Extreme gardening

Something alien is growing in the community garden on my street. The garden occupies a narrow lot, fenced on all sides and bordered by multi-family homes. There’s a wooden fence in the front; the entrance is always open. In the nearly 30 plots, all of which are planted out this year, we earnest urban gardeners have planted our tomatoes, eggplants and peppers. Bold, racy types have planted lavender or arugula or wandering Egyptian onions or albino hybrids. In July, the garden goes wild: the tendrils of my neighbor’s pea plants have reached across the gap and grappled with my Brandywines, and the raspberry bushes are threatening mutiny. We’ve got a compost pile and bees in the back. Lots of bees. The plants are green and lush right now, which is exciting, but a few weeks ago the verdant hues dimmed a little. The organizer of the garden sent out an email saying that one of us wanted to lock the entrance gate. Fruits were being plucked from vines. A locked gate is an understandable reaction to pilfering, a common problem in community gardens. You grow your plants, you carefully tend to them all summer, and days before you reap, some hooligan comes by and cleans off your pepper plant. I get it: What’s the point of gardening, if the products of your labors walk off when you’re not looking?

Ultimately, the gate idea was axed: The majority of us preferred to keep our community garden unlocked and open. And if someone comes along and swipes, well, that sucks. You could get mad, real mad, and plot your revenge. Or you can say, in your best Pollyanna voice, “I hope the people who take it need it more than I do!” or you can stomp at the ground and get over it, or you can shrug your shoulders and say that’s the price of gardening in the open.

The emails and responses grew quickly as people weighed in. People suggested signs: “Don’t Steal” or “We call the police.” A video surveillance system was proposed.

About this time, I realized I have no idea who these people are. I’ve probably seen them, greeted them, talked about bugs or taproot with them, but I can’t match emails with faces. I didn’t used to think of gardeners as being prone to extreme measures, but the situation escalated quickly in cyberspace. Last week, a gardener emailed all of us to complain that someone had stolen a few frying peppers and a basil plant from her plot. She went on to use her email to berate “them” (quotation marks are hers). In her colorful epistle, she questioned whether “they” even know what to do with the stolen food; she mocked “them” for stealing only a few peppers and not the whole plant; she said she thought “they” stole her food for spite, because “they” can. Finally, she said that if those thieves are the kind of people that live in the neighborhood, she doesn’t want to have anything to do with them. I find this fascinating because I, like most of the gardeners who garden there, live in the neighborhood—on the same street.

Her email became a battle cry. Someone thought they could secure broken-down video cameras to install around the garden—a ruse, to drive away vegetable thieves who are afraid of being recorded. Another gardener wrote back immediately to call for solar-powered electric fences. A few days later, a gardener/spy sent out a very excited email with a picture attached. He claimed he had caught photos of vegetable thieves in the act—and he was tapping the collective wisdom to find out if it was appropriate to spray the burglars with a hose. Later the same day, he sent out an email with the subject line “false alarm.” Turns out, he had taken pictures of a fellow gardener picking a few zukes from his own plant.

We gardeners are taking pictures of each other and thinking the worst. Where are we headed? An all-out produce rumble? I’ve been thinking about unexpected brinkmanship this summer because of a recent run-in with Dr. Seuss. (How’s that for a forced segue way?) We were vacationing with my in-laws in Florida, and one morning my mother-in-law surprised my son with new books. She said she had raided her kids’ bookshelves and found lots of lost Dr. Seuss books, and she was very excited to read them to Sam.

After reading The Butter Battle Book, she looked a little shaken. “Well,” she said. “That wasn’t what I thought it was.” I picked it up. The book tells the story of two peoples, the Yooks and the Zooks, who live on different sides of a wall. At the beginning, they disagree about some minor issues. The book ends with a Yook and a Zook facing off on the wall—and they both have nukes. That’s where you’re left, as a reader, seeing two Seussians about to blow each other to smithereens. It’s mutually assured destruction, the end of escalation, the final countdown, zero minutes to midnight. I thought I had known about escalation in Dr. Seuss—I’m familiar with “The Big Brag,” after all—but I was mistaken. I was delighted to find he was so political, so outspoken. I may not ever get past delight: I’m sure tomes have been written about the politics of Theodore Geisel, but that’s probably one area of literary arcana of which I will forever be ignorant.

As it turns out, one of the themes of my summer is “Escalation where you least expect it.” As for the garden—what’s going to happen when we leave the relatively cool climes of June and July and head into the really hot and humid waters of August and September? There's a storm brewing; people are drawing lines in the soil. I can't help but recall these wise words from It Came from Outer Space :

Did you know that more people are murdered at 92 degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature? I read an article once. Lower temperatures, people are easy-going, over 92 and it's too hot to move, but just 92, people get irritable.

Just Another Band From L.A.?

As I went out one morning a few weeks ago, there was a package at my door. It contained Inherent Vice, the new Thomas Pynchon novel due in stores next Tuesday. The book came my way because I sought the opportunity to review it soon after hearing, not that long ago, that a new Pynchon novel was scheduled for release this summer. As followers of Pynchon no doubt know, his previous novel appeared in November 2006, less than three years ago. Sure, there was only three years between his first novel V. (1963) and his shortest novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), but it’s been some time since any Pynchon opus was followed so quickly by a new work. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) was seven years after Lot 49, and then there was no new work until a funny, friendly intro to his old short stories, ten years after his National Book Award in 1974. Finally, in 1990, Vineland, a new novel appeared, seventeen years after GR. Then, a mere seven years later, the massive Mason & Dixon in 1997. Almost another decade would pass before Against the Day, formidable at over 1,000 pages, arrived. So, by any estimation, the new novel, at 369 pages, is a quick turn-around for the Reclusive One. It should be noted too, going in, that TP’s short novels are set in California, predominantly. Lot 49, Vineland, and now Inherent Vice. We can think 'California trilogy' if we’re so inclined. And I must add that I’m both inclined and not inclined. I’m inclined because, yes, all three, besides taking CA as their location, also all take a certain 'California State of Mind' as their main theme. When the smoke clears -- and need I tell you what kind of smoke it is? -- what the three novels share is TP’s penchant for both basking in and gently needling the predominant culture of California in the era from the mid-sixties to the early seventies. Indeed, Lot 49 was set only a few years before the year of its publication, lending it an immediacy of setting not common in Pynchon’s works. Vineland, set in 1984, looked back both at the era of Reagan’s re-election and of Nixon’s first term and suggested that, bummer-wise, they had a lot in common, though the Reagan years were worse due to all the ‘karmic adjustments’ that had to be made because of how the Sixties went down. Now, we’re back in Nixonland again, summer of 1970, a year after the Manson murders, about to go to trial, a recurring reference point à la Joan Didion’s take on the Californian ramifications of that event in her essay 'The White Album.'

Why I’m not inclined? No particular reason, I suppose, other than a certain Imp of the Perverse which makes me want to read each of the three CA novels more in terms of what they mean in their particular moments rather than what they mean yoked together as a connect-the-dots of California culture as presented by everyone’s favorite Paranoid Author. In other words, each of the three CA novels feels to me motivated by a completely different ‘trip.’ In Lot 49, the novel is ahead of the curve, satirizing aspects of the day -- who can forget DJ Mucho Maas explaining the effects of LSD -- that hadn’t quite become common currency in 1966, to say nothing of its glance at the Berkeley Free Speech Movement as something simply in the air, though major protests at non-Californian universities were yet to come.

In Vineland, the task was to remind all those who might like to bury their memories of those days, as they rode whatever conservative and generally more lucrative bandwagon through the soulless hype of the Reagan years. But it should be said that the narrative voice of Vineland was more complex than many of its initial reviewers gave it credit for. It wasn’t simply a ‘nostalgia’ trip in which TP, suffering from Tubal Addiction and jonesing for the heady days of tie-dye and patchouli, tried to reignite synapses long grown dormant. The attitude was wiser, sympathetic, but ultimately skeptical, though not snide. A bit like Frank Zappa’s attitude to hippiedom in its heyday, but more affectionate toward those ‘hungry freaks, daddy.’

Then too, both Lot 49 and Vineland treat different aspects of CA: for Lot 49 it’s the area around SF with forays to the fictional San Narciso, closer to L.A. For Vineland, it’s northern CA, Humboldt County, in 1984, with the College of the Surf shenanigans of the Sixties set between San Diego and San Clemente. And this time, in Inherent Vice, it’s L.A. all the way. The prose, enacted through the viewpoint of a Private Eye named Doc Sportello, reads like Raymond Chandler meets Hunter Thompson, and each finds the other simpatico: ‘hard-boiled’ becomes ‘head-fried.’ But one senses the book had to get into print fast, while the ‘groovy vibes’ of Obama-mania are still in the popular consciousness, and that whole Ding-Dong-The-Witch-Is-Dead thing might support cranking back into a simpler time and place where Chinatown’s Jay Gittes and Easy Rider’s Billy are, like, one.

I haven't finished reading it yet, but it’s easily TP’s lightest novel, his most simply entertaining. It might even become one of his most popular if its target audience can stop watching Nick at Nite broadcasts of the TV shows of the era and/or replays of The Big Lebowski long enough to get on board. And I wish we all could be California PIs ...

What Our Things Say About Us

Like many conceptual art installations, the Chinese artist Song Dong’s exhibition on the mezzanine floor of the Museum of Modern Art (through Sept 7) has to be experienced in order to be appreciated. Entitled “Waste not”, the exhibit offers literally the entire contents of the artist’s Beijing hutong (courtyard) house, everything that the artist’s mother, driven by the watchword of her generation in China, wu qi jing yong -- “waste nothing which might have some use” – used, recycled and hoarded over the years. Meticulously gathered, categorized and displayed in MOMA’s pristine space, are (just to name a few) stacks of wood scraps, row upon row of rolled fabric scraps, used plastic soda bottles, almost-empty toothpaste tubes, paper bags, soap scraps, Styrofoam packing material, bits of string and yarn, and plastic bags carefully folded into triangular dumplings. Song Dong was born in 1966, just at the outbreak of China’s Cultural Revolution; his mother, Zhao Xiang Yuan, in 1938, during the tumultuous years when China was at war with Japan and changed hands from the Nationalist to the Communist government. Holding onto everything you could was a type of amulet against political uncertainty and shortages of goods. In the text accompanying the exhibit, Zhao Xiang Yuan tells about obtaining soap through ration coupons during China’s bleak years, and drying her soap after each use because wet soap melted away faster than dry. Placed in historical context, it’s easy to see how even an empty soda bottle can have myriad uses, or be traded for something else useful.

We New Englanders are certainly familiar with the concept of waste not want not, traditionally wearing clothes until holes show through, driving cars till their final sputter. I’ve always imagined Eli Whitney as a hoarder and tinkerer – how else could he come up with the idea of interchangeable parts? For me, walking through the exhibition felt eerily familiar, as if I was in my own parents’ basement or some of their friends’ homes. I was reminded of my college roommate who told me that when her Maine grandmother died, they found a box in the attic labeled “Bits of String Too Small to Use.” In the pre-Costco oil crisis seventies, goods were expensive, and we never knew what a winter would bring.

On Editing, Part 2

After staring at The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer's epic about the Pacific theater of World War II, on my to-read shelf for over ten years, this summer I've finally gotten around to reading it. Interestingly, it appears to be a first-edition hardcover of the book, though it's in bad enough shape that its value as a collectible is shot (hooray!). Before reading it, I had to reinforce the spine with Scotch tape. Also, it has the name "Glass" written on the inside cover—it was my grandfather-in-law's book, and I say "grandfather-in-law" instead of "grandmother-in-law" because it's hard to imagine too many self-respecting women sitting through a book this long that tells them, over and over again, how horrible they are. I'm only half joking. Except for "The White Negro," The Naked and the Dead is the only thing I've read by Norman Mailer. And, unlike my grandfather-in-law, who—assuming he didn't wait ten or twenty years to read the book after buying it—read Mailer as a hip young writer, the Next Big Thing, I came to Mailer with the outline of his life story firmly lodged in my head. The politics. The pugilism. The woman-hating. I was given to understand that the woman-hating thing came later, in effect—that with The Naked and the Dead, Mailer was crowned one of America's best novelists; both the uneven output and the misogyny that made him an enemy of feminists came afterward. The Naked and the Dead was given a pass, as if it's too bad that a guy who turned out to be such a jerk had written such a great book, and the book's general reputation—and the fact that, as a child, I read over and over again an excerpt from it that appeared in a Time-Life photography book about the 1940s—is the reason I decided to start with The Naked and the Dead, with an eye to perhaps proceeding from there.

I'm now on the closing chapters of the novel, and it's easy to see why it has its stellar reputation. It is a great book for all the reasons that people say it is. It's got a bit of everything. There's action, extremely well-developed characters, some really amazing feats of psychological realism, and, of course, beautiful writing. For me, there's also what feels like a very accurate glimpse into the Army as an organization: the scheming, the petty infighting, the tension between officers and enlisted men, that comes as icing on the cake; Mailer may at his best in this book when he delves deep into the minds of two men who are plotting to humiliate or destroy each other. That Mailer wrote it when he was in his 20s is a bit astounding; that he pulled it off as well as he did, even more so.

What is harder to fathom is how this book got a pass on the misogyny charge that is leveled against Mailer's later work and, of course, Mailer himself. The misogyny in The Naked and the Dead is rampant. Yes, being a book about the Pacific theater of World War II, this is a book about men, and men at their most brutal, conniving, and horny. There is not a woman in sight in the main action of the book, so the long passages in which character after character longs explicitly for a good lay, or reminisces about particularly hot episodes with wives or girlfriends, don't bother me—it's high-school locker-roon talk of a sort that's easy to imagine happening in an army camp. What does bother me is the near constant refrain about "no woman is worth a damn" and the seemingly infinite variations on same, that come out of most characters' mouths; the one or two men who seem to have decent relationships with their wives or girlfriends back home are portrayed as weak, indecisive, or deficient in some way. The misogyny is so thick that it actually makes the book dumber; it feels like a huge blind spot in the author's intellect, and renders suspicious even the most intelligent things that the book says.

You may be wondering why this post is actually called "On Editing." Here's why: While the editors of The Naked and the Dead seemed to be totally okay with Mailer's hateful misogyny, they balked at the use of the word fuck, forcing Mailer to use fug instead. (In the edition I have, they also hypehanated ass-hole, which is neither here or there—just an interesting stylistic choice.) Today, the fug reads as really unnecessarily chaste, though one gets used to it. But it's interesting to me that the editors intervened severely on behalf of a four-letter word (which From Here to Eternity, by the way, got away with, so it's not just a question of falling afoul of obscenity law) but let the misogyny go, because today, those emphases would almost certainly be reversed. It's hard to imagine an editor today giving a damn about the profligacy of expletives in The Naked and the Dead—aesthetically and thematically, they're completely justified. It's also easy to imagine Mailer getting a long editorial note about the book's apparent attitude toward women, something along the lines of, "you know, we'd really like to publish this, but could you turn down the woman-hating a couple notches?" Perhaps that happened then as well, though if so, it's sad to think that's as far as it went. In any case, the final manuscript stands as a fine exhibit of how editorial standards regarding obscenity and moral values have changed in the last sixty-odd years—in response, presumably, to the perceived difference between challenging and offending their readers, a line many editors are always trying to straddle.

P.S. Yes, yes, I'm a giant hypocrite for using Mailer's biography in a discussion of his book when I just said recently that I don't see the point of same. I await your subpoena.

George Selden vs. Roland Barthes

One of the weird things, I've found, about becoming a parent is that people keep saying to me -- this started when I was pregnant -- "Oh, now you'll have the fun of re-reading all your favorite books from when you were little! Won't that be great?" Well, sure. But the thing is, I never stopped re-reading all my favorite books from when I was little. At my bedside table are at least thirty books, but one of them -- it actually lives in the table's drawer -- is a copy of Corduroy by Don Freeman. It's a newer copy I bought at the Foundry Bookstore; my original childhood copy fell apart aeons ago. This is a book that I have taken out every few months to read to myself at bedtime. My husband has gotten used to my showing him some of my favorite pictures to him: "Doesn't he look just so sad??? Poor Corduroy..."

It is true that one of the best parts of being mother to my daughter is reading to her and watching her learn to appreciate books, though at this point she's most interested in tearing them or standing on them, only once or twice a day actually sitting down and pretending to really read them. (She's good at mimicking the sound of me reading to her, though.) But the idea that I left my children's books behind when I reached the age of 13 or something is just moronic. I can't imagine doing that. I know most people do, but I think it's a real shame. Most people also think re-reading in general is a waste of time, but I don't. Most books are a waste of time; usually my feeling is, You might as well focus on the ones you love, and read them until they fall apart, like my beloved copy of Corduroy.

I did not keep all of my books from my childhood and youth; my family moved a couple of times, and that meant deaccessioning. But I have easily three shelves' worth of books from my own childhood and I do re-read them, some of them very regularly. The All-of-a-Kind-Family books get read usually twice a year (once at Passover, once at the High Holidays; sometimes, okay, at Chanukkah, too). Ronnie and Rosey by Judie Angell (a YA novel) gets read usually once a year; I actually picked up a second copy of it a couple of years ago because my original was just beat. Pippi Longstocking, the oeuvre of E.L. Konigsburg (Father's Arcane Daughter, (George), A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, and About the B'nai Bagelsin particular), and all of the novels by Louise Fitzhugh are re-read at least yearly. Ditto The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill, which has to be read in multiple editions because the text changes. Also, the George and Martha stories by James Marshall, the four Mary Poppins books, and a YA novel by Alice Bach entitled They'll Never Make a Movie Starring Me.

All of these are in regular rotation, and I'd take any one of them, any day, over a novel by Philip Roth.

There are children's books which have joined these ranks more recently, such as Beegu and Slow Loris by Alexis Deacon, and the Provensens' Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm, which I somehow missed when I was a kid. (My parents didn't believe in farms, I guess.) I am in love with it and have one copy for me and one for my daughter.

I don't understand why people pack up and toss their books from childhood if they don't have to. Why would you want to forget the stories that made you what you are? In college, when better minds (or at least more grade-grubbing minds, I guess) were happily reading moronic texts on literary theory assigned by Paul Fry (I took a class at Yale one summer; boy, was that a bummer), I was re-reading stories that were actually stories, not just pretentious trickery. The Genie of Sutton Place by George Selden is more important to me than anything Gadamer or de Man ever came up with. Let alone Roland freaking Barthes. Between The Genie of Sutton Place and S/Z? No contest.

Harry Potter and the Ignorance

I've been seeing headlines about how Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince made something like 50 trillion dollars just in the time it took me to type this sentence. And 25 trillion more just now. And so on. Curious. Apparently there is series of books about a schoolboy who is also a young wizard. And this revenue-record-breaking film is said to be adapted from the sixth of those books. Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson star, along with other, less famous but more established actors, and David Yates directs.

Do I sound detached? Well, listen. I have something to confess to you. And now seems like as good a time as any to say it. I have never seen a single Harry Potter film, nor read any of the Harry Potter books.

You may think this strange given the cultural ubiquity of Harry Potter. And stranger still given that I've been working for several years as a movie critic and a book critic. It is strange. I really don’t know what to tell you.

Maybe it's like living in New York and somehow never managing to go to the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty, and always saying how funny that is and you really should do it, like when a friend or relative is visiting from out of town so you have a good excuse, but still letting the years go by without actually doing it.

Except it's not like that.

I'm not trying to be funny, or contrary, or crass. It's not a boycott. I can't say that non-exposure to Harry Potter is a personal goal or an explicit priority. But neither, apparently, is exposure to Harry Potter.

I have sometimes wondered how culturally illiterate this makes me, and how much my cultural illiteracy matters. But I’m starting to think that at this late stage I might just have to let it go. I mean, assuming this stage is late. How many Harry Potter books and movies are there? I don't even know. Well, the stage is late in the sense that I'm getting old. I don’t mean old as in, "Damn kids today, with their wizard movies; in my day, we had Star Wars!” It’s more like, “Wow, life really is short, and there really is so much to read and see.” Such as all the stuff that came before Star Wars. I'm still not even halfway through all that stuff.

Anyway, if I change my mind, or find the time, I know Harry will be waiting for me. Making trillions all the while.

Guest Post: How Much of It Is Autobiographical?

This post appears, courtesy of Robert McGuire a freelance writer and college writing instructor who is working on his first novel. He lives in New Haven. I’m a life-long aspiring novelist making my first real attempt to finish a book at an embarrassingly late age. The big insight I needed to get going was the realization that, of all the ways I’ve managed to psyche myself out from writing, the goofiest and most powerful has been anticipating a single question: How much of it is autobiographical?

Any question a writer anticipates during the work is a way of giving voice to internal critics or fantasies of literary celebrity, and both are filthy habits. But the question of autobiography has been especially troubling because, unfairly or not, I tend to perceive it as a way of discounting the work—as if readers might judge something that is merely autobiographical as less legitimate, closer to exhibitionism than art.

Not wanting to get called out for that kind of cheat, I spent years ignoring any story idea where I could see a thin filament connecting it to my own life, which, for a novice writer, doesn’t leave a lot of material to work with. Thus, the late start. Luckily, I finally got to the point where wanting to know if I could finish a novel was more important to me than any paranoia about what people might think of the result.

That doesn’t mean the anxiety and daydreaming go away, so when I’m not working, I’m usually preparing my answer for when Terri Gross asks me if my own parents were like the hot mess portrayed in the book. I’m sure it will come up, because it always does, unless a book is set in the realm of fantasy or in distant history. And maybe even then. As Rabih Alameddine says, “If you write about a colony of rabbits, someone will ask, which rabbit is you?”

And I’m guilty of being on the other side of the question. I once interviewed Ethan Canin by telephone in advance of his visit for a reading, fighting my urge to ask how much of his fiction came from his own life. After I turned in the finished profile, my editor wanted me to call him back and ask what everyone really wanted to know: Which parts are true?

Most of the time I think the question of autobiography isn’t motivated so much by prurience or a desire to catch the author cheating than by a sincere interest. As a reader I know I taste an extra layer of delight when I suspect that the characters in The Sun Also Rises or To Kill A Mockingbird resemble their authors’ younger selves. Sussing out which parts are autobiographical can feel like another way of living in the work, a thickening in the indefinable atmosphere we breathe when we are reading.

But most authors try to squirm out from under the question, and one could publish an anthology just documenting all the ways they’ve tried. One of my favorites recently is from Colson Whitehead respecting his novel Sag Harbor: “Let’s get the boilerplate disclaimer out of the way—I overlap with Benji, and use my summer of 1985 as a touchstone for his experience, but you can’t make a one-to-one correlation between my life and his, blah blah, it’s fictional, blah blah and etc.”

Usually the author’s answer is some version of: “It’s kind of true, in a literal way in some parts, but none of it is really true in the ways that matter.” As a reader, I feel as if they’re holding out on me. But while at work on my book, I’ve gradually come to understand what they mean.

First, I’ve learned that the common metaphor to illustrate chaos theory applies here; when the butterfly flaps its wings great changes result later on. I may start by using elements from a real event, but narrative flow inevitably requires small changes in detail—the season of year, the age of the character when it happened, combining two real people into one character. Those small changes accumulate, so that the consequences and emotional impact of the event start to diverge from reality, which changes how characters will act in subsequent scenes and so on. Pretty soon, the characters lose their resemblance to the live models and they are causing new complications that never happened in real life.

Second, I’ve come to think of my book in terms used recently by Aleksandar Hemon when The New Yorker pointed out that characters in his story collection Love and Obstacles have “a trajectory similar to your own.” He allowed some similarities in the details but asserted, “I compulsively imagine scenarios alternative to what happens to me. To my mind, my stories are not autobiographical; they are antibiographical, they are the antimatter to the matter of my life. They contain what did not happen to me.”

I recognized in that answer my own impulse to write. I may use elements of my own life, but the purpose is more like the opposite of telling my story—not to reflect reality but to make it come out differently. This is another way of getting at the obvious but hard-to-accept difference between real life and fiction; to get fiction, you get to and actually must impose resolutions that real life never permits. That’s what makes narrative so attractive and, paradoxically, so tempting for readers to confuse with real life.

Mainly, I’ve come to sympathize with the puzzled responses authors have when they’re asked the autobiography question because the more I work the more it seems so much beside the point. I’m reminded of a favorite scene in The World according to Garp. The struggling young writer (based on Irving?) practices his craft by telling his wife stories in bed at night. After one fantastic tale, she asks in delighted shock: Is that true? Did that really happen?

But like Melville's Bartleby, no matter how many times she asks, he only has one response: Which part didn’t seem true? Garp’s only interest is in improving on anything his audience isn’t convinced by. He wants to create something so powerfully honest that it’s assumed to be autobiography. Which parts actually are autobiographical is the least interesting thing about it.

Summer Lovin’-in a flashy 19th Century Sort of Way

At the beach this week, my friend was reading Music for Torching by A.M. Homes. After the novel, she couldn't get her dramatic internal monologue to turn off. She confessed the novel left her narrating her life with a similar sort of agonizing ennui. She said it was something like: “Okay, it’s time for dinner.” She hated the way he swung the dishtowel over his shoulder like he’d actually been the one cooking dinner for the last eight years! Or:

“Great. Let’s go.” And for that moment, she believed they could love each other.

Flopped down there as I was on the beach, I was so happy to have an adventure novel to dig into. My beach book was packed with drama, to be sure, but was light on the simple-sentence quips between white suburban depressives. I turned to my yellowed little paperback Flashman in the Great Game. There I could give myself up to that randy ol’ rascal Sir Harry Paget Flashman of the “Flashman” series by George MacDonald Fraser.

The series came about in the 1970s, and are brilliant books. The novels are chronological memoirs told as the found diaries of Sir Harry. (Fraser based his character off of Tom Brown’s bully at Rugby School from Tom Brown’s School Days of 1857.) The memoirs are artfully written; each book packed with forty or fifty encyclopedic footnotes about various geographic or biographic addendums for further historic reading. And they are saucy and witty as hell. The novels take us through Harry’s missions in India, Crimea, the slaving United States, Germany, and back again to Russia. In short, he emerges as the lucky and yet hexed hero of nearly all of the major wars of the 19th century.

What’s fun about reading Flashy are the novels’ absolute cheek in the face of feminism, heroism, patriotism, and religion. Flashman fancies himself to be a Victorian victor and yet few who meet him do not see through his brazen charade. Our hero is a confessed womanizer, whoremonger even, and an absolute coward in the thick of battle. He’d rather throw a drugged naked women off a sled in Siberia to save his own skin from the Cossacks. In his own words, he’s "a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and oh yes, a toady." In The Great Game, Flashy manages to tell off a Christian zealot better than any ethicist, “roger” the princess of Jhansi (an Indian province in 1852), and escape execution by his own English army- all in a mere 300 pages.

I’ve been bingeing on Flashy, plowed through five of the series of 12 books in the last two months, and have bought the first book, Flashman (about the first Anglo-Afghan war) for most of the readers in my family. (That makes me feel a bit odd, because the novels are littered with anglophile/intellectual/farcical sex scenes in which Flashman is unabashedly base and fervent. And yet-my dad loves them!) And best, in my mind, these books are a sort of adventurous and historical antidote to the likes of Music for Torching, books that remind us of our suburban monotony and cliche hairdos. I highly recommend going along for a ride with Sir Flashy.

I Hate My Generation

I hate my generation, I offer no apologiesI hate my generation, yeah–Cracker

My recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show “The Pictures Generation, 1974-84" made this song, from 1996, leap to mind. Interestingly, in her review of the show for the Village Voice, Martha Schwendener bookended her take on the show with two generational markers: a comment from a seventy-something viewer (‘I have no appreciation for this’) and an anecdote by Robert Longo (one of the artists in the show) in which a 15-year-old asked if he got the idea for his Men in the Cities drawings from an iPod ad. Schwendener uses these bookends to talk about how art is generational, marked by what’s in the air at a given time; art can be distanced from us by the convictions we’ve spent a lifetime acquiring (the seventy-year-old), or as immediate as our own ignorance (the 15-year-old).

I appropriate Schwendener’s opening as my opening because I’m supposedly ‘of’ the ‘generation’ being represented in this show. Which is to say that the artists represented, born from the mid-40s to the mid-50s for the most part, are from fifteen to five years older than I am. In 1977, when the Pictures show was up at Artists Space, that seminal event from which this exhibit, curated by Douglas Eklund, takes its name, I graduated from high school. So these artists are my elders in the way that older siblings and such can be: which is to say: annoying in their know-it-all cool, their endgame of art as no longer having ‘aesthetic’ quality, no longer being something specifically made as an ‘art object,’ but rather something concocted from images and existing only as commentary on the ubiquity of image, both as something we look at everywhere, as spectators and voyeurs, and as something that shows us ourselves, as reflection and simulacrum.

This, as almost every commentator on the show has underscored, is the first generation to come of age with TVs in the home. And that, we’re made to think, has made all the difference. Though why television should spell the death of the aesthetic object is another one of those mysterious givens of art history, as for instance when it became clear, to use Wallace Stevens line, that ‘it must be abstract.’ We can rehearse the reasons why -- point to Abstraction, point to Conceptualism and Minimalism, point to Pop Art -- and then sum up why the only self-respecting response to the ubiquity of Madison Avenue, as the moneyed little brat it is, is: to appropriate it, thus making images of its images. Only this time with irony.

Fine. I can accept that. It was 1977, after all. Disco . . . Punk . . . New Wave, you get the idea. And, what’s worse, these people were all recently in art school. Let them have fun, let it rip . . . never mind the bollocks. But howevermuch one might have been sympathetic to the stance at the time, something rankles when these brittle disquistions on the staging of objecthood and send-ups of the mechanisms of attention, generally known as The Tube, get appropriated by The Museum and then hoisted onto walls where formerly masters of their medium had hung.

Is there a sense in which these artists -- Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, David Salle, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, to name but a few -- are masters? Yes, if we mean ‘masters of an idiom,’ ‘masters of manipulation,’ for how else explain the manner by which these largely ephemeral works have become ‘permanent’ as art objects? Where once these artists might have protested The Tube’s appropriation of virtually every image, The Artworld’s appropriation of every possible style, The Museum’s appropriation of every ‘aesthetic object’ so-called (da Vinci to Duchamp, etc.), offering their appropriations as flick-offs of the Pop Art/Minimalist aesthetic that, to quote Saint Andy, was all surface or mere object, they have now, via this show, appropriated The Museum, appropriately enough. Because this day had to come. But as with the idea of exhibits in The Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, I can’t help feeling that everything about the art that gave it charm and brio has become a casualty of its enshrinement.

And what’s maybe even worse than that is the fact that the note-cards in the show play back to us the tired tale of epic struggle, not against the Artworld, or even against the bourgeoisie, but against The Image, and yet one is left wondering in whose name such struggle takes place. If it’s artist decrying advertising, such an idea is not new at the time and certainly not accurate to the world of the artist after Pop Art; if it’s the more thinky pleasure of deconstructing the Image, it’s not clear who can really receive this message. For there’s no evidence, in all this surfacedom, that anyone here can think outside the Image or that they would want to. When Sherrie Levine takes pictures of Walker Evans pictures she trades on the fact that those photographs are already known images. And her images of those photos become objects, but objects whose only purpose is the ancillary role of objectifying imagehood. When we watch clips of the TV show Wonder Woman we might hear an internal voice asking us: why was this televised, what does it say about the medium, and about the advertisers who aired to support it, and about those who tuned in -- or at least we might in an exhibit cataloguing eras of broadcast television -- but the question I ask myself here is what makes this objectification of an Image salient, provocative ... enduring?

The big gun of the show, we’re told by everyone, including Barry Schwabsky, whose critical take on the show for The Nation I’m mostly in agreement with, is Cindy Sherman, and it’s true that, in rooms of forgettable stuff, her images of herself as ‘forgotten film stills’ are already ‘unforgettable.’ But is that because they really do look like images of movies we may have seen once upon a time, or is it because we have seen these images before -- in the aggrandizing use of Sherman as the poster child of self-exploitative manipulation of gender signals in which every ‘look’ is aimed to see/show a cliché? Striking as these photographs might have been in their day, they now seem already to be like Walker Evans’ photos chez Levine, now objectified by the curatorial effort to tell a story in which the Image of the object (here ‘woman,’ the great absent signifié) reigns. And Sherman’s sad one-shot psychodramas are the best way to ‘reflect’ that.

The reason the seventy-year-old has no appreciation for this, we may say, is because a good part of her life was lived before The Tube changed forever the meanings of looking and watching and being seen ... enviable woman, she existed before The Image was everything. But the reason I have no appreciation for this is that I don’t see why The Museum has to capitulate to The Tube, nor why my looking at things and beings (odd that I should think such may be found in the world I live in, independent of images of them) has to be inflected by ersatz renderings of more commercial mediums (TV, magazine ads, pop music) for the sake of art history, and po-mo art history at that. For if the grand narrative was already kaput when this stuff first surfaced -- and these artists were cool with that in their glib image-happy heyday -- then the deflating irony comes in when we realize that, without those art-critic gestures to the narratives of Pop Art and Objectivism, these particular images mean -- to borrow another line from a song -- less than zero

Let's Get Radical

A decade-and-a-half ago, somewhere in the far reaches of cloudy memory, a friend told me a wonderful story that went something like this: There was a political radical who had come to some unnamed municipality to agitate for the rights of its local black population. However, instead of the usual grist of petitions and protest marches, he embraced more disruptive methods laced with a good dose of humor. One particular action involved purchasing a hundred theatre tickets for an upcoming, nearly always white-only attended play and giving them to members of the black community whom he was then representing. Before entering the theatre building, the group feted itself with a meal notable for its preponderance of baked beans. Needless to say, the event's malodorous results—and the threat of more such actions—changed how the municipality's cultural centers treated its minority populations, namely for the better. I forgot that story until this weekend when I picked up Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, published in 1971 by Random House (under the keen eye of its legendary editor-in-chief Jason Epstein). I didn't realize this story came from Alinsky's handbook for how to stir the political pot until I was over a 100 pages in. Before I even came to story itself, a sneaking feeling that I was in familiar territory had crawled up on me. Ten or twenty pages later, there it was: the scene, the Rochester Opera House in Rochester, New York; the instigator, the famed Chicago community activist, Saul Alinsky, protégé to the great CIO leader John L. Lewis; the bad guys, Eastman Kodak, the University of Rochester, and Rochester City Hall; the cause for all this trouble, the race riots the year before that had paralyzed a city in which the community of stupefied white residents had assumed that, because there had been no such previous riots, all was right in their little world.

But tendrils of unconscious memory were not the reason I plucked the volume off the book shelf of friends whom I was visiting in Chicago this weekend. No, the reason I was intrigued was because of the well-publicized fact that Alinsky's work had served as the primer for Barack Obama's community activism in Chicago—hardly a surprise given Alinsky's long history of organizing in Chicago, including the University of Chicago area, where Obama worked for nearly a decade and has lived for over two.

In terms of sheer efficacy, there has never been a presidential campaign like that organized by Obama's brain trust, David Axelrod and David Plouffe. But many also attribute the training regimen and organizational keenness of the operation to Obama's own experience as a community organizer, the skills from which he reapplied to the many thousands of campaign-focused community organizers his team churned out with such painfully meticulous efficiency.  (The best article ever on the Obama campaign's organization was authored by Zack Exley for the Huffington Post.)

Given the unique character of the campaign, Obama's community organizing background, and the influence of Alinsky's work and writings on Obama, there were not a few conservative bloggers who argued that perhaps Republican campaign managers and organizations ought turn a few pages in Alinsky's book and take notes. After all, Democrats had schooled themselves in the Republican playbook after repeated defeats during the Bush years. Surely Alinsky might shed some light on the wonders of the Obama machine.

Well, it does shed light, but not the kind I thought. At first, my assumption had been that, after a few preliminary remarks, Rules for Radicals would just dig in with a flurry of techniques and tactics—and, to a certain extent, it does. But it does more in ways that I am still digesting. In brief, after Alinsky's prologue, the second chapter lays out the groundwork for an ethics of means and ends that out-Machiavelli's Machiavelli by taking apart the old moral saw that "ends don't justify means." In Alinsky's dictionary, this is the very definition of foolishness. While he makes a noble effort to reformulate an ethics in which "particular ends justify particular means," the 11 rules that he, in fact, assets make it hard see how he hasn't merely updated Il Principe for modern circumstances. Even when Alinsky tries to hem in his "any ends"-"any means" philosophy with such bottom-line provisos of "as long as it does not violate human dignity," it's weak tea, at best. Here are Alinsky's rules, recast in simpler English than the pseudo-mathematical language of the professional philosophers he adopts for no real good reason:

1. The more closely involved you are in the conflict, the less justification of means and ends matter.
2. Ethical evaluations of means and ends depend upon the relation of your political position to them.
3. In war, ends will justify almost any means.
4. Means and end can never be adequately judged in hindsight.
5. The more means available for accomplishing an end, the more room there is for ethical considerations of them.
6. The less important an end is, again the more room there is for ethic concerns.
7. Success or failure is a strong determinant of the ethics of means and ends.
8. The imminence of success or failure, victory or defeat, narrows any ethical considerations of means.
9. The opposition will always cast effective means as unethical.
10. Do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral arguments.
11. Use popular ideas and catch phrases to justify ends.

Here Alinsky liberally mixes the descriptive with the prescriptive, skipping the distinction for the hardened reality, based on his experience fighting large corporate interests on behalf of the underprivileged, that what is and what ought matter little when the rubber hits the road. Alinsky is playing to win, and probably goes even further than Machiavelli in recommending masking one's methods with rhetoric (see rules 10 & 11). In fact, to gain community participation in an action, he shows absolutely no qualms about having supporters do, as he sees it, the right thing for the wrong reasons. For Alinsky, it’s always war, especially when the forces arrayed against you—corporations and their cadres of union-busting lawyers; city halls and their platoons of bureaucrats—will not being giving you any quarter.

Alinsky’s manifesto is a guide to political streetfighting, lessons that were not learned by the Gore or Kerry campaigns but were clearly absorbed by Obama’s. Notwithstanding the seeming noblesse oblige of his campaign—as opposed to the messy bomb-throwing that characterized the McCain camp—it was all a street fight, from beginning to end. Alinsky, for example, recognizing how little real power “have-nots” can bring to bear against “haves,” strongly recommends a kind of ju-jitsu (he has a chapter called “Hoist the Enemy by His Own Petard”) that the Obama campaign took to heart, almost encouraging (yes, encouraging!) the McCain campaign to wallow in its own muck.

Did Obama take the high road in his campaign? He did…and didn’t (see Rule 10 again). All that tut-tutting and wink-and-nod ridicule, as if all of us together couldn’t help but shake our heads at how foolish the McCain campaign acted, was just Alinsky-esque karate chops to the back of the neck as McCain and Palin careened forward with their misplaced drop kicks. Even Machiavelli would have to smile.

Letter from the Bronx

Two Saturdays ago, to little fanfare (save long awaited blue skies and an occasional waft of the WKTU Michael Jackson tribute) the Floating Pool Lady opened for the season. Docked in Baretto Point Park in the Bronx, this swimming pool is just like any other of New York City’s fifty-four outdoor basins – offering two sessions daily (11am-3pm, 4pm-7pm), life guards clad in the Parks Department’s signature orange bathing suits and a cool respite from the summer heat. And yet it’s also different: the Floating Pool Lady, which has commanding views of the New York skyline across the East River, began life as an industrial barge in Morgan City, Louisiana. On her decks are three generations of New York City swimmers. “I grew up going to Astoria” Maria tells me, while my daughter and her granddaughter take running leaps into the cold water. Framed by the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, she watches the girls splash in twenty-five meters of sparkling blue. “We’d also go to Lasker,” Maria’s own daughter remembers. “But Astoria has those nice, shallow parts where the little kids play. Plus you can see the Triboro. I mean RFK.” Indeed the pool at Astoria Park, down the East River to the southwest from Barretto in Hunts Point, is the city’s oldest and largest, built by Robert Moses in 1936 to host the U.S. Olympic Team swimming and diving trials. This summer, both the Floating Pool Lady and the Astoria pool provide free swim lessons, lunch and practices for the Summer Swim Team Championship Meet on August 8th. Both parks also have plaques commemorating the wreck of the SS General Slocum, the steamship that embarked on June 15th 1904 from “Little Germany” up the East River towards Long Island for an annual summer picnic. As the ship passed through Hell’s Gate, it caught fire. By the time it beached at North Brother Island, between Astoria and Barretto Point, more than 1,000 of the 1300 passengers – mostly women and children – had drowned.

The Floating Pool Lady was born out of a fascination with New York’s waterfront, past and present. In 1980, while researching her doctoral thesis, city planner and historian Ann Buttenwieser learned that in the 19th Century the city had fifteen “floating baths” moored on pontoons along the Hudson and East Rivers. The idea was planted for a modern day counterpart. Buttenwieser’s dissertation became one of the definitive chronicles of New York water ways, Manhattan Water Bound (Syracuse University, 1987); this month she will publish Governors Island: The Jewel of the New York Harbor (Syracuse University, 2009). In the intervening decades, Buttenwieser has also helped to shape the city’s recreational waterscape, working for a variety of city agencies on river parks, esplanades, kayak launches, ferries to the ballparks and a Skidmore, Owings and Merrill master plan for the lower Manhattan shoreline.  It wasn’t until 2000, however, that she turned to the floating pool project in earnest, undertaking a feasibility study, enlisting architect Jonathan Kirschenfeld and founding the Neptune Foundation to raise the necessary funds. In 2004, after an extensive search, the Foundation discovered a decommissioned river barge in the bayous of Morgan City. Construction began in nearby Amelia, Louisiana and after some Hurricane Katrina delay the soon-to-be Floating Pool Lady (a moniker also now used to describe Buttenwieser) arrived in New York in 2006 for final outfitting. The floating pool opened on July 4th, 2007 off the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and that first summer hosted 50,000 families.  In its current home in Barretto Point Park Point in Community District 2, it is the only public pool.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is swimming.

How the Kindle Can Save Your Life

A few months ago, my ex-mother-in-law gave me her old Kindle when she upgraded to the new model. The first book I downloaded on it was last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, The Short, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. I finished the book on a roundtrip Metro-North ride to Grand Central.

Now, the strangest thing happened, or rather, didn't happen while I was reading this book. No one noticed what I was reading. Nobody asked me what I thought of the book, whether I liked it, whether I didn't. This was incredibly disorienting, reading in public and creating no reaction. An entire part of my brain that I hadn't even known about shut down -- the part that is self-conscious about what I’m reading, and what people think about what I’m reading.

Call me intellectually vain, a snob. But I'm one of those people who makes snap judgments about you based upon what you read. Sit next to me on an airplane proudly sporting a copy of the latest John Grisham or Nora Roberts, and I will give you wide berth. Clutch a Jhumpa Lahiri or a Malcolm Gladwell, and settle in.

When my ex-mother-in-law gave me the Kindle, she extolled its virtues. She suffers from cancer and needs books that weigh very little. So the Kindle is perfect for her; she could reread Gone With the Wind on it if she wanted to.

Yes, the Kindle is light. Yes, the Kindle is portable. But this is what I consider the most wondrous aspect of it: You can read in public and no knows what you are reading.

- The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Judaism - Master Your Metabolism: The 3 Diet Secrets to Naturally Balancing Your Hormones for a Hot and Healthy Body - The Secret - Getting Things Done

This is a partial list of the books I now have downloaded in my Kindle.

At home, my bookcases are crammed with the classics from Austen to Zola; in non-fiction I love Didion and Derrida (okay, just Didion), but I’ve always had a healthy respect for self-help and how-to books. They have guided me through many a personal crisis. I used to buy these books sheepishly at the bookstore, have to set aside time alone and at home to read them, then hide them in the back layer of my bookcase.

Now, I just read them in broad daylight whenever I want to, whenever the need arises.

At last, reading as it should be: A personal choice. Absolutely private.

New Haven's Union Station's Lavish Display

New Haven's a wonderful place but it is pretty rinky-dink in a lot of ways. If it took itself more seriously, for example, matters relating to public transportation would be taken more seriously. Don't get me started on bus service here, for one thing. (I use the buses all the time, and I'm the first to try to defend them, but my point is, I shouldn't have to think about defending them. I should be able to just... use them, and boast about them.) One sign that New Haven used to be a bigger, more impressive place than it is now -- or a place that cared more about the public's view of public transportation -- is the train station, which is lovely, designed on a grand scale. When I was a kid, the New Haven train station wasn't the building it is now; that building, the original train station, was closed, first awaiting demolition and, then, eventually, renovation. In the meantime, we used this underground, scary, damp-feeling space which has somehow completely disappeared. If you took me there now I wouldn't know how to explain where it was. This is the trouble with memories from childhood; they get hazy. I'm sure many readers of this will be happy to tell me what happened to that piece of crap train station. (Please do.)

You walked in at street level and the whole entrance was this massive ramp down to the waiting area, where there were sad little benches, and then you went up to the tracks, as I recall. I may be mistaken but I remember the ramp having dreary, ill-advised industrial carpeting on it (after a while, the flooring was some kind of equally depressing linoleum). The best part of the whole place was the vending machines, which isn't saying much. Kids always like vending machines anyhow.

The old Union Station (which, Wikipedia tells me, was designed by Cass Gilbert -- woo woo) is a huge improvement over that disgusting place I remember from the 1970s. It's airy, sunny; when you walk on the floors, your snappy shoes make a wonderful, adult "click-click-click" sound. (If you're wearing Birkenstocks or sneakers or shoes that aren't snappy, you just trudge along and miss out on the joy of the clicking.) There's a shoeshine station, which I've always wanted to patronize but have never had a chance to; there's a newsstand. There are a few little sandwich stores, which aren't remarkable but do their jobs perfectly well. My main point is, you come into the train station from the street or from the tracks, and either way, you think, "Huh. New Haven. This is a real place." It's a miniaturized Grand Central Station, and that sounds like I'm being slighting, but I'm not trying to be. It's a marvelous space.

One of the things that continues to make the station so appealing is its arrivals/departures board, which is something of an anomaly in today's LED display world (so my husband, who pays attention to these things, tells me). The board is a huge black and white thing with little panels that flip, like the numbers on the alarm clock my brother had in 1978, changing the displayed information. The panels turn incredibly fast, and the sound they make -- kind of "whp-whp-whp-whp-whp" -- is just awesome. When you're waiting for a train that's running late -- as the Amtrak trains often are -- you can get absorbed in your reading and not worry about missing anything because you know you'll look up when you hear the whp-whp-whp sound: it digs into your head, signifiying "new information on the board, pay attention." Sometimes the information is useful to you, and sometimes not, but either way it's fun to watch the text change. You can see all the names of the cities on the Northeast Corridor whip by, which is cool. You can think, "Well, maybe I'll skip going to Boston and just hop onto the Montrealer instead." (You won't, though, because your girlfriend in Boston would be pissed, and, what's more, you wouldn't have a place to stay in Montreal anyhow.) There's something about that board that keeps one's sense of travel intact in a way that the LED displays of Grand Central Station -- a shame they installed that -- just.... don't.

People who know me will snort at this; I am a homebody and am known for not liking to travel And it is true, I like being at home. But every now and then I also like going somewhere, particularly if there is a snazzy hotel involved (I'm big on snazzy hotels), and so I have had some experience with train stations and, yes, even airports. I'm one of maybe three people you'll ever meet who's actually been at the Los Angeles train station, for example. And I can tell you: New Haven's train station is nicer.

But, of course, I am biased.

The Good Will of Books

A few weeks ago, I had lunch with John Donatich, director of the Yale University Press at Yale’s Graduate Club on Elm Street, where we swapped stories from our respective careers in publishing. (I did most of the talking, to be honest.) In the course of conversation, we discussed the state of academic publishing. I had recently completed a research project for an overseas press looking to expand its English-language publishing program in philosophy. Since I had an amateur’s interest in the field and more than a decade in scholarly publishing of one sort or another, it was a perfect project for someone with my inclination. During a tete-a-tete, one item that caught my attention was John’s comments on the state of book publishing in the field of literary criticism. In brief, it is not an area that is doing especially well nowadays. This isn’t to say that it’s on life support. But in terms of raw sales figures—number of units printed and sold—it’s a less-than-ideal area of publication.

Reasons for the decline of "litcrit" sales are legion. Humanities-based book publishing programs have taken a real pounding. The elimination of university press subsidies has hurt, as has the steady migration of scholars to digital venues. Moreover, the overproduction of books in response to tenure pressures has produced a flood of publication that academic library budgets can no longer accommodate. And then there is the ontological problem of scholarly specialization, which automatically limits audience size and book sales.  This tailspin in academic monograph has thrown into question the future of humanities research, begun to reshape criteria for tenure, and obliged scholars to rethink the place the “book” in literary criticism.

Alas, solutions are not legion. Many publishers seem resigned to plodding on, producing works of literary criticism regardless of how much interest there really can be in the culture of the book in Tibet or new interpretations of Paradise Lost.  But even where there is interest--hell, even I'm interested in these topics--that interest will be be nominal at most and fleeting at best. Books of this ilk will take not 2nd or 3rd place on my reading stack; they'd be lucky to take 20th or 21st. Indeed, the fact that I’d have to re-read Paradise Lost before taking on a whole work devoted to a “dramatic reinterpretation” of it makes me queasy just thinking of the required page-turns.

Is it any wonder that literary criticism is on the ropes? And, yet, literary criticism done well can offer true pleasure.  This certainly occurs to me when I look at the litcrit section of my personal library and consider the characteristics that make for a good litcrit read. What matters is not any critic's purported insightfulness or even her work's importance to the history of literary exegesis. No, what stays with me is something different, something crystallized by my recent exercise in slimming down this part of my library.

It is now 15 years since I received my doctorate, and it is unlikely I will ever return to academia to teach or write literary criticism. So when my wife recently demanded that I reduce the size of my library, I decided to rake out the litcrit collection I had amassed in graduate school. Refreshing is the only word I can use to describe the experience. My academic career behind me and none ahead, I saw no  need to retain works that supplied so little satisfaction but had stayed on hand solely for the purpose of teaching or quoting. Now I could forthrightly assess the quality of the reading experience of this part of my collection, no small matter for a discipline excoriated during my graduate days for loose thinking and impenetrable writing.   The standing of works of ostensibly "breakaway" originality, held in high regard then by litcrit professionals, dissolved instantly before a fierce resolve to keep what I had enjoyed and eliminate those academic aspiration had obliged me to have."  Works that were once "hot" now seemed trite, belabored, ostentatious, or overindulged.  I bathed in the freedom of putting front and center new, more personal criteria: readability, narrative drive, force and clarity of argument, playfulness of voice.

So what sailed away to the local Goodwill? My collection of essays by Paul de Man, which, despite their presumptive brilliance, never shined for me as his extended explicationes de text all drove to the same tiring conclusion  that every text is a morass of contradiction, a perpetual shooting of one’s own feet; Walter Benjamin’s essays were also cast overboard, I never having found them all that compelling or even that well written; several of Foucault’s works—which were not even literary criticism but were so heavy-handedly adopted for  litcrit purposes that they ended up in this area of my library regardless—were boxed up, particularly the overlong Order of Things and the unnecessarily abstract Archaeology of Knowledge. Nor were all my rejects of the “theoretical” kind. Ihab Hassan’s Contemporary American Literature, 1945-1972: An Introduction was a rather pedestrian affair as introductions go; Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending was never going to get read; Cleanth Brooks’ Well-Wrought Urn, a series of essays illustrating how “close reading” of poetry ought be done, left this reader's experience of the poems entirely parched; Rene Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature was neither readable nor useful, more a dryly written period piece; Terry Heller’s Delights of Terror, Clayton Koelb’s The Incredulous Reader, Joseph Grixti’s Terrors of Uncertainty were all well written and well argued, but took up shelf space only because of my now long-forgotten dissertation on the American gothic tradition; and then there were the multi-author essay collections on feminist criticism and theory, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and God knows what else.

So what stayed?  Walter Kendricks’ Thrill of Fear, another dissertation source, stayed not only because it offered reasonably good history of the genre in literature and film but also for the pugnacious tone of its treatment of bad horror art. I gladly held onto Mythologies and S/Z by Roland Barthes as examples of original thinking, humorous observation (especially) Mythologies) and truly novel presentation (has there ever been another work of literary criticism like S/Z?). Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class? also stuck around for its clarity of prose, precision of thought, and force of argument.  I could not imagine letting go of fine introductory works like  Terry Eagleton’s tour de force, Literary Theory: An Introduction or the should-be-better-known Superstructuralism by Richard Harland.  Literary histories and works of cultural criticism that were compelling in their insight or unique in their approach—such as Lionel Trilling’s Liberal Imagination, David S. Reynolds’ Beneath the American Renaissance or Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Lighting Out for the Territory—I also retained. Finally, I do admit a penchant for writers on writing: essays (Language of the Night by Ursula LeGuin), criticism (Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster), manifestoes (For a New Novel by Alaine Robbe-Grillet), memoirs (One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty) or interviews (Lawrence Grobel’s Conversations with Capote). As works of criticism go, none of these amounts to much. But as commentary by craftsmen on the crafting process rather than the crafted object’s final effect, they are worth something.

All of these titles stuck with me because they interested me as a reader and not as a litcrit professional. And so I wonder if, in the end, this is the direction that literary critics will ultimately have to take to stay in the book—as opposed to the academic journal—business.  Doing so might require setting aside calls to specialize or even theorize and focus more on voice, originality of presentation, quality of writing, force and range of argument, and—finally—on the story their book tells rather than the stories that are the object of their criticism.

Occasional Paper #1: Rudolph Delson Reviews the Official GED Practice Test

This post marks the release of the New Haven Review's first occasional paper; as the title suggests, we expect to put out more such papers, well, occasionally (though we have more in the works right now). Why an occasional paper, you may ask? I answer: why not? In this occasional paper, novelist and essayist Rudolph Delson, a lawyer by training, reviews the Official GED Practice Tests (Steck-Vaughn Co., $21.95). No, it's not mean. And no, it's not smarmy. What is it, then? Download Occasional Paper #1 and find out. And let us know what you think—both of Delson's piece and the idea of occasional papers generally.

What I assume, You shall assume

I recently heard that one of my old students fell into a conversation in which my name was brought up. Apparently, he really split everyone’s sides by recalling, “Ms. Moncrief totally has an unhealthy obsession with Walt Whitman!” And that was all he remembered, and all he had to say of the eighth grade.

This child was one of my brighter darlings, with a mind and a mouth faster than mine—and most of his peers. He was frantic and quick-witted. (Once when I turned my back, he threw his shoe at me; it landed on my desk and his face went white. He said in the most adult and caring way, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me.”)

Something other than the smart-alecky tone of this response got to me. You always hear that teachers who follow their passions are the best teachers. But this makes me wonder. When I taught this guy, I was obsessed with Whitman, I suppose it’s true. These kids were a young thirteen and I assigned them to read the whole of Leaves of Grass. That’s 52 poems and over 30 pages in our Norton anthology. I photocopied every poem and made each student his or her own packet! We memorized many of the poems, we wrote Songs of Ourselves! We played, “What would Whitman do?” What was I thinking?! AND, I never told them about Whitman’s homosexuality, because I figured it wasn’t that important for them to know. (I am not sure what my logic was there. They figured it out themselves. How you ask? Well, does this give it away for an 8th grade boy?

The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet it ran from their long hair, Little streams pass'd all over their bodies. An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies, It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them, They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray.

I fear I ruined Whitman for them. I fear I was like one of those gift giver types—hovering over you as you open a gift, smiling down at you with an open mouth, ready to gasp and clap and say, “Isn’t it just great? I mean, isn’t it perfect?!” My own joy of reading got in the way of letting others have joy too. That seemed like a beautiful failure. “The mystic anomalous nights, the strange half welcome pangs, (and) visions” that I had in discovering Whitman maybe need to be my own private meditation. As for my old student—he’s off to China, nearly fluent in Mandarin. I heard of him that he’s “settled down,” but hope he hasn’t really settled down. And, well, at least he forgot all my other unhealthy obsessions.

Natural Storytellers

My son Sam is an early riser. For the first 16 months of my his life, give or take a month, the day began in the same way. I’d get up with him at 5:30 or 6 (or, on lucky days, 6:30). I’d turn on the radio, make coffee, eat a bowl of oatmeal, bundle my son, bundle myself, pour the coffee into a travel mug, strap on a harness used for tethering babies to people, and walk out the door. Judging by the looks of people on the street, I looked like a vagabond who had raided an orphanage. Twenty steps down the street, I’d realize I had left my coffee at home and, depending on the grayness of the sky or some other arbitrary measure, I’d go back and get it or make a beeline for Fuel, a small coffeeshop where they knew me and knew my son.

As he got older and the seasons changed, we introduced some variation. I stopped bundling both of us. He started riding in the stroller. I frequently planted him in a raised bed while I planted seedlings in our plot in the William Street Community Garden. Snacks became paramount to the success of the adventure. We went to Willoughby’s (big mistake with a baby when you’re facing off against the early morning rush hour), Moka/Koffee on Orange/Bru, Koffee on Audubon. Sometimes I remembered my coffee. Sometimes he ate croissant. We took long walks to marvel at the Quinnipiac River drawbridge in Fair Haven, or to marvel at the view from the Leitner Observatory, or to try out a distant and fabled playground.

There was one part of every day that did not vary during that time. There’s a man who lives on our street who I believe is a natural storyteller. We saw him every day, either in front of his house or in the garden or on the next street over. Because of him, I suspect there must be dynasties of storytellers, passing the storytelling gene from generation to generation, each new iteration changing and adapting the same stories. That isn’t to say they don’t have to work at it, but in these families I imagine a high premium is placed on telling the right story, at the right time, in as few a words as possible.

He’s known my son longer than anyone outside our family. I don’t know anything about him but his stories, and they’re kind of incredible. His stories stick: They bounce around in my brain and surface in my thoughts frequently throughout the day. He greets us with “Hello good people” or something similarly benign, and then he starts telling. The first one I remember well is the day it was particularly windy, and as we made our way down William Street he joined us and walked for a while. “Did you hear what happened in Washington?” he asked. He proceeded to tell me about a man who was walking his baby, in a stroller, along a river. The wind, he said, was so strong and so fierce that the man had to fight hard to finish the walk. But in the end, the wind won: The man and his son were blown into the river and disappeared, and they still hadn’t found him. “Okay, good people!” he said cheerily. “Have a great day! One day we’ll all serve Sam!”

As he left, I wondered it nature overtake us while we’re out in the world, just trying to have a normal existence. All day, I thought about strollers blown away by the wind; tornadoes taking away our children and our parents; waves rising up from Long Island Sound. I thought how the telling of the story seemed so effortless.

One time, the time it began to occur to me that he might not be the best company for our walks, I asked him how he had come to New Haven. He said that his probation officer was transporting him from Stamford to Hartford. They were handcuffed on the train, he said, but when the train pulled into Union Station in New Haven, his probation officer was asleep. He reached over, stole the key to the handcuffs, and escaped the train. Once inside the station, he ran in John DeStefano. The two of them chatted amiably; by the end of the conversation, DeStefano had offered him a job with the city, working as a counselor with recent inmates who had been released. Don’t worry about the probation, he said, I’ll take care of it. And ever since, Sam’s friend had been working in the prison system in New Haven.

I was both enthralled and disturbed by that story. I had known our neighbor for months: At what point do I start avoiding him in the morning? Do I have terrible judgment in the company I keep? What was his crime? He really does work for the city, and very well might have been on probation, but did he really know DeStefano? What was his connection to the way everything works?

My favorite story was about our neighborhood. We were walking down Lyon Street, and our friend pointed out the chimneys. He said he had worked on restoring most of the chimneys on that street, that I wouldn’t believe how many of them were on the verge of toppling. It’s barely safe to keep walking here, he said. Immediately I conjured up an inner movie, in which a whole block of houses just started crumbling, from the top down. He laughed and laughed to himself, and I asked what was so funny. He told me that when they renovated the house I’m living in, an opossum had been living in the basement; the first time they lit the pilot light, the opossum caught fire and made a beeline for the natural gas tank. (I was a little surprised at how well he knew the layout of our basement.) They caught him, doused him and expelled him. Don’t worry, he said, that opossum (of fire!) doesn’t live in your house anymore.

He then pointed to a house and said that many families of birds had been living in its chimney, but the new owners didn’t know. The first time they fired up the furnace (lit a fire? I don’t remember now), the flames ignited the nest, and the nest ignited the birds, and the birds came flying out of the top of the house. He opened his arms and fanned out his fingers, saying the sky was full of burning birds. That had happened so many time he couldn’t remember, he said. A house renovation, a pilot light, a furnace, and voila! Burning animals are running down the street; burning birds are filling the sky. It made our neighborhood seem dangerous but at the same time mythological.

I feel happy to live on a block where the oral tradition is alive and well, where stories circulate and grow. On the other hand, it’s time to move. We’ve got another kid now, and I’m tired of having to scan the nearest playground for rusty lighters and broken vodka bottles before I let Sam scramble. I don’t want to wonder if my walking companion, no matter how talented a storyteller he is, is a walking manifestation of my bad judgment. My New Haven street may not be the best place to raise a kid – indeed, most young families in Wooster Square eventually migrate to Westville or Whitneyville.

But hey, time passes. Things change. I’ll miss the natural storyteller on my block when we go, and I’ll probably always think of him when the wind blows so hard I wonder if it’s going to whisk us away.

Whither Home?

I was away for three weeks in June, and for two of those weeks I was away not only from where I live, but from the internet. In a sense, separation from the internet was the more telling separation -- I know more people available to me online than I do in New Haven, to say nothing of the people I ‘follow’ (or stalk?) on Facebook. While away, I visited all my ‘homes away from home’: including three of my four siblings’ homes in Delaware, one of which is the house we all grew up in, where my mother still lives. I also visited my stepson and his family who live a bit west of Philadelphia -- Philly is where we lived when he lived with my wife and I, and where our daughter was born. And I got over to rural New Jersey where a longtime friend (a Philly native I met in Philly) lives with his family and writes -- and where I am an honorary “Uncle Donald.” And I made it down to Rockville, MD, outside DC, where my sister-in-law lives and where my mother-in-law is now in an assisted living home, which I visited for the first time. The main reason I went away at all was to visit the shore in Ocean City, MD, where some version of my family has gone to unwind in June since we were all kids together, and where my parents spent their honeymoon, and where there was no internet connection, which helped to emphasize the feeling I have down there anyway -- that I’m in some perpetual version of my youth, either the late ‘60s when I first went there, or some memorable teen visits in the late ‘70s, or those years in the ‘80s when it was all about my daughter.

All of this is to introduce the thought which I’ve had before, when returning ‘home’ to New Haven, this town I’ve lived in for ten years (moved here from Hamden when our daughter went off to college in Baltimore), and frequented for five years before that (after moving to CT straight from grad school): I’m hard-pressed to say what makes this place my home other than the fact that I live here -- at some distance from all the people I’ve known longest. My way of life and general outlook seems a continuation of grad school, which is to say, transient, not in for the long haul, expecting to go elsewhere, someday, and only hoping ‘there’ won’t be worse. And that feeling, I think, is sustained by the fact that the population of New Haven, as I experience it, is tied to Yale and recurrently transient: students, grad students, junior faculty are here for awhile and move on.

Yet, while in this limbo (working on long term writing projects and at ‘teaching gigs’ tends to sustain a certain disconnect from my surroundings ... maybe even requires it?), I have become accustomed to New Haven, even though I consider myself barely a resident. There are places I frequent, and which I like seeing -- Willoughby’s, Yorkside, Book Trader, Labyrinth, Odd Bins, Anna Liffey’s, Cutler’s, Mamoun’s, Rudy’s, Royal India, etc. -- but I seem never to move much beyond the familiar grooves worn by making my way, mostly on foot, to the orbit of that big educational concern in town, which I refer to affectionately, or not so affectionately, as the Mighty Fortress.

When I’m back in the environs I hail from, I’m always glad to know I’m only passing through. Much as I like seeing everyone, it’s good to know I don’t really live there. And I can think of one event, a few years ago, that made me realize that I actually have a kind of relation to New Haven. It was the closing of The Rainbow Café, and at the time I wrote:

We rely on such places as providing identity for what "our town" is, and for providing us with a renewable sense of who we are as their steady patrons. You are where you eat, and where you shop? Something like that.

Realizing the place was pretty new when I first went there and that it was now gone, it seemed to matter that I'd outlasted a business.

So, a question to any long-standing or native New Haveners reading this: what do you consider to be definitive aspects of New Haven ... the kinds of things one shouldn’t miss while living here? Or: what's a change you've seen in your time here that had some effect on you?

Kindle a book, light my fire

I was in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, and I went into Bridge Street Books, located nowhere near Bridge Street, from what I could tell. It was on Pennsylvania Ave., off M Street, the main thoroughfare of Georgetown. The proprietor, who sat to the left, immediately upon the entrance, sitting between a two-sided counter, a wall of books, and the front window facing the street, was not particularly friendly (that seems to be a species of booksellers, deeply in love with books but not much for customers—it seems a unique form of vocational torture). When I asked him what was upstairs, for I had noticed a staircase, he said, "More books." When I asked him what particular sections were kept upstairs, he impatiently ran off a list for me ("fiction, psychology, sports" — something like that), but clearly wasn't keen to do it. I had hoped he might enjoy telling me about the vast selection in his store; he clearly hoped I'd have the decency to leave him be and go look for myself. When I did go look, I discovered that his was one of the best-curated selections of any bookstore I'd ever seen. Put another way: he's a splendid buyer. There were a dozen books I'd seen reviewed over the past six months but had never seen in a store; there were even more books, including some by famous or prestigious authors, that I had not seen reviewed, but which he had ordered from publishers' catalogues. He (or his buyer) quite simply had a terrific eye. The store was very, very well stocked, with reasonable quantity but unmatched quality.

It wasn't just that he had good taste, but also variegated and eccentric taste. This clearly was not a scholarly bookstore, although there were many fine books from scholarly presses. Nor did it suffer from the book-clubby quality of so many independent bookstores, the proprietors of which seem to buy books, primarily "literary fiction," with the predictable tastes of local book-clubbers in mind. (This tic results in shelf after shelf of Barbara Kingsolver.) And he was not a snob: there was no shortage of beach reads or what in Washington might be called Metro reads.

I ended up buying from his Architecture section a book I had never seen before, even as my current interests mean that I always look in a store's Architecture section. It's called Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness, and it's by an Australian critic named Elizabeth Farrelly. I'm nearly done with the book now, and while in some ways it is familiar—her impatience with suburban sprawl will be familiar to readers of Philip Langdon, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Bill McKibben, David Owen, and many others—she has a deeply philosophical bent; her references range from Milan Kundera (on kitsch) to Richard Sennett (on the modern tension between our interior and exterior selves) to Aristotle, happiness psychologist Martin Seligman, and weirdo supremo Alvin Toffler. She misspells Nietzsche, but we all do sometimes; less forgivable is her misspelling of Lemony Snicket. The book is spellbinding, and I am grateful that I went browsing in a store that had it.

In other news, my friend Jonathan now has a Kindle; he is the first of my friends whose literary flame has been Kindled. He loves it, so far. From the public domain he has downloaded Hume and Freud; from the private domain, Gladwell and Michael Lewis. Jonathan said it even came with a little beach tent to keep sand out. Party on, my dear friend, party on.