bound that old world together. Such misplaced nostalgia also glosses over the problems that still exist in the city, in the neighborhoods that gentrification and economic progress have overlooked, particularly Roxbury, Mattapan, and western Dorchester, whose residents would surely prefer their environs had a little less character and a little more security. What makes for a good story does not always make for a good city.'

John Banville on The Original of Laura

At Bookforum, John Banville reviews the posthumous novel ('let us call it a novel, for now,' he writes) of Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura: Dying is Fun. Banville writes, 'It is not a nice thing to have to say in the circumstances, but Dmitri Nabokov's introduction is a lamentable performance, stridently defensive, slippery on particulars, and frequently repellent in tone. Aping Nabokov père at his aristocratically disdainful worst, he makes jibes at "half-literate journalists," dismisses someone's "asinine electronic biography" of his father, and wearily deplores the "lesser minds" whom it has been his misfortune to encounter over the years when he was debating whether to publish or not. Reading these introductory pages is like being trapped in an airless room with a priggish adolescent dressed up in his father's outsize clothes — tails, white tie, spats, and all — who expatiates on the awfulness of the masters at his school while puffing on one of Daddy's finest cigars and turning slowly green.'

It seems the progeny of authors are destined for these grotesques, driven towards them, presumably, by familial insecurities: Zukofsky and Joyce spring to mind, of course, as well as Kerouac recently. Others number among these too, some entirely un-public and, so, unknown to us. At the very least, the unknown are spared our pity, a brand that will conjure up an unstated but perfectly realized humiliation in the years to come. It is Bloom's anxiety of influence intensified, swallowed, manifested outside the realm of the arts.

I can't imagine that The Original of Laura will, in the slightest, support or tarnish Nabokov's literary reputation: an unfinished, disowned, hardly-written work doesn't carry enough importance to do much of anything. In that regard, it's publication is a non-event; or, at least, it is not a literary event: it is a commercial exercise, 'a triumph of the book maker's art' which I can very much appreciate. It is, by all accounts, simply a thing for the fans of Nabokov to own — a piece of ephemera, a souvenir: a coffee mug with the author's face on it or a magnet with some pithy quotation.

Der Spiegel Asks the Big, Big Questions

In an interview with Italian polymath Umberto Eco, which focuses primarily on Eco's love of lists and the importance / role of lists in culture, Der Spiegel seriously whips it out to see whose is bigger: 'Should the cultured person be understood as a custodian looking to impose order on places where chaos prevails?' Jesus Harold Seamus Christ, that is one hell of a question.

The Feminism Conundrum

At The New Yorker, Ariel Levy asks, 'why has feminism, which managed to win so many battles — the notion of a woman with a career has become perfectly unexceptionable — remained anathema to millions of women who are the beneficiaries of its success?' It's a good question. At the National Post, we see exactly this type of backlash: Marni Soupcoff makes light of the Toronto Poet Laureate by describing her as 'a Marxist feminist', 'the poster child for the politically correct academic', and as an 'identity-obsessed activist insider'. It is an odd thing to be able to publicly ridicule a woman for being successful, intelligent, and feminist.

Levy writes, 'The easier victories involved representation, or at least symbolic representation. For all the backlash against Roe v. Wade, the movement had steady success in getting women into the government and the private-sector workforce. The contours of mainstream feminism started to change accordingly. A politics of liberation was largely supplanted by a politics of identity. But, if feminism becomes a politics of identity, it can safely be drained of ideology. Identity politics isn’t much concerned with abstract ideals, like justice. It’s a version of the old spoils system: align yourself with other members of a group — Irish, Italian, women, or whatever — and try to get a bigger slice of the resources that are being allocated. If a demand for revolution is tamed into a simple insistence on representation, then one woman is as good as another. You could have, in a sense, feminism without feminists. You could have, for example, Leslie Sanchez or Sarah Palin.'

What the movement has become, in some sense, is a movement framed entirely by the politics of the wealthy: you can have a rich liberal woman empowered, or a rich conservative woman empowered, and you are to live vicariously by their success. Practical equality between men and women is no longer the goal of feminism. We also very often frame the role of the wife / mother and husband / father in entirely traditional ways, even when describing the goals of feminism: the woman 'has the choice' now, the implication being that the man's role of financial support is still mandatory while the woman's role is newly flexible. (Realistically, neither partner probably has a choice at all. Times are tough.)

Still, equality between partners seems out of the conversation. Equality would entail a woman's being able to support a family while her husband stays home and have that exist as a normative option for families — not a special case. The question of financial support would begin open-ended, to be answered by the situation of each equal individual. It would probably entail a widespread support system for families with two working parents as well. I am a big fan of the government-subsidized early education and childcare system, which was apparently voted into law long, long ago:

'In 1971, a bipartisan group of senators, led by Walter Mondale, came up with legislation that would have established both early-education programs and after-school care across the country. Tuition would be on a sliding scale based on a family’s income bracket, and the program would be available to everyone but participation was required of no one. Both houses of Congress passed the bill.'

And then, President Nixon vetoed it; of course he did. As a man who grew up in a working single-mother household, I have to admit this makes me a little angry. My mother could have afforded us a better life — particularly by getting a BA at night school, but also by not working as many second jobs to pay for my care (which she needed, ironically, because she worked). The fact of a female politician, judge, or CEO doesn't help much, although it is a sign of opened possibilities. Women and men will likely not hold an equal place in our society until we create a realistic support system for the working family.

At any rate, another version of the feminist identity question presents itself, obviously, in the arts. The stereotype of the 'identity-obsessed activist insider' is an easy one to pick on — fess up, you know some people who fit it — but the vehemence with which this type is attacked is harder to explain. The fact of pride is not itself odious. Maybe it is the feeling of loss one gets from hearing beautiful, identity-focused poetry: the resources of the world seem finite, and the rarest of the them seem eminently exhaustible; perhaps people feel this way about beauty too, or about the authority of literature. Too much in one identity does not leave enough for the rest.

I've found myself unmoved by some literary work because it relies on shared experience, like an in-joke, that I simply lack — Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, for instance, drew upon a popular British boarding school trope to which I have no connection, and the book fell flatter for me than for others for this reason. But I experienced no visceral response to it, either. Also like an in-joke, there seems to be an exclusionary air about identity-based lit, and about identity poetry in particular, that breeds a negative response. That itself could be the key: a simple, almost childish trait about people: that no one likes to feel excluded.

The Aught Nots: a Lost Decade

At Slate, Daniel Gross writes about the years 2000–2010 as something of an economic lost decade, 'Incomes were basically stagnant during the decade while the costs of vital goods and services — education, health insurance, energy — spiked. The latest report from the Census Bureau on income, poverty, and health insurance is full of interesting data that show that median household income in 2008, at $50,303, was below where it was in 1998. The same report shows (see Table B-1 on Page 44) that both the number and the percentage of people living below the poverty line rose, from 11.9 percent in 1999 to 13.2 percent in 2009.

'Many factors explain the sluggish performance. Globalization, the continuing information technology revolution, and the offshoring of manufacturing and service jobs kept employment in check. But at root, it turned out that the policies enacted by the folks running the system — low interest rates, cutting taxes aggressively, disempowering unions, empowering Wall Street, deregulating the financial system — just didn't work as advertised. Meanwhile, policymakers neglected some important areas that can help support financial stability — such as health insurance. Between 1999 and 2008 (see Table C-1, Page 59 of the census report), the population of the United States rose 9 percent, but the uninsured population of the United States rose 19.5 percent.

'There were a few areas of progress. Partisans of the decade's economic policies liked to hold up the rise in homeownership as a success. Instead of buying stocks, Americans were buying McMansions and condos. And as these census data on homeownership rates show, the housing and mortgage bubble boosted the homeownership rate, which peaked at about 69 percent in 2006. But while stocks and bonds are bought mostly with cash, homes were purchased mostly with debt. And what leverage giveth — higher homeownership, lots of jobs tied to real estate — leverage taketh away. Once the housing market peaked in the summer of 2006 and foreclosures started to mount, the homeownership rate declined. Today, it stands at 67.6 percent — almost precisely where it was in the fall of 2000.'

BEA: We Didn't Start the Fire

Recently, Richard Nash and Bloomsbury Press publisher Peter Ginna have both discussed the future of Book Expo America, the leading trade show for the publishing industry in America, and its continued down-sizing. I've written about BEA before on The Wooden Spoon [LA in 2008 and NYC in 2009], describing it once as 'the mascot for this country's ass-backwards, failing book culture.' Maybe my description was just the result of a bad day at the office — these things happen. Maybe not, though. Ginna writes, 'BEA has been all about traditional channels of bookselling, which everyone agrees aren’t effective enough anymore. Publishers are concerned they’re wasting their money at BEA, and with good reason. But instead of reinventing the show, transforming it into a new, better way to market our product — yes, to the public as well as booksellers, librarians, and media — the current approach seems to be to try to do the same thing in a cheaper way. Hm, sounds like the general strategy most big publishers have adopted over the last couple of years.'

Richard Nash offers some alternative models to the current Publisher-Bookseller dynamic, 'I and others have been crying out not just for a party but for at least one day of the show to be open to the public. Witness the remarkable success of events like the LA Times Festival of Books (140,000 attending), the Decatur Book Festival (70,000 attending after only five years in existence), the Brooklyn Book Festival, to name some outdoor events, and New York Comicon, organized by the same folks that organize BEA, but with exhibitors who actually care about the fans, 70,000 of whom show up.' We hope that the brand new Boston Book Festival will aim for such lofty attendance goals, too. We'd like that an awful lot.

The way people talk about BookExpo, you would think the show had some kind of independent life, as if an autonomous being threw BEA with or without us each year; or, that it was an essential aspect of publishing like, say, printing or binding. (Cutting costs by not binding books would be laughable — this is not 18th century France, after all.) The big players will continue to push it, because it's the only chance they get to show everyone else in the industry how much bigger they are. (You could write a book about Freud and the use of foamcore.) I'm not sure that their attendance alone could carry the show, though.

For small presses, or even moderately-sized indies, it might make more sense to forgo BEA in favor of book festivals such as those Nash mentions. If meeting with bookstores too distant to visit is no longer the goal — if actually placing orders is no longer the goal — then the money might be better spent garnering media and public attention more directly, and more efficiently.

A.F. Moritz on Poetry, Community, & Isolation

At the Poetry Foundation (from the November issue of Poetry Magazine) A.F. Moritz writes, 'In each era, the relation of poetry and society changes; for us, it is bound up with the problem of isolation and communion — our basic social question. Sounding this question leads us to the role of poetry, in the general sense, as it exists, or could exist, in all of us, and in the specific sense, as poems. [. . .] Poetry is, above every other human endeavor, the place where person and society are not merely joined but revealed in their original unity. Poetry is the place where the strange, painful division we have created between person and society is suffered, despaired over, denounced, subjected to comparison with memories and dreams and myths of better times, and given the gift of a prophecy: that the proper unity still and always persists, and that it can become the world we actually live in, not just in verse, but on both sides of our front door.'

Reading Thursday with Ernest Hilbert & Mark Schorr

Nabokov's Laura

At Slate today, Aleksander Hemon reviews the recently published pieced-together work by Nabokov, The Original of Laura, 'Here and there, however, a perfectly cut Nabokovian gem sparkles: "A cloudless September maddened the crickets." Or take Flora's earliest lover "drawing junior-size sheath over his penis, which has its head turned somewhat askew as if wary of receiving backhand slap." It is also good to see that the master never lost his passion to dress down one Dr. Freud or address the inherent mediocrity of the writers (in this case Malraux, Michima [sic], and some more obscure ones) who pretend to represent an era, whereby "such represéntants could get away with the most execrable writing." Such flashes of light only make the fog around them look thicker, a fog that would probably have been dispersed had the great Russian managed to forestall the process of dying by organ failure.

'Although there is a spark of creative excitement discernable in the manuscript, suggesting that Nabokov was up to his old brilliant tricks and making one wonder how he would have pulled off a self-deleting book, The Original of Laura can't escape the musty air of an estate sale: The trinkets that piled up in the attic; the damp books from the basement; the old man's stained cravat; the lonely figurines that used to be part of a cherished set; the mismatched, overworn clothing—all are brought out in the hope that there might appear a buyer for those sad objects, someone blinded by literary nostalgia and willing to rescue the family possessions from the waste basket.

'It would be ridiculous, of course, to blame the deceased for the estate sale. Nabokov was not merely unequivocal in his desire that his notecards be destroyed. He was also adamantly clear in his views on excavating unfinished manuscripts and the drafts preceding final, published versions—as well as on the absolute value of a finished work of art. In the introduction to his translation of Eugene Onegin, he wrote: "An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius by studying cancelled readings. In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the results count." '

Heidegger's Foundations

At The New York Times, Patricia Cohen writes, 'For decades the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been the subject of passionate debate. His critique of Western thought and technology has penetrated deeply into architecture, psychology and literary theory and inspired some of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century. Yet he was also a fervent Nazi. Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.” '

To my mind, if one feels that the philosophy is worthless (and I was certainly never sold on it as an undergraduate) then all one needs to do is attack the philosophical work itself. If it is a mere ballast for Nazism, that fact can be illuminated. One needs to prove nothing about the man himself. Sartre was a communist, Machiavelli a royalist, Hume a Whig and an atheist: shall their work be labeled as such? It seems then we would be, forgoing all other qualities, categorizing these thinkers by their flaws alone.

It sounds as if the book in question does this to some degree. Cohen writes, 'While he doesn’t dispute Heidegger’s place in the intellectual pantheon, Mr. Faye reviews his unpublished lectures and concludes his philosophy was based on the same ideas as National Socialism.' Still, it seems — well, let's say that I'm skeptical that the foundations of Heidegger's philosophy were somehow far more Nazi than Husserl.

Matt Bell from The Critical Flame

Frances Theodora Parsons' How to Know the Wild Flowers — written under the pseudonym Mrs. William Star Dana, published in 1893, and acknowledged as the first true "field guide" — begins with a brief section explaining the purpose of its innovative format. In that section — entitled, helpfully, "How to Use This Book" — Parsons writes:

'Many difficulties have been encountered in the arrangement of this guide to the flowers. To be really useful such a guide must be of moderate size, easily carried in the woods and fields; yet there are so many flowers, and there is so much to say about them, that we have been obliged to control our selection and descriptions by certain regulations which we hope will commend themselves to the intelligence of our readers and secure their indulgence should any special favorite be conspicuous by its absence.'

In a similar manner, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, edited by Tara L. Masih, will not be all things to all readers. In their preface, press editors Kathleen Rooney and Abigail Beckel admit as much, noting that it is "not necessarily the case that you will be able, even hiking the whole path of this book, to see all the flora and fauna this particular 'field' has to offer." Nonetheless, what is collected here is a broad sample of the current state of writing flash fiction, including twenty-five brief essays by practicing flash fiction writers, editors, and teachers, as well as accompanying writing exercises, and story samples.

Rooney and Beckel claim that their aim is not to "pin. . . inventive forms down with strict definitions" nor to "sink their ever-changing manifestations beneath the weight of scholarly scrutiny. . ." Yet, perhaps inevitably, this is a book obsessed in part with both the definition and analysis of flash fiction as a form. In fact, the first task that nearly every essay in the book embarks upon is determining the definition of flash fiction, and, as a result, the form’s definition arrives piecemeal, and with far less certainty than that with which Parsons named and explained the illustrations in her original field guide. Where How to Know the Wild Flowers is clear in its separations of one species of flower from another — this is pink azalea, and only this — the essayists included in Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction have a more complex task in front of them, due to the widely differing definitions and sub-definitions of the term.

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J.M.G. Le Clézio on Claude Lévi-Strauss

A beautiful consideration of the recently deceased philosopher and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss by Nobel Prize–winner J.M.G. Le Clézio at the New York Times:

'What always struck me most about Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s thought was his ability to dodge the traps of modern ethnology, sometimes so much like old colonialism. There is an enormous difference between Mr. Lévi-Strauss and his most notable predecessors, E. E. Evans-Pritchard or Bronislaw Malinowski: his humanity and his melancholy kindness, which made him reluctant to go into the field for fear of intruding on the people he studied or finding himself disappointed by what had been lost to the evolution of modern times.

'Still, Claude Lévi-Strauss overcame his reluctance and went, opening our minds to the extraordinary complexity of the Bororo’s and Nambikwara’s way of life. He expressed in his books the beauty and intelligibility of myths. And he kept in his heart the warmth and the modesty of the young man he once was, a man who was struck by a pessimistic sympathy for dying civilizations, dying people.'

The End of the Top 10?

At Jezebel, Anna North considers a good question: is it time to stop the Top Book Lists, such as the recent Publishers Weekly Top 10 Books of 2009? As has been noticed in such outlets as The New York Times, there is not a single female author on the list, raising questions about long-held critical biases against women's fiction.

Of course, it's possible that the top books of the year were without question written by men. It is improbable, but possible. However, with such acclaimed writers as Mararet Atwood, Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Rae Armantrout, and Barbara Ehrenreich having all released new titles this year — as well as new well-reviewed work from authors such as Adichie and Van den Berg — it strikes me as being more than a coincidence or a statistical anomaly.

Anna North writes, 'When a list like this one draws criticism — and they have in the past — the compilers usually defend it with the argument that "this is just what we like." But what we like is subject to deeply held and unconscious biases, and when we think we're being objective, we are often praising what we're most comfortable with, or what we think is most deserving of praise based on whatever stereotypes we grew up with.'

TBG chides me sometimes for the dearth of female authors in my portion of our library. She is mostly kidding but, also, absolutely correct — I must be honest about this. Although a reasonable portion of my favorite books were penned by women, the majority of the books I own and love were written by men. This is particularly true of our LitCrit bookshelf, on which I believe Helen Vendler, Julia Kritsteva, and Virginia Woolf may lonely huddle; and, of these three, only Vendler is my contribution.

So, what gives? To begin, my high school education was pretty old-school: began with Homer and Shakespeare, on to Moby Dick, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman, then to T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. Part of it was random (plenty of my classmates read more women than I did) and part of it was the canonical bent. College was definitely more balanced. Since then, I've gone on recommendations — which have included authors like Ozick, Atwood, Kristeva, and Vendler — but the recommendations I get are still predominantly for male authors, who also seem to dominate the critical sphere.

And from here, I have no excuses. Thoughts? Recommendations? Top ten lists are dumbed-down and necessarily exclusive, and not good critical work; but, in being so obviously limited, this list has raised a good question. If it gets us to question our biases, our reading habits and habits of reviewing, then I'd say it has done some good.

Harold Bloom on Samuel Johnson

Harold Bloom has a review at The New York Times on the new biography of Samuel Johnson: 'Johnson, at 26, arrived in London without money and with only his more than considerable wit, learning, judgment and astonishing energy. He worked at literary odd jobs and only gradually raised himself out of Grub Street. Breakthrough commenced with “A Dictionary of the English Language” (1755), after which Johnson was famous enough to remain solvent, and sociable enough to keep himself from his terrible fear of solitude. He knew his balance to be perilous, and he feared madness.

Nokes is particularly moving and informative on Johnson’s relation to his Jamaican manservant, Frank Barber, a freedman who essentially became Johnson’s son, though without formal adoption. A childless widower, Johnson willed Barber his estate and effects, hoping that the young man could prosper without him.

I myself, as I age, go on reading Johnson, seeking the consolations of wisdom. Though an excellent poet and storyteller, aside from his critical power, Johnson now matters most as a wisdom writer. His test for literary criticism was its success at “improving opinion into knowledge,” and the knowledge he sought was wisdom. His own writing became increasingly aphoristic, in the mode of Ecclesiastes. My favorite Johnsonian aphorism is supremely subtle in its irony: “All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.” '

The Transformation of Roses

It is tempting, as William H. Gass writes in Reading Rilke (Basic Books), to organize Rainer Maria Rilke’s life story around the several themes that obsessed and stalked him, particularly the image of the Rose. As it was for his contemporary Yeats, and many poets before and after them both, roses were the source and object of many of Rilke’s most brilliant poems and metaphors, including one of his finest lyric works, “The Bowl of Roses.” However, to think of Rilke's life in terms of his own mythologies is to fall into the trap of choosing aesthetics over facts, gloss over content.

Rilke did not lead a mythical life, but a tragic and mundane one. He was a deeply troubled person whose early years were a model case for Freudian analysis. His parents quarreled often, both of them failed social climbers who blamed each other for their mutual unhappiness. Until he entered school, Rilke’s hyper-religious mother dressed and treated him as a girl, and called this feminine “good self” Sophie, all in lieu of mourning the baby girl who died just before the poet was conceived. His father had failed in the armed services and attempted to live out this fantasy of success by proxy, sending Rilke to a military academy — it was not a happy experience. For the rest of his life, Rilke would flee from mother figure to mother figure, drawn particularly to the influential iconoclast Lou Salomé; he would worship several father figures, first Tolstoy and then Rodin, who rejected him offhand; he would be a failed literary organizer, a persistent philanderer, and a sycophant of the aristocracy he encountered.

The poet was also, and particularly late in his abbreviated life, an ardent supporter of young writers, revered and beloved within a moderately-sized circle of readers, and a true imaginative genius of the century. Robert Musil famously asserted that Rilke was “the greatest lyric poet the Germans have seen since the Middle Ages,” that he “did nothing but perfect the German poem for the first time.” It is hardly an exaggeration. In Rilke’s oeuvre, we find some of the most beautiful and moving lyrics of the twentieth century, many of which resonate as if they had been written today. Indeed, his poems touched upon such human dilemmas that persist into our postmodern world, as in the existential “The Panther” where, in the caged beast, “a mighty will stands numbed.” Lines from the Sonnets to Orpheus — “All that we’ve gained the machine threatens, as long / as it dares to exist as Idea, not obedient tool” — reflect our modern paranoia about the internet as well as they did his own anti-modernism. Rilke's best work, as is the case for so many great poets, contain some universal quality that renews itself to meet the needs of each new generation. [. . .]

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from The Critical Flame :: Issue 4, November 2009

“A Congealed Nebulosity”
a review by Nigel Beale

Reading Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Critical Writings feels a lot like what it might to step into a graduate seminar in 19th and 20th century poetry without having taken the prerequisite courses, or completed the required reading.

It will not be immediately understood by “a common well-educated, thoughtful man of ordinary talents;” or, for that matter, by anyone of extraordinary intelligence who hasn’t read with great care at least some of the works of, among others, T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, W.B.Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and John Crowe Ransom.

The volume is filled with references and brief quotes which tee up the complex thoughts of renowned philosophers, literary scholars, and poet / critics, so that Hill can knock them around. And this he does wonderfully well in a collection of bracingly argumentative essays that scrap with almost everything and everyone they touch: T.S. Eliot is crass, alienated and unfocused; John Crowe Ransom does not make points “at all well”; British poet Laurence Binyon’s “critical imagination is lacking.” . . .

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The Critical Flame :: Issue 4, November 2009

Friends! Americans! Readers! Lend me your screens —

The Critical Flame is proud to announce the publication of Issue #4, Nov / Dec, our last of the year. Within its digital pages, you'll find Quarterly Conversation editor Scott Esposito reviewing Evelio Rosero's new novel The Armies, winner of The Independent's Foreign Fiction award in 2009; eminent broadcaster and journalist Nigel Beale reviews The Collected Critical Writings of Geoffrey Hill, winner of the 2009 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; your humble editor Daniel E. Pritchard grappling with The Poetry of Rilke, newly compiled, revised, and translated by Edward Snow — and more. Enjoy!

As this is the final issue announcement for 2009, let me take a moment to add extra and unending thanks to the writers, friends, and fiancée who supported me with their careful editorial eyes, their precious time, and their whiskey. It's all still amazing to me. ~ D.

In a New York State of Poets

In a very funny, very serious article at The Morning News, Daniel Nestor writes, 'In New York, it is a self-licking ice cream cone that depends on untalented poets to keep the system going. The more paranoid poets regarded their skills as a threat to those toward the bottom of the Ponzi scheme, whose worship of higher-ups were not adequate enough to rise a level on the Poetry Chain of Being. [. . .] Poets around me were trying too hard to imitate their immediate predecessors, were too keen to keep up with current fashions, what Valery calls “painstaking embellishments,” all of which leads to a lack of connection to the reader. I’d like to be able to say I did not employ painstaking embellishments, but as I saw which poems got published, which poets won prizes, I became obsessed with novelty and bells and whistles.'

Pinsky on Yeats at Slate

At Slate, Robert Pinsky discusses W.B. Yeats' poem "Adam's Curse," writing: 'The casual surface of speech and the inward energy of art have a clear relation in "Adam's Curse" by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). A couple and their friend are together at the end of a summer day. In the poem, two of them speak, first about poetry and then about love. All of the poem's distinct narrative parts — the setting, the dialogue, the stunning and unspoken conclusion — are conveyed in the strict form of rhymed couplets throughout. I have read the poem many times, for many years, and every time, something in me is hypnotized by the dance of sentence and rhyme. Always, in a certain way, the conclusion startles me. How can the familiar be somehow surprising? It seems to be a principle of art; and in this case, the masterful, unshowy rhyming seems to be a part of it. The couplet rhyme profoundly drives and tempers the gradually gathering emotional force of the poem in ways beyond analysis.'


"Adam's Curse"
by William Butler Yeats

We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, "A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world."
@@@@@@@@@@@@@And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, "To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful."
I said, "It's certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
Precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough."

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

Colm Tóibín on Gerard Manley Hopkins

At the New York Review of Books blog, Colm Tóibín has a brief review of a recent theater production, 'No Worst There is None', on the final five years Gerard Manley Hopkins spent in Ireland. Hopkins was living in Dublin at the time, in a deep despair that he pinned on the place, and it was there wrote his gorgeous, gripping 'terrible sonnets' (terrible in the sense of their depth of feeling; in the same sense as 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God').

Toibin writes, 'Somehow, the low ceilings and the more cramped spaces conjured up a gloom all of their own; this gloom was not dispelled by the dwindling light in the city outside, the slow sense of winter coming with all its dampness, or the pervading news of the Irish economy which is in ruins. As we watched the poet in the bed, the twenty-five of us, who had bonded somewhat as we moved from room to room contemplating the precise spaces where Hopkins had felt his dark despair, had reason to join him in believing that “no worst, there is none” and asking, as he did, someone to send our roots rain.'

'No Worst, There is None. Pitched Past Pitch of Grief'
by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'

    O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

Almost There Yet

Putting the final shine on CF :: 1.4, Nov-Dec'09, which should publish this week!

Until then, words to live by from Slate, regarding the life of a battery: 'No matter what you do, your battery will become a useless piece of junk — one day it will reach a point where it can no longer be charged, and then you'll have to recycle it. It will die if you use it often. It will die if you hardly ever use it. It will die if you charge it too much. It will die if you charge it too little. You can pull the battery out of your camera, stuff it under your mattress, and come back for it in five years. Guess what? Your battery will be dead. And when I say dead, I mean dead — not that it's run out of juice, but that it can no longer hold a charge. That said, there are ways to prolong your batteries' lives.'

Genius by Way of Affiliation: Kirsch on Rand

At The New York Times this week, Adam Kirsch reviews the new biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. He writes, 'Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand’s teaching. The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect. [. . .] while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do.'