Author: Edwin Turner

Hitler’s Private Library — Timothy W. Ryback

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In Hitler’s Private Library, Timothy W. Ryback works from Walter Benjamin’s assertion that “a private library serves as a permanent and credible witness to the character of its collector.” Ryback delves into the books–the actual, physical books–that Hitler studied and pondered, paying particular attention to the dictator’s annotations and marginalia. To be sure, there are plenty of political tracts–especially anti-Semitic writings, such as Henry Ford’s The International Jew–to be found in Hitler’s library, but far more fascinating is Ryback’s analysis of Hitler’s love for Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare, Don Quixote, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of all books. Hitler’s taste was varied–there’s an early infatuation with Max Osborn’s Berlin, an architectural guide to that city, an obsession with Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and Hitler’s final day’s poring over a biography of Frederick the Great (he also comforted himself in the final days of his regime by rereading his boyhood favorite Karl May).

The Nazi party’s lurid mania for occultism is well documented, but Ryback brings a fresh perspective here, eschewing tabloid histrionics in favor of a measured approach to Hitler’s volumes of bizarre and arcane works. More troubling is the public misconception that the works of Schopenhauer and Nietchzsche some how gave philosophical weight to the Nazi’s crime spree; Ryback eliminates that notion:

For all the talk of Hitler’s exploitation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concepts of the “master race” or Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion of the “will to power” that Hitler used to headline the 1934 party rally and Riefenstahl cribbed as a title for her cinematic chronicle of the event, we have little credible evidence of Hitler’s personal engagement with serious philosophy. Most of what we know is tenuous and at best anecdotal.

In short, Hitler was a poseur who recontextualized bit parts of great thinkers into mind-numbing sloganeering for his own ends (luckily, no politicians today would be so crude). Ryback’s even-handedness here is indicative of the project of his book: his is not a psychological study; he never seeks to explain the motivations for Hitler’s evil actions, but rather report what Hitler read closely. What we get in the end is an historicized, contextualized account of a bibliophile who initiated book burnings and mandated reading lists.

Hitler’s Private Library is really a book about books and how what we read shapes and then testifies to who we are and what we did in our life. I am not particularly interested in Hitler or the (well-documented) history of WWII, but I found in Hitler’s Private Library both a fascinating dialogic analysis as well as a new narrative take on some pretty stale material. The philosophy of Walter Benjamin permeates Ryback’s book, which is also a big plus. I’m not sure if the world needs another book about WWII, but I’m always a sucker for books about books. Recommended.

Hitler’s Private Library is available in hardback and ebook on October 21st, 2008 from Knopf.

Road Movie

Edwin Turner5 Comments

“Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes” — John LeCarre

Movies rarely compare favorably to the books from which they are adapted and almost never surpass them. Still, film adaptations of books can be fantastic if handled by the right director–take Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón for example, whose brilliant films Children of Men and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (adaptations of books by P.D James and J.K. Rowling, respectively) convey richly imagined, engrossing worlds. Cuarón’s films join a small stable of adaptations that live up to–if not surpass–the books on which they are based. Most great film adaptations turn good genre fiction into great art. However, great literature doesn’t usually fare so well. Geniuses like Kubrick and Coppola have reconfigured airport reading like Stephen King’s The Shining and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather into cinematic masterpieces, but has anyone ever done justice to Melville or Hemingway or Hawthorne or Fitzgerald (of the four attempts at translating Gatsby to the screen, the 1974 Coppola-produced effort is arguably the best, but consider how short it falls of capturing Fitzgerald’s vision)? Which brings up the question: just how good, bad, or indifferent will the upcoming movie adaptation of Cormac McCarhy’s Pulitzer Prize winner The Road be? We thought we’d navigate the pros and cons here.

What The Road film adaptation has going for it:

The director: Australian director John Hillcoat’s 2005 feature film debut The Proposition captured the bloody violence and moral ambiguity of a world alienated from civilization. We loved the movie, and not enough people have seen it. The tone Hillcoat achieved in The Proposition seems well matched to McCarthy’s grim vision.

The producer: Nick Wechsler’s list of films includes Sex, Lies, and Videotape, The Player, Requiem for a Dream, 25th Hour, and Drugstore Cowboy–so it seems like he knows how to sit back and let a filmmaker create art without trying to, you know, have a massive Hollywood hit.

The leading man: Viggo Mortensen as the father seems like a great choice. Mortensen brought depth to the role he’s most famous for–Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy–something of a feat when you consider most of his screen time was devoted to scowling, brooding, or chopping up orcs. He was fantastic in the films he did with David Cronenberg, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises (his bathhouse fight scene is unbelievable). Mortensen’s a published author who started his own publishing house, Perceval Press, so he probably understands the literary gravity of The Road.

The story: Anyone who’s read The Road knows that it’s a sad and moving and strangely beautiful take on one of the most hackneyed devices of science fiction: the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

No Country for Old Men: The Coen brothers did a great job with No Country for Old Men.

Potential problem spots for The Road film adaptation:

The cast: We don’t know much about twelve year old Kodi Smit-McPhee who plays the son, but we do know that that is a major role. Let’s hope Kodi is more Jodie, less Jake Lloyd or (shiver) Dakota Fanning. However, Viggo’s had pretty positive things to say about him. Ringers Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce are also in there, but there aren’t too many other speaking parts in the book besides the father and the son, so it’s hard to predict what they’ll be doing–hopefully Hillcoat hasn’t fiddled with the story too much. Charlize Theron is also in the movie. The wife character showed up in a few dreamy flashbacks, but was more of a shadow than a fleshed out character; again, hopefully Hillcoat hasn’t chosen to expand the role to appease a wider demographic.

The story: Some of the best moments of The Road consist of the father’s inner monologues on memory and loss and very few directors can pull off a voice-over successfully (Terrence Malick is the only one who comes to mind right now). Of course, this problem of language is always the problem of movie adaptation.

All the Pretty Horses: Billy Bob Thornton’s leaden 2000 adaptation of the first of McCarthy’s “border trilogy” is pretty boring. I’ll admit that I’ve never finished the book, despite three attempts [ed. note: I finished the “border trilogy” in spring of ’09. Books are far, far, far superior to the film].

No Country for Old Men: Even though the Coens did a great job with No Country for Old Men, the book was still better than the movie–and No Country is, in some ways, McCarthy’s take on a genre novel, the crime procedural. In this sense, the Coens made a smart move, but they still couldn’t convey the depth and meaning of the book–again, much of it delivered via Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s inner monologues. Although The Road may appear to have genre fiction elements–namely, the tropes of post-apocalyptic sci-fi–to describe it as such would be a severe limitation, as would be to film it in such a manner.

The advance stills: Sure, they’re grim and bleak, but are they grim and bleak enough?

Also, why the stylized cart? If you’ve read the novel, you know what I mean–the cart needs to be a grocery store cart, homeless style! Hang on–

–that’s better! (NB: images link to a gallery of advance images)

Does it seem worth seeing in the theater?

Yes. We’ll be carrying the fire on or around November 26th (and just in time for Thanksgiving!)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: One of Our Favorite Challenged Books

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E.W. Kemble's frontispiece to the original 1884 edition
E.W. Kemble's frontispiece to the original illustrated edition

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, undoubtedly one of the Great American Novels, ranks a healthy #5 on the ALA’s list the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books. Young Huck’s casual colloquial use of the word “nigger” and the cruel hijinks Huck and Tom play on Jim at the novel’s end are two reasons that many have sought to suppress Twain’s masterpiece, including educator and critic John Wallace, who famously called it “the most grotesque example of racist trash ever given our children to read.” Wallace went so far as to suggest that “Any teacher caught trying to use that piece of trash with our children should be fired on the spot, for he or she is either racist, insensitive, naive, incompetent or all of the above.”

I guess I should’ve been fired on the spot, as I’ve used Huck Finn in my classroom a number of times, almost always in conjunction with excerpts from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, some Philis Wheatley poems, and a UN report on modern human trafficking. Context is everything.

While I can concede readily that Huck, the voice of the novel, says some pretty degrading things about Jim, often meant (on Twain’s part) to create humor for the reader, to expect Twain’s treatment of race to be what we in the 21st century want it to be is to not treat the material with any justice. And while Huck Finn may be insensitive at times, it handles the issues of race, slavery, class, and escape from the dominant social order with the complexity and thought that such weighty issues deserve. Ultimately, the novel performs a critique on the hypocrisy of a “Christian,” “democratic” society that thought it was okay to buy and sell people. This critique shows up right in the second page. Consider these lines (boldface mine):

The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time. When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything the matter with them,—that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.

After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn’t care no more about him, because I don’t take no stock in dead people.

Huck’s dream is of a delicious mix, a swapping of juices — integration. Additionally, his disregard for the dead Bible heroes reveals that the white Christian society’s obsession with the ancient past comes at the expense of contemporary value. Huck, an orphan, and Jim, separated from his family, will symbolically echo Moses in the bulrushes as they use the great Mississippi as a conduit for escape, for freedom. Huck (or Twain, really) here points out that it’s not enough to look at dead words on a page, on old dead lawgivers–we have to pay attention to the evils and wrongs and hypocrisies that live today.

Twain even tells us how to read his book from the outset:

Now, it’s impossible to read a book–a good book–without finding its plot, searching for its moral, or caring about its characters, and Twain knows this. His “Notice” is tantamount to saying “don’t think about an elephant”–he uses irony to tell us we must find motive, moral, and plot here, and that we must do so through this lens of irony.

But of course, you have to read closely for all these things. I suppose it’s technically easier to call something trash, throw it in the garbage, and not have to devote time and energy to thinking about it. Who knows? You might learn something–and we wouldn’t want that, would we?

Wabi Sabi–Mark Reibstein and Ed Young

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Wabi Sabi tells the story of of a cat from Kyoto named, uh, Wabi Sabi, who goes on a journey of self discovery in order to find out the elusive meaning of her name. Mark Reibstein’s simple but lovely script effectively incorporates haiku poems (including three haiku composed by Wabi Sabi herself, who finds artistic freedom at Ginkaku-ji) that can stand on their own as a simple story. Artist Ed Young brings Reibstein’s story to vivid, shimmering life. Not enough praise will do justice to Young’s rich, dense collage illustrations, which evoke the luxurious complexity one associates with masterpieces of ukiyo-e. Young’s kinetic yet peaceful art resonates with the book’s theme of finding beauty in the incomplete or imperfect, and is probably the best reason to buy this book. Wabi Sabi reads up-and-down as opposed to left-to-right, evoking a traditional scroll, allowing Young to utilize the depth and motion of the full space. The book also features short but detailed (and aesthetically-pleasing) endnotes explain the history of wabi sabi, haiku, and haibun. This short appendix also includes an English translation of the 14 haiku poems by Basho and Shiki that show up in the margins (in kanji, no less) on each of the pages.

Wabi Sabi was too long for my fifteen-month old daughter’s precious attention, and the scroll-style layout made it almost impossible to read with her on my lap (the book is also pretty much impossible for my scanner to handle, unfortunately for you dear reader). Also, I think the illustrations were a little too nuanced and complex for her–very young children tend to like strong, defined lines and bright primary colors. I’m convinced, however, that Wabi Sabi isn’t so much a children’s book as it is an art book for aesthetes with an interest in traditional Japanese culture–and I enjoyed it very much. Recommended.

Wabi Sabi is now available from Little, Brown.

Death of the Author

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“[O]nce I’m done with the thing, I’m basically dead, and probably the text’s dead: it becomes simply language, and language lives not just in but through the reader” — David Foster Wallace, quoted in Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace

In the quote above, DFW illustrates why, when writing at his best, he was able to transcend the cold irony and post-modern goofiness of forbears (and, to some extent, contemporaries) like DeLillo and Pynchon. Wallace understood language as a game, and understood that the game was cooperative. He knew that it wasn’t enough to be clever–readers need to care about that cleverness. If the author is dead, and the text is dead, then the language has to live on through voices, through perspectives, through a series of interior identifications: this is where DFW excelled and dazzled. The myriad voices that lard Infinite Jest testify the power of walking in another’s shoes and seeing through another pair of eyes–in caring for the other. This is the power of literature, and this is why Wallace was such a powerful writer. And this is why we’ll miss him so much.

Wallace’s work went past the post-modern (counter)tradition of meta-textuality and self-referentiality, and commented–sometimes with a painful awareness and acuity–on the emotional deadening produced by contemporary irony and consumerist culture. His characters weren’t just placeholders to be pushed around in the hopes of proving a point, but real, achieved voices who lived through the reader. DFW’s project was not to simply repeat the postmodern realization of the indecidability of textuality, but to work through that realization into a new realm of connection and meaning and identification with his readers despite a cold, ironic, and sometimes meaningless world. In both his groundbreaking fiction and his brilliant essays, DFW delivered what matters the most in any piece of writing–subjects and characters you care about (often despite yourself). Postmodernist thought declares there’s nothing outside the text, a supposition many contemporary authors explore and expound upon in chilly irony or silly wordplay. Even when he was negotiating problems of meaning, signification, and communication in the face of alienation, fragmentation, and despair, David Foster Wallace gave us fully-realized worlds populated with characters we could care about.

There are any number of reports out there right now that mischaracterize DFW as an author who hid behind wordplay and irony. Consider Guy Adams ridiculous lead in The Independent: “For a writer who elevated irony to an art form, and whose infinite jesting co-existed with an all-too-apparent dark side, it felt grimly appropriate that David Foster Wallace should have chosen suicide as the means by which to end his own life story.” Did it feel “grimly appropriate”? Why? What was “grimly appropriate,” about David Foster Wallace’s suicide, Guy? Adams reinforces both his ignorance of his subject as well as his lack of literary understanding with this tidbit: “For all his natural ability, and occasional brilliance, Wallace never lived-up to the fullness of his talent, or the haunting reach of his possibilities.” Adams’s dismissive-yet-inflated rhetoric is exactly the kind of verbal posturing that needs to be shouted down right now by those who’ve actually read Wallace and can testify that his brilliance was anything but “occasional.” And that, I guess, is my only real goal here. Adams is wrong. It’s not true that “Wallace never lived-up to the fullness of his talent”–that phrase doesn’t even mean anything. Who measured the fullness of Wallace’s talent? When did that measurement take place, and in what units was said-talent measured? The measure of DFW’s talent can only be assessed by actually reading his work, and that’s what you should do–especially if you’ve been putting it off. Our author may be dead, but he lives on in a language game played with his readers via the act of reading, and this is a game where everyone stands to win.

For DFW

Edwin Turner9 Comments

This post will be full of typos and rhetorical slips and just generally bad writing. I’m just gonna write and post and I won’t bother editing. Sorry.

This morning, after BLTs with wife and child I checked my email. My buddy Damon sent me this article from the New York Times. Damon’s subject line, “David Foster Wallace dead at 46 (suicide)” kinda blew my mind. I didn’t get past the first lines of the Times report before tears started coming out of my eyes.

I’ve read all of DFW’s books, and, as corny as it sounds, the majority of them spoke so directly to me, so intimately, that I feel as if I’ve lost someone I knew. I’m sure that this isn’t the case at all, because he’s a writer and I’m his audience. He’s not friends or family. But reading him doesn’t feel that way. I would describe his style as a really, really good friend sitting on the couch with you, telling you stories that were both painfully funny and painfully sad. Infinite Jest provided a world of escape–a world I became addicted to–when I felt lonely in a foreign country I’d moved to. Girl with Curious Hair changed forever the way I thought about writing and reading–it opened me up to a whole new bank of authors and styles. But it’s probably DFW’s essays that hit me most directly.

Anyone who’s read the title essay from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, or “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” from that same collection knows just how funny and insightful and analytical Wallace could be–all without any of the caustic meanness a lesser writer might employ. DFW’s essays–and fiction–are always negotiating the razor line between earnest emotion and ironic detachment. He hated the latter but understood it was part of a cultural mode, part of the counter-tradition of post- or meta- fiction that he was continuing and responding to with his own writing. The two essays that probably best exemplify this are a Fun Thing‘s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (this should be required reading for every thinking person) and “Authority and  American Usage,” DFW’s take on who-decides-what-is-proper-grammar-and-diction (collected in Consider the Lobster). I was re-reading the essay last Thursday and last night, with the intention to finish it today, with the intention to use it as part of something else I had planned to write. It will be impossible to finish it with the same reading schema in mind.

Just last week I listened to DFW reading from some as-yet-unpublished stuff; one section, on an overachieving boy that everyone hates is hilarious. The crowd is sometimes laughing too hard for DFW to maintain his rhythm and he has to slow down. In the interview that follows the reading, DFW seems like a really sweet, honest guy.

I remember distinctly my cousin calling me, well over a decade ago now, to tell me that Kurt Cobain had shot himself. I felt nothing then–it seemed perfectly logical. I was a huge Nirvana fan; they were my first concert and a big musical/cultural determiner in my young life. But his suicide seemed normal, natural even to me. I remember thinking “Of course.” When Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide, it seemed strange to me that he’d taken so long to do it. And when one of my favorite writers of all time, Kurt Vonnegut, passed away last year, I felt sad, but not so sad. So it goes.

This, this devastates me though. How could he hang himself? Why? I feel selfish and sad. Will we get another novel? Is it wrong to feel this way? I’m pretty sure that it’s wrong. I think about his body, hanged, and it makes me sick. I honestly felt close to this person. Unlike DeLillo or Pynchon or Barth, there was no veil or mediation in Wallace’s greatest work, no distance between his voice, or his speakers’ voices and my own burning internal ear. I have no pithy statement or philosophical wax for this piece, I have no way of summing up here. I feel sick.

Tree of Smoke — Denis Johnson

Edwin Turner8 Comments

One year after it topped book critics’ best-of 2007 lists everywhere (including ours), Denis Johnson’s Vietnam War epic Tree of Smoke is finally available in a handsome trade-paperback. Picador’s edition retains the original orange and yellow cover, only now affixed with the proud blazon “National Book Award Winner.” However, that Tree of Smoke won this prestigious award no doubt ruffled a few feathers. It still remains an urgently divisive work.

Although plenty of critics and readers loved the novel, including The New York Times‘s Jim Lewis (who cautiously called it “something like a masterpiece”) and Michiko Kakutani, it has had more than its fair share of haters. Consider B.R. Myers’s downright mean review, “A Bright Shining Lie” in The Atlantic. Here, Myers displays the worst kind of vitriol. He’s the critic who feels the need not only to trumpet his hatred of the work he’s assessing, but also to lambaste the dignity, taste, and intellect of anyone who would disagree with him. Myers specifically attacks Johnson’s rhetorical style, his diction and syntax, and concludes that those idiots who would praise such inane, base, and clichéd language (idiots like me, that is) are clearly the cause of all current social and political problems and “have no right to complain about incoherent government.” Uh, sure. Myers’s baseless zealotry aside, it’s worth looking at the popular reception of Tree of Smoke, and what better place to do so than scouring Amazon reviews, right?

A cynic might say that Amazon reviews are the bottom-barrel of literary criticism, yet it’s still worth considering the almost perfectly mathematical split between 5- and 4-starred reviews of the book and 1- and 2-starred reviews (although none of the negative reviews I read on Amazon suggested that praising Johnson’s novel disenfranchised one from political opinions). Put simply, most people tend to either hate or love Tree of Smoke, which, I believe, is a sign of great art. And, were I inclined to inflate my rhetoric to a grandiose level like Myers, I might here wax philosophical about opinion, perspective, history, and the value of great art to ignite debate and discussion within the marketplace of ideas. However, I don’t think a book review is necessarily the best venue to make grand sweeping statements. At best, such writing presents a shallow or hollow endorsement of a collective truth (e.g. “Everyone assesses literature from their own perspective and therefore everyone values books differently”); at worst–in the case of Myers’s grotesque review–we get a pompous, overblown, self-important declaration (here, praising Tree of Smoke = losing the ability to authoritatively comment on society or politics) that can only be supported within the limited rhetorical bounds created the sophist has constructed (i.e. Myers’s review). But I’ve made a long digression, and, worse, I’ve failed to really discuss the book at all.

My initial review of Tree of Smoke last year was really a review of Will Patton’s masterful audio-recording of the novel (I was reading Ulysses for graduate school at the time and simply did not have the time to read both). I loved the experience; Patton did a great job, and I found myself wholly addicted to the narrative. When the advance copy of Tree showed up in the mail earlier this week, I immediately re-read the coda of the book in a single sitting. I would say the measure of a great narrative is not its core, its climax, or its beginning, but how well the conclusion is able to deliver the promises established throughout the book. Tree of Smoke delivers, and its ending continues to haunt the reader well after the book has been set aside. Readers like Myers may not get the payoff–he claims that “Johnson’s failure to understand [his character’s] faith is such that when he uses it to end the novel on an uplifting note, the reader feels nothing.” However, I hardly think that a watery Hallmark-word like “uplifting” properly connotes the weight, pathos, and sheer pain that Johnson conveys and addresses at the end of the book (Myers’s shallow diagnosis leads me to believe he merely skimmed the novel). Ethics of literary criticism aside, the real triumph of Tree of Smoke is simply that Johnson manages to comment in a new way on a subject that, by 2007, had been done to death. Who knew that we needed another story about the Vietnam War? Denis Johnson, apparently. Read the book for yourself. Very highly recommended.

Tree of Smoke is available in paperback from Picador on 2 September, 2008.

High Society–Dave Sim

Edwin Turner1 Comment

If you’re at all interested in reading any of Dave Sim’s epic 300-issue comic book Cerebus, a book chronicling the life–and death–of a misanthropic mystical barbarian aardvark, High Society is the best (and possibly only) starting point. High Society tells the story of Cerebus’s political adventures in Iest, the largest cosmopolitan city-state of Estarcion. Guided (or perhaps manipulated) by Machiavellian Astoria, Cerebus undertakes a strange, comic odyssey of political ascendancy, culminating in an election for Prime Minister (against Groucho Marx stand-in Lord Julius’s goat, of all things). Sim has a deft ear for political satire and the volume holds up particularly well to a rereading against the backdrop of the current American electoral process. While High Society conveys a certain cynical contempt for the cronyism, deal-making, and the general nasty malfeasance that underwrites politics, there’s also a reconciling of democracy, liberty, and art here that you could never find from a CNN analyst or a Fox News hack. By this point, the crude art and flubbed pacing that hampered the first few years of Cerebus are nowhere to be found. High Society is tightly-plotted, full of smart gags expressed in Sim’s keen lines, without an over-reliance on bubbles overstuffed with exposition.

The book is funny without ever being light, and rereading it again, I was surprised at how moved–and exhilarated–I was by the conclusion. Although the parody of Marvel’s forgotten Batman ripoff Moon Knight doesn’t hold up very well, and the “sideways” issues at the end are an annoying (but interesting) experiment, High Society continues to deliver both laughs and insight about the political process over twenty years after its single-volume publication. Very good stuff, and highly recommended (read it along with/against the 2008 election).

(Strange aside that I couldn’t work into the piece–remember Ken Jennings? That guy who won Jeopardy! like, a year straight? According to his blog he’s a huge Cerebus fan).

Writing in the Ellipses

Edwin Turner2 Comments
Balthus--The Living Room
Balthus–The Living Room

Flipping through Balthus‘s digressive, discursive, elliptical memoir Vanished Splendors, I came across this notation:

I deeply believe in the genius of painting, which parallels that of childhood. I’ve used painting as a language without really having decided to do so, because it suits me better than writing. Writing tries to be too explicit and go directly to meaning. That’s why I could never be a writer like many of my friends. Some aspects of my life might be clarified by the present short texts, similar to letters. . . . For me, writing can only be in the ellipses, where I express myself; painting conveys this magnificently, sometimes unbeknownst to the painter himself.

Elsewhere, Balthus lists the writers and texts he loves, and gives us (what I believe to be) a great definition for reading:

I often paint young girls who are reading. It’s surely because I saw the act of reading as a way to enter life’s deeper secrets. Reading is the great means of access to myths. Green, Gracq, Char, Jouve, Michaux, and Artuad were frequent passageways, as well as the great holy writings of the Bible and initiates like Dante, Rilke, the Pléiade poets, the great Chinese writers, the mystics John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, not to mention Carroll, the pure German poet Ludwig Tieck, and Indian epics. All these texts and authors were landmarks in my life, and gave me another dimension of time to which I soon felt myself summoned. My young girls who read in dreaming poses are escaping from fleeting, harmful time . . . Fixing them in the act of reading or dreaming prolongs a privileged, splendid, and magic glimpsed-at time. A suddenly opened curtain sheds light from a window and is seen only by those who know how. Thus a book is a key to open a mysterious trunk containing childhood scents. .

Balthus--Girl with Cat
Balthus--Girl with Cat

But, my favorite lines in the book come at the end of the following passage:

Painting is something both embodied and spiritualized. It’s a way of attaining the soul through the body. . . . Being too cerebral and jokey can obstruct an artisan’s manual labor, and impede the ascent to the soul. Believing that my young girls are perversely erotic is to remain on the level of material things. It means understanding nothing about the innocence of adolescent languor, and the truth of childhood.

Exactly. Whenever I look at Girl with Cat, I think, man, that’s not perversely erotic at all…that’s just the innocence of adolescent languor–the real truth of childhood, actually. Nice try, Count Balthasar.

Moral Relativism — Steven Lukes

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Moral relativism is the belief that ideals of right and wrong and good and bad are contextually determined by one’s local culture, as opposed to a theory of morality that holds that good and bad exist as absolute, metaphysical values existing cross-culturally, values intrinsic to one’s humanness. At the same time, individuals, even those (sometimes especially those) who see moral relativism as the overwhelmingly rational, sensical position, nonetheless are inextricably tied to their own sense of right and wrong, and this sense often leads them into a position of judgment–and perhaps action–against, over, and/or in reaction to the perceived wrongs of other cultures and societies.

In his new book Moral Relativism, NYU sociology professor Steven Lukes employs an interdisciplinary approach to tackle one of the biggest sticking points of contemporary thought. Using a variety of methods including philosophy, anthropology, history, and literature, Lukes addresses the fundamental conflict of moral relativism: that what’s right and good in one’s own culture may not be right and good in another’s culture, yet a will remains to believe in ideals of universal human rights. Lukes uses a number of timely concrete examples, including female genital circumcision, Islamic fundamentalism, and mass immigration, to assess the costs and payoffs of holding a view that says that no absolute morality exists. Perhaps the most fascinating part of Moral Relativism is Lukes’s negotiation of Western (or globally Northern, as he saliently points out) human rights actions as an extension of colonialism, with the one-time colonists imposing their values–again–upon the one-time colonized.

Lukes concludes that “the question Who are we to judge other cultures? is a bad question.” Arguing that the “postcolonial and multicultural contexts of our time do not require us to see the discourse and practice of human rights as ethnocentric,” Lukes takes up a position–well-argued–that a moral fundamentalist might claim is simply a liberal humanist wanting to have his cake and eat it too. Which, of course, is the problem with the book. It’s a fantastic argument for moral relativism, one that points out that no one–no one–is absolutely relativist, and that, in fact, being a moral relativist entails recognizing that within cultures certain perceived absolutes exist. The idea that right and wrong are relative doesn’t mean that right and wrong are arbitrary or don’t exist–it simply means that ideals of right and wrong have to be reconstituted within different systems of social and cultural order. Yet Lukes’s book isn’t going to convince the types that need convincing. Still, those of us who think that moral relativism is simple common sense will find plenty of concrete, contemporary, real world ammunition here in case we feel like arguing with a–gasp–moral fundamentalist.

Moral Relativism, available now, is part of the new BIG IDEAS // small books series from Picador Books.

In the Land of No Right Angles — Daphne Beal

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In the Land of No Right Angles tells the story of Alex, an American college student backpacking in Nepal for a year. Alex’s overseas adventure becomes complicated when she meets fellow American Will. Will prompts Alex to help bring a poor Nepalese girl named Maya to the capital city of Kathmandu, and the three move in to an apartment together. Awkwardness ensues, including a failed threesome, a bad drug trip, and some major cultural misunderstandings. Alex leaves on a sour note, returning eight years later as a professional photojournalist to expose the horrors of human trafficking, only to find Maya embroiled in Bombay’s seedy sex trade.

The novel reads at a rapid clip, propelled by lots of dialog, and Beal certainly shows a complex knowledge of Nepali culture. Still, there’s something pervasively shallow, even troubling about Alex’s interactions with and reactions to her experience with this alien culture that the novel doesn’t quite resolve. The reader is meant to identify with Alex, the privileged American on her adventure to the exotic East. At one point, Alex states, “I wanted to come home different from what I’d been–bolder, wiser, happier.” This desire to find one’s self far away from home is nothing uncommon, of course, yet Alex’s–and Will’s–professed altruism toward their subject, poor little Maya, ultimately comes off as paternalistic and demeaning, culminating in the older Alex’s quest to “save” Maya. It’s hard to feel the empathy or sympathy that Beal wishes to evoke for Alex’s dilemma: in spite of all her questing, she still falls prey to the illusion of her own power as an educated Westerner to control the outcomes of alien others. To take a cue from Edward Said’s work revealing Orientalism in Western thinking, Alex’s East–and the people in it–exist mostly to reify and stabilize her own identity, give her her the adventure she needs to “come home different” with plenty of great stories to share.

Orientalist critique aside, Alex does have a pretty good story to tell. Beal’s descriptions are vivid and the novel has the compressed vitality of a good memoir coupled with a tone of immediacy that makes it easy and enjoyable to read. In the Land of No Right Angles will no doubt end up in more than a few book clubs this fall, and it’s certainly your smarter than average beach read–and there’s still plenty of summer left.

In the Land of No Right Angles is available August 12th from Anchor Books.

Violence — Slavoj Žižek

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Slavoj Žižek describes Violence as “six sideways glances” examining how our preoccupation with subjective violence (that is, the personal, material violence that we can see so easily in crime, racism, etc.) masks and occludes our understanding of the systemic and symbolic violence that underwrites our political, economic, and cultural hierarchies. Žižek believes that a dispassionate “step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and promote tolerance,” and that a rampant “pseudo-urgency” to act instead of think currently (detrimentally) infects liberal humanitarian efforts to help others. This is where the fun comes in. Žižek delights here in pointing out all the ways in which we fool ourselves, all the ways in which we believe we’ve gained some kind of moral edge through our beliefs and actions.

I use the words “fun” and “delight” above for a reason: Violence is fun and a delight to read. Žižek employs a rapid, discursive method, pulling examples from contemporary politics, psychoanalysis, films, poetry, history, jokes, famous apocryphal anecdotes, and just about every other source you can think of to illustrate his points. And while it would be disingenuous to suggest that it doesn’t help to have some working knowledge of the philosophical tradition and counter-traditions to best appreciate Violence, Žižek writes for a larger audience than the academy. Yet, even when he’s quoting Elton John on religion or performing a Nietzschean reading of Children of Men, Žižek’s dalliances with pop culture always occur within the gravest of backdrops. Within each of Violence‘s six chapters, there’s a profound concern for not only the Big Questions but also the big events: Žižek frequently returns to the Iraq War, the 9/11 attacks, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as major points of consideration. This concern for contemporary events, and the materiality of contemporary events, is particularly refreshing in a work of contemporary philosophy. Undoubtedly some will pigeonhole Žižek in the deconstructionist-psychoanalytical-post-modernist camp (as if it were an insult, of course)–he clearly has a Marxist streak and a penchant for Lacanian terminology. Yet, unlike many of the writers of this philosophical counter-tradition, Žižek writes in a very clear, lucid manner. There’s also a great sense of humor here, as well as any number of beautiful articulations, like this description of the “dignity and courage” of atheism:

[A]theists strive to formulate the message of joy which comes not from escaping reality, but from accepting it and creatively finding one’s place in it. What makes this materialist tradition unique is the way it combines the humble awareness that we are not masters of the universe, but just a part of a much larger whole exposed to contingent twists of fate, with a readiness to accept the heavy burden of responsibility for what we make out of our lives. With the threat of unpredictable catastrophe looming from all sides, isn’t this an attitude needed more than ever in our own times?

I’m inclined to answer, “Yes.” Highly recommended.

Violence, part of the new BIG IDEAS // small books series from Picador Books, is available August 1st.

Chemical Chords — Stereolab

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When “Valley Hi!” pops up roughly half way through Chemical Chords, Stereolab’s ninth studio album, the realization sinks in that on just about any new group’s new album the song would be a great achievement, a perfectly constructed pop song, fun, bouncy, a little sly even, with sexy lead vocals, effervescent harmonies, and tight but lush instrumentation. However, wedged into Stereolab’s nearly two-decade-long oeuvre, the song barely stands out, and that’s the problem. The band consistently delivers material like this, to the point that it all kinda sounds the same–a charge that’s been leveled at them by critics and fans alike for a few years now, starting more or less with 1999’s Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, a record that some (maybe many) thought failed to live up to the radical revisionist pop tendencies of 1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup (it’s hard to top a perfect album, folks!) or the digital experiments of 1997’s Dots and Loops (my least favorite Stereolab album; sounds like marbles rolling on ice). I happen to like Cobra a lot: it’s warm (and literally fuzzy) and masterfully played–and kinda anonymous, a trend that Stereolab continues with Chemical Chords.

From the outset of the new album, Stereolab establishes a metronomic motortik pop vibe from which they rarely deviate. Opener “Neon Beanbag” flows into first single “Three Women” without much to differentiate the two besides a two second gap and a key change, and the third track, “One Finger Symphony,” only stands out due to its throwaway brevity. It isn’t until Sean O’Hagan’s slinky strings announce the title track that the album grabs onto something new. “Chemical Chords” approaches a ’70s blaxploitation vibe–think Curtis Mayfield or Bobby Womack here–but ends up being (you guessed it) just another Stereolab song, beautifully polished and meticulously executed with little or no risk to band or audience. The next track, “The Ecstatic Static” slides right into the same groove, and it becomes apparent that Stereolab have released yet another perfect ambient soundtrack for any polite social gathering. The rest of the album follows this mode of flawless and ultimately forgettable songwriting.

There are moments of exception, of course, but only moments. The countryfied swagger that initiates the penultimate track, “Daisy Click Clack,” is pretty great, if only for simply hitting a different rhythm and sound, and the song’s lyrics are about making music, which is always cool. It’s on “Pop Molecule (Molecular Pop 1),” where Stereolab employ backmasked drones and triumphant chugging guitars that recall the glory days of tracks like “Crest,” from ’93’s Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements (or anything off of ’92’s dreampop singles collection, Switched On), that the band finally gets its hands a little dirty–with great results. Too bad they only play it out for about two minutes; the old groop would’ve droned those two chords for at least six–the listener doesn’t ever get a chance to get hypnotized.

It seems like I’m bashing the album, but I’m not. I love Stereolab. Really. And Chemical Chords is pretty good — it will hang out in my stereo for a month, maybe two, and then I’ll forget about it. Ultimately, it’s too polished, too precise, and too meticulous to make any long-term impact. We know Stereolab are fantastic arrangers and musicians, and their taste is impeccable, but when bands fail to take risks, the music gets stale.

Chemical Chords is available from 4AD Records in the US on August 19th.

The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories

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There’s something fun-but-not-too-fun about James McConnachie and Robin Tudge’s The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories, a lovely little coffee-table encyclopedia that investigates everything from the strange death of playwright Christopher Marlowe to the disputed Apollo 11 moon landings to the sinister happenings at Bohemian Grove to the 9/11 attacks. The book is dubious and skeptical in all the right places, yet never snotty or wholly dismissive of the marginalized ideas it presents. Also, none of the lurid tabloid earnestness that marks the work of lifers like Alex Jones or David Icke can be found here (Icke does get his own five paragraph section, however). For the most part, the 450 or so pages of Conspiracy Theories are evenhanded, concise, and well-researched. A bibliography follows each section, and at the end of the book there’s a “Conspiracy Archive” suggesting books, websites, and films for those who can’t get enough paranoia. Conspiracy Theory devotes a good number of pages to recent events like Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, a choice that will perhaps date the book eventually–but of course, by that time we’ll need a new edition to record all the nefarious invisible acts committed by the Bilderberg Group, NWO, Masons, and, uh, reptilian beings posing as European royalty. Good stuff.

The updated U.S. edition of The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories is available this fall from Rough Guides.

Underworld — Don DeLillo

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Don DeLillo’s Underworld explores American culture and psyche throughout–and immediately after–the Cold War era. The book centers loosely on waste management exec Nick Shay, but diverges in constant achronological loops, employing dozens of different voices and viewpoints in order to handle a variety of themes and subjects that are, frankly, too massive to get a grip on. At all times though, Underworld seems aware of this inability to document its subject’s vastness, but, like Ishmael in Moby-Dick who attempts to systemize the unknowable whales, the characters in Underworld nevertheless try and try again to find order and meaning in a paranoid and increasingly disconnected world. The real center of the book is a baseball, the ball pitched by Brooklyn Dodger Ralph Branca to New York Giant Bobby Thomson, who won the game in a hit known as “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World.” However, this ball, this center, is repeatedly transferred, deferred, shifted, and even characters who claim to own the “real” ball understand that the validity or “realness” of the home run ball is always under question. DeLillo seems to suggest that finding fixed, stable meaning is an illusion; the best that people can hope for is to find solace in their family and friends in open, honest relationships.

By the time DeLillo had published Underworld in 1997, he had already established himself as a canonized saint of the American postmodern literary tradition, yet Underworld, in its massive size and scope (it weighs in at over 800 pages) seems primed to be the author’s “big book,” destined to fit neatly in the new canon of large and long American postmodern novels next to John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Underworld utilizes nearly every postmodernist trope, including a nonlinear plot, myriad, discursive voices, and a willingness to engage historical figures. The novel also manages to contain a bulk of themes and devices DeLillo has employed throughout his body of work: find here the paranoid alienation of The Names, the shadow of assassination-as-spectacle from Libra, the intersection of art, violence, economics, and politics of Mao II, and the exploration of the new American religion, consumerism, that underpinned White Noise.

Ultimately, all of Underworld‘s themes–garbage, art, war, insulation, paranoia, drugs, death, secrets, baseball, identity, etc.–threaten to crush the narrative under their sheer weight. Unlike Pynchon, Barth, Coover, and DFW, DeLillo is rarely playful or even fun; most of the humor here serves to alienate rather than connect the reader to the characters. The book is masterfully written, and any number of the little vignettes, like the sad life of the Texas Highway Killer, or the Space-Age compartmentalization of a 1950s suburban family, expertly delineate DeLillo’s handling of concepts and motifs. However, the book’s prologue, “The Triumph of Death” (the title alludes to Bruegel’s painting), an account of the 1951 Dodgers-Giants pennant game is easily the most passionate, intense, and engaging moment of the novel. This assessment isn’t meant to suggest that the remaining 700 pages or so of Underworld aren’t as rewarding, they just aren’t as fun. Underworld is probably a work of genius, and the sum of its many, many parts do add up to more than the corpus, only that sum will probably leave a lot of readers feeling cold.

Brundibar — Maurice Sendak

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Adapted by playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, Brundibar retells Hans Krása’s children’s opera about a brother and sister who go on an adventure to get their ailing mother some fresh milk. The penniless pair decides to sing in order to earn milk money, but the cruel organ grinder Brundibar chases them away. However, they triumph with the help of a sparrow, a cat, a dog, and a cadre of helpful children.

The original opera was first performed by the children-inmates of a Nazi concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia. The symbolic overtones of the story are pretty straightforward, and Sendak emphasizes the point, marking his Brundibar with a Hitlerish mustache and a ridiculous Napoleon Bonaparte hat. Political symbolism aside, Brundibar is simply a great book, full of little songs, beautiful art, and a unique narrative style in which individual characters get their own speech bubbles and even street signs tell a story. This isn’t my one-year old daughter’s favorite book–yet–but it’s certainly one of my top picks from her little library. Good stuff.

On Rereading

Edwin Turner3 Comments

So I just read Blood Meridian again. And–

Like many bibliophiles, I have a stack of books marked “to read,” both a physical and a mental one, a stack that only grows, one that my book-buying addiction feeds and that the reader in me can in no way deplete. The saddest thing in the stack–or about the stack, really (about is the proper preposition, not in) are all the books that I’m sure are just totally great (Atonement, The Sot-Weed Factor) and the ones that I’ve started at least half a dozen times yet never finished–yet (Gravity’s Rainbow, The Wind-up Bird Chronicles) that might not ever get read because of all the new books that get thrown on the stack.

The saddest thing though, is that we–and the “we” here is not editorial, folks, it refers to bibliophiles–we simply don’t reread enough. Because I teach high school, there are dozens of books that I get to reread every year. Every time I read Macbeth or Of Mice and Men or Their Eyes Were Watching God, I’m amazed by how rich and complex and just downright masterful these books are. Each new reading produces new insights, layers, new motifs unraveled, new details, once seemingly mere happenstances, reveal themselves as key to the whole ship and shebang. Rereading is good. And yet we don’t reread enough, precisely because of the stack, the insane egomaniacal compulsion to read all of the great books before, uh, death.

And so well and so thus I reread Blood Meridian. I read it a few months ago, put it down in a daze, read a few more books, all etiolated by comparison, and then, despite the stack I picked up Blood Meridian again, a strange ineffable compulsion forcing it into my hands; I didn’t want to reread the whole thing, just a few passages, and then, and then, well and then so well and thus I was just rereading the whole thing, a whole new book there under the book I thought I had read, had known, knew. I had experienced this before: when I first read Holden Caulfield, we were the same age; five years later I was five years older and he was a jerk. A decade passed and he was an alien (maybe I was a phony). Now, well, now I’m afraid to read the book

We can’t ever really know a book because we change. The book doesn’t change but the reading of the book changes. Because I get so much out of a rereading, because I know that reading in itself is not enough, the stack–which, I should probably emphasize, is a very real, physical presence, a little mound by my bed–because of this, there is a second distress, a pain of not only not being able to read all of the books, but also not being able to not reread many of them that deserve it.

So and well, after I reread Blood Meridian, I do something that I do after I finish every book–I go pick up a couple of books that I’m desperate to reread, as well as a few from the stack. The feeling is strange and breathless and giddy, and ultimately overwhelming. I uncover over old bookmarks, shocked that I made it so far on the last attempt, or stumble over the first five pages. I lie to myself, reading sections of Finnegans Wake, as if.

Right now I’m halfway through DeLillo’s masterpiece Underworld. It’s huge and unwieldy and really fucking good, and I will finish it–this time–but even as I read it I know that I’m missing half of it, that I can only really “get it” in the rereading. And yet and well this is a book that’s been in the stack for years. I have no solution, and I guess there’s no point to this post, only that I wish I had more time to read and then to read again.