Ross Douthat writes for the New York Times a response to last week's Sunday Book Review feature by Katie Roiphe, in which she laments the loss of the literary lions of yesteryear—"the Roths and Updikes, Mailers and Bellows," per Douthat—and the virility and libido that defined their letters. Douthat writes down Roiphe's main complaint about their successors, today's authors, which is that they are possessed by a "puritanical" streak. Douthat make a compelling case for the notion that it is not an outward pressure, an imposition of an external or religious nature, so much as it as a hard-won "exhaustion of the transgressive impulse." I think that's an elegant phrasing and perhaps captures something about an accelerated sexual coming of age. But his argument comes off the rails with his illustrations. So when he says that Lady Gaga . . .
. . . um, that . . .
oh hell. I can't think straight. Y'all know what day it is here at G.p headquarters. It is time to THROW THEM HORNS UP. Just as soon as I get a couple calls back from Los Angeles I am on my way to the first of several six-packs of Shiner Bock. Here is the day's mandatory reading. I am also enjoying this and this right now. And for your further consideration.
Some of those links courtesy of the cast of villains I call my friends back home. We're all pretty much in agreement: The more yards Colt has running and the higher the scores go, the better our chances will be. Ingram? That's some kind of Scientology thing, right?
TEXAS!
FIGHT!
I'm joining Ezra in this Infinite Summer business but I don't know that I want to post thoughts on a group forum. (At least, not one that isn't devoted to barbecue or Magic: The Gathering.) Now, I know that The Governess is reading too, and I'm going to try to twist a few more arms (Ryan? Tommy? Yglesias?) and see if we can't form a quorum to do what we do best: Highly public navel gazing, cut-copied from mail to html. Who's game?
I picked up my copy of Infinite Jest at Kramerbooks the other day and it cost significantly more than $10—my cover must have been a misprint. Also, every cover along the new-books promenade featured the same float-y, PowerPoint, 3D script.
I cannot remember the last time I read fiction written by a woman. The last novels I bought were by Witold Gombrowicz: Pornografia, Kosmos, and Trans-Atlantyk, as well as another copy of Ferdydurke to replace the one I loaned out. Polish mid-century adolescence-obsessed Modernism is very much boy
lit and has made me aware that I need to pick up some contemporary women authors: any pics? Don't say JCO—I'm not a fan.
I'm really taken with the title Kafka gave to the journals in which he stashed his collection of erot/ica and p0rnogra/phy: The Amethyst/Opals. Believe it or not, the existence of the journals—ignored or buried by Kafka scholars—is the subject of a Times exposé and a lot of hand wringing in what one young brooding academic calls the "Kafka industry".
I didn't even know it was possible. I tip my hat to Lorrie Moore:
For Obama: "The Portrait of a Lady," by Henry James. A virtuous orphan is plotted against by a charming, ruthless couple the orphan once trusted and admired.Yeeouch!For Clinton: "Macbeth," by William Shakespeare. The timeless tale of how untethered ambition and early predictions may carry a large price tag.
For McCain: "Tales From the Brothers Grimm." In case more are needed.
Proposed: Any lengthy, aphoristic, musing essai on the Internet and its deleterious impact on "significant speech"—whether by the hordes it summons, the criticism it debases, or the men of privilege it removes—be called a turning aspen.
Here's Leon Wieseltier with a turning aspen on the sorrow and resignation that he feels after a peer and friend embraces the Walt and Mearsheimer position on the Israel lobby. Note, though, that embedded in his pensive pen is the audacious capacity for hope, the recognition of and appreciation for the renewal that is bound to come. This is a necessary feature of the turning aspen. The emptiness Wieseltier feels now is real but his remove from considered commentary, alas, is only temporary.
Richly deserving of the many nods they received last year, Helen Yentus's designs for the new Camus edition are fine.
An brief profile on Yentus by the art director of Print. Yentus's designs for Camus are cousin to the 2006 Grove Centenary Editions of Samuel Beckett boxed set, designed by Laura Lindgren; I'd call both successes. What fun exercises.
Left: First UK edition. Right: First US edition.
Bad years look considerably worse in England than in the States, where even bad years cater to young women readers. I don't care for the cover of Coetzee's latest, a feminine departure for whoever handles the designs, which are typically quite good: clean, nice author font, a firm signature look.
About Chip Kidd, book cover rock star: His covers are handsome but aren't they overliteral? Now, I don't think you could do much else with The Road. And his logos for DC Comics' All Star imprint (e.g., Superman, Batman & Robin) are pitch perfect. But his Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is all wrong. Kidd gives the game away. The fun in Gawain is imagining what Gawain-poet has actually written despite your many-layered and Hollywood-informed expectations of medieval imagery. Depicting the Green Knight as some emissary of hell flattens the comic possibilities of the story. No, it's not laugh-out-loud funny like Chaucer, but it has its moments. Burton Raffel describes the emerald knight reclaiming his decapitated head as a football player in a mad scramble after a fumble. And there's an amusing tension in the court scenes, the knights all feigning silence as courtly propriety when, in fact, they're all terrified. That tension doesn't work under the presumption that the Green Knight is something like the Mouth of Sauron, more creature than man. Kidd's suggesting the Spectre here.
Tolkien's cover is even worse for getting Gawain wrong as well. Only the Cotton Nero A.x. illumination will do.
All things are full of labour;
man cannot utter it:
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
Mark Athitakis passes along a great anecdote from an unexpected source:
As if to compensate for the general dreariness of her novels' themes—her latest is a one-two punch combining the Holocaust and domestic violence—[Joyce Carol Oates]'s affected a dry, almost Stephen Wright–like demeanor in front of the crowd. One audience member said she understood she had an interest in boxing, and could she expand on that? "Well, I wrote a book called On Boxing," she said, dryly. "That may have given you a small hint of that." It sounds bitchier written down than it does when she says it. Thompson didn't write about her weirdest, funniest joke, though. She talked about Hitler and Stalin for a bit, then noted to the audience that somebody was holding a sign saying she had two minutes left. "Then they'll machine-gun me," she said."Oates! That's so funny! She really is not a humorous writer.
Summer is the time when a young man's thoughts turn to metafictional devices. And no less fine a young man than Julian Sanchez is puzzling over one of Richard Powers's literary strategies. Sanchez writes:
[Powers] routinely alludes to a familiar company or institution, making it clear beyond any doubt which he's referring to, but then either scrupulously and pointedly avoids naming it, such that the absence of the name almost becomes a distracting presence itself, or else he gives it a phony name.I've never read any of Powers's work, so I can't say anything about that. For what it's worth, the author chimes in and largely consents to Sanchez's reading.
Sanchez's prompt launched my own flight of fancy: on Matthew Barney. Barney's take on brands might be the inverse of Powers's. According to Sanchez (and the author), Powers provides the reader with the context to situate a fictional institution within the world in which the reader lives; that world, the real world, runs parallel to the world Powers creates, if I understand what they're getting at.
Barney, on the other hand, presents brand symbols without any context—in inappropriate contexts, even. And his world is magical, to say the least.
Matthew Barney, Cremaster 1, 1996.Take Cremaster 1: How does the Goodyear blimp fit into a film about zygotic gender determination, featuring a Busby Berkeley musical staged on Boise's Bronco Stadium? In the narrative, the twin blimps are ovaries; inside each, a character (named Goodyear) coexists. (Right, in both of them. What'd I say? Magic.) Goodyear fiddles with some grapes, arranging them in various patterns. In one blimp, the grapes are red, and in the other, they're white. Meanwhile, the kick line on the field marches in the shapes dictated by the grape arrangements. It's a gradual but tremendous sculptural process—the magical miracle of life, you see.
Ovaries, okay—but why Goodyear blimps? It's tempting to consider this decision like any other in his series—as layered and oblique. If I consider the Goodyear brand, I might think expansively about vulcanized rubber and Hephaestus (god of sculpture, you know). But I think that when Barney selects a brand symbol, it is irreducibly that symbol, in order to open up different schedules of meaning in an object. Sometimes a blimp is just a blimp.
And these blimps are there to be Goodyear blimps. They hover over the football field; so does Barney's camera, as he reproduces Busby Berkeley's soaring, signature shots. Barney's thinking about framing, and how he can use film to develop his sculptural ideas. Inside the blimps—with the girl and the grapes—he's recording a narrative that is fundamental, microscopic, and subcellular. But outside—well, it doesn't get much bigger than a dancing chorus broadcast via the aerial blimp cam.
So the brand-name blimps have a place in the narrative, but they're also there because they line up vertically with other elements in the movie that are about film and not just a part of Barney's plot.
"Part of the point is to stop and slow readers, to make them look again", says Powers over at Sanchez's lounge. Powers doesn't want readers forgetting that they're not in the real world. Barney doesn't need to worry about this—but he is clear about the fact that he's working with cinema in a particular way.
In visual art circles, you'll sometimes hear a critic or viewer dismiss an artwork by saying that it doesn't depict beauty—as if that were the abject goal of all art. In his Washington Post column, Ron Charles dismisses the Harry Potter series because it doesn't afford an intimate relationship between the reader and the author, a criteria for literature that's as myopic as the belief that the plastic arts must engage beauty. Here's my defense of Harry Potter as an episodic drama that is in an important sense about the reader's experience. The whole fun of it is figuring out whether Snape is good or evil, you know? And everyone reads these books exactly because everyone else is reading them—that's the other great fun to it.
Catherine and I just bought a few bottles of Felix Felicis to add to the stocks of butterbeer and The Drink That Must Not Be Named. (The liquor store doesn't sell bloody-mary mix, so no Polyjuice Potion.) With the final book in hand, however, neither of us can start reading the damned thing. Right now, I'm still reading book six and fine-tuning my case for Snape's goodness, the Hallows staring at me from the coffee table.
I'll get to it. In any case, the more wizards die, the better it'll be.
Ann Althouse argues that fiction shouldn't be taught in public schools. A stalking horse—but for what? I'll consider it while I'm reading on the beach.
UPDATE: I promise you, I gave Althouse no thought whatsoever while I was closing waves, root beers, and short stories by Will Self. But now I'm giving her program a little more thought.
Althouse:
And why does reading even need to be a separate subject from history in school? Give them history texts and teach reading from them. Science books too. Leave the storybooks for pleasure reading outside of school.
So that's pretty straightforward: get rid of English classes, literature classes. (But I don't think your reading skillz are teh suxx0rz, Henry; I was looking for an angle and that probably slanted your reading of my reading, lolz.)
Maybe it's Culture Wars shell-shock that leads me to suspect that Althouse—a conservative who is not above specious argumentation—objects to, and with this suggestion deprecates, exposure to art. She's down on fiction (the tell-tale "storybooks" slam on novels), so there's reason to suspect that she is suggesting this program at the very least because she does not like fiction. "I worry that authority figures will choose fiction that they approve of because it teaches the values they like" sounds like a nod toward contrarianism, but may just as well be a swipe at the liberal academy, and, in any case, expresses a concern that applies to subjects like history and science. Intelligent design, anyone?
Subtext and context notwithstanding, she's arguing that English classes are unnecessary because the goal of reading education is to promote reading comprehension, and comprehension alone—that fiction has no utility. She assumes that this is self evident. I don't think it is self evident, I don't think she's right on the comprehension point, and furthermore I don't think that she's even arguing what she says she's arguing.
Althouse claims but never proves that fiction is an inefficient way to teach kids how to read. In fact, the only counterargument she anticipates and falsifies is that people might not learn to love fiction if they're not exposed to it during school—which is neither here nor there. Althouse's question should be whether history and science texts are better vehicles for developing reading skills.
Reading isn't merely processing the logic of a text; acuity is also required. Teaching kids how to read, and read well as they age, means exposing them to all the diverse textual strategies that writers use to convey information. Learning to understand and anticipate and imitate strategies like metaphor, symbolism, and the first-person perspective makes for strong, literate readers. None of these strategies appears in junior-high American history textbooks. Which—so long as we're debating positions built entirely on personal preferences—were really fucking boring.
Jim Crace's latest novel is poorly written. Generic and meager as that criticism sounds, especially when it regards a novelist who comes so highly praised as Crace, it's true—it's by design. The Pesthouse is something of a science-fiction novel (quoting myself here):
Disturbed by the long national nightmare of the Bush administration, the English novelist turns on the American dream itself: Following an apocalyptic collapse staged generations into the future—in which the United States has descended into a pre-modern dark age—emigrants flee the West by mule and wagon in a journey across the Mississippi to the East. There, they line up for a ticket to the land of opportunity: Europe. Crace's reverse Oregon Trail is marked by a spoiled breadbasket, ruthless lawlessness, and worse still, a terrible plague (the "flux") that ravages the last populated bastions of the City Upon a Hill.To tell this story, Crace adopts a mimetic strategy. He writes in strictly tempered tones, dressing the medium itself to match the thing he's representing in the narrative. The story's premised on a pre-industrial, superstitious, traditionalist, anarchist society—so, accordingly, Crace's prose is nasty, brutish, and short.
The writing in The Pesthouse is in fact folksy, characterized by simple sentences and elementary diction. But it's not ironical or tart, the way you might expect a stylized future apocalypse tale to be. Instead, the narrator comes across as naive—in fact, as naive as his lead characters, Franklin and Margaret, whom the reader meets on their punishing trek east. (No worry, no spoilers here.) Throughout the story, the value of his protagonists is strictly symbolic. Like characters in a parable, they are levers, simple machines used to accomplish the elements of the story. The narrator's relation to the story, however, is tangled.
Good science fiction stories are legends; and a reader expects the narrator of a legend to be a tribesman, a fellow, someone who is sympathetic to the text or, at the very least, shares the epistemic situation of the readers. (As opposed to being in the same condition as the hero, for example.) Folk literature is diagetic (in that the narrator tells the story rather than reveals it). Crace's narrator, however, doesn't tell it straight. An example from early in the story, just after Franklin meets Margaret (she is sick, he is carrying her):
Were they in love? Well, no, not yet. He was too young and inexperienced; she was too old an inexperienced. They were, though, getting there with every step. And they were as intimate as lovers. How could they not be, with her legs pushed open, wrapped around his back, her breath and lips against his nape, her arms embracing him, clasped across his breastbone, so that, she thought illogically, she could help him bear her own weight and share the weight of worrying?Crace's stilted, superficial delivery continues apace, mirroring the blank characters in the story. It's a textually mimetic device: The narration is built to resemble a mythic journey, an epic text. Crace's post-history is practically pre-novel.[ . . . ]
. . . [Franklin] was determined not to show any weakness or tiredness. Here was his chance to prove to her how useful he might be and how mature. What luck had put this woman on his back? His damaged knee had proved to be an unexpected blessing.
But without the benefit of an emulsifying agent (like irony), Crace's stylistic ingredients don't take. Dialog is rare in The Pesthouse and instrumental at best; the reader is granted selective insight into the protagonists' minds, but they are blank as slate. And even that fails to say something compelling or biting about America.
Had the story been told from a strictly objective lens, Crace might have pulled off his faux-naif tale. Certainly, the novel would have benefited from the kind of affection that sci-fi authors typically devote to description. The narrator has no better knowledge of science, medicine, etc., than the characters, leaving the reader with dull explanations for catastrophes—the land is toxic, full stop, and no opportunity is afforded to investigate this state in a way that might give the reader some clue as to why or how.
Such an extravagant and ultimately fruitless approach to a story that ought to have been delicious. Where were the everyday artifacts, the everyday things lost on the characters but token to us? Or frightening cave bears? Not even a Statue of Liberty, half sunk, visage shattered, where nothing beside remains. The pure pleasure elements are missing in The Pesthouse because Crace didn't take pleasure in writing it.
So Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa really did have that big fight.
So this metaphor from Laura Sessions Stepp's Unhooked, excerpted in the WaPo review mentioned below, comes unhinged:
Your body is your property. . . . Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?The house cracketh up:
Yglesias: Your body is your property. Think about the first home you hope to own. You want to have a big party and invite all your friends over.When false entailments are drawn from a metaphor's source domain, hilarity ensues!Spencer: Your body is your property. Think about the first home you hope to own. You don't want people breaking in through the front or the back.
Me: Your body is your property. Think about the first home you hope to own. If you're ever in a bind you can always take out a mortgage.
UPDATE: Genevieve had a bit on Stepp metaphors a while back.
Since you illiterate lot are useless for new book pics ('cept for Emily), I've turned to the tubes. Three from Bloomberg:
—Boilerplate that blurb writers use for an Amis novel: "He revisits [site of act of incredible violence], where he and his [male relative] reminisce about their shared love for a once-[adjective ending in -acious] woman." *
—Boilerplate that blurb writers use for a contemporary Russian novel: "This trippy satire depicts [persons] who beat [persons] with ice-covered hammers."
—Not the boilerplate usually associated with Bush administration–era fiction.
* For Philip Roth, strike the violence; for Norman Mailer, restrict the violence to women
Good on Michael Dirda for addressing the Fairfax library scandal first thing in his WaPo chat, but what a milquetoast response:
[L]ocal libraries seem to be discarding classics and stocking the shelves with popular contemporary writers. Their argument is that they are catering to their clients needs and wishes. Yes, I can understand that. But whatever happened to the notion that people went to the library to learn something, to better themselves, to gain some familiarity with culture and achievements of the past? A library serves to educate, not merely to entertain.Yah sure but come on. The state, employing its monopoly on violence, coercively collects hard-earned citizen tax dollars and funnels them into moratoriums for the relatively unpopular but absolutely extraordinary achievements of mankind. Achievements like The Sound and the Fury—libraries hold The Sound and the Fury. A book-borrowing building that does not hold The Sound and the Fury—a list that might include the George Mason Regional Library, if it adheres to the quota system that allow it to boost Scott Turow's stackshare by weeding William Faulkner— is not a library. When no one borrows The Sounds and the Fury from the library for 24 months, the library still retains the novel because it's William Fucking Faulkner, and libraries exist if for no other reason to preserve the kneejerk instincts of canon-preserving elitists, who may waffle over, say, which Proust companion to stock prominently but would only entertain removing In Search of Lost Time—as librarians are at George Masion Regional Library—in daydreams of cheekily replacing each copy with À la recherche du temps perdu. Because, in fact, within an institution of subsidized knowledge and only within an institution of subsidized knowledge, a book can be forever, despite what 21-branch Fairfax library system director Sam Clay seems to suggest when he says, "A book is not forever."
We could just set up YouTube terminals. Dick in a box! Dick in a box for everyone. Let's throw italics around Dick in a Box.
In the The Quincunx, a character offers just once the exclamation, "Bli' me!", a corruption of "God blind me" that (Google says) replaced "gorblimey" or "cor blimey" as the favored way to curse without invoking the name, and thus the wrath, of the Lord. The Online Etymology Dictionary, for what it's worth, dates the appearance of "blimey" to 1889. I trust that Palliser's done his homework, but I don't have the resources on hand to check whether this contraction appears in any literature during the period described by the novel (1810–30 or so).
This is to say, I didn't get much in the way of new fiction for Christmas this year. My mom usually gives me two or three new novels, but this year she gave me a fantastic flexiheaded torque screwdriver. The Flophouse is most securely fastened, but I have nothing to read—anyone care to recommend some new fiction, preferably from the Bli' Me Era (1810?89? to present)?
That's the title of the nightmare-inducing seventh and final chapter. Apologies if you were to this point being productive.
UPDATE: "Hallows" doesn't seem to mean anything, even according to real-live British people online. It will be translated to "hollows" for right-speaking American audiences, but I can't confirm that "hallows" means something like "small valley".
MORE: Courtesy Ben, the OED has:
In pl. applied to the shrines or relics of saints; the gods of the heathen or their shrines.In that case, "hollows" is a very poor translation.In the phrase to seek hallows, to visit the shrines or relics of saints; orig. as in sense 1, the saints themselves being thought of as present at their shrines.
Here's to one thousand posts on G.p!
No reason not to burn the millenial entry on a book meme. Remember memes? This one comes couresy of Yglesias and PG.
There ought to be question 10 that asks, "Other books whose titles you'd like to drop." To which I'd answer: Sebald's Austerlitz; Bellow's The Adventures of Auggie March; the latest by Zadie Smith (noted in a slightly exasperated tone); the Booker finalists (natch).1. One book that's changed your lifeThe books that come to mind are all classics—all poems, in fact. Dante's Inferno was the first book that revealed to me what sort of work literature can do, so I think it takes top prize. The Aeneid runs a close second for being the first book I read after deciding that literature was crucial. You know, first kiss after the first kiss? I don't know that any book has "changed my life" in the way that the question probably intends.
2. One book that you have read more than onceBulgakov's The Master and Margarita I've read probably it a dozen times. Once, three times in a row.
3. One book you would want on a desert island.Something that lends itself to endless rereading, right? Swann's Way or War in Peace would satisfice. But maybe there's another way: a book that lends itself to endless hallucinatory permutations! Flaubert's Tempataion of Saint Anthony fits that bill (NB: I read it on a bus). The Book of Revelation is the industry standard in quality visions, but what if visions don't fuel visions the way I assume they would?
4. One book that made you cryPrimo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz was the last one I can remember. I'll well up over especially lyrical passages in fiction, but none has ever moved me to tears—just to nose-scrunching.
5. One book that made you laughBad question! If I say Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, you will think I guffaw over the Holocaust, and if I say John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, I'll seem to lack the appropriate taste and sensitivity for dark, literary comedy! Eh, most books I read make me laugh, I think I tend to choose them for that; but just to be clear: the Holocaust is not hilarious.
6. One book you wish had been writtenMy breakout novel, when I was 23? I can't come up with a great answer to this question. And so, my novel languishes.
7. One book you wish had never been writtenVictor Milan's Cybernetic Samurai. It was well established in my sixth-grade class that this book was the single one in the library that contained a graphic sex scene, a truth to which the broken spine around page x attested. Of course I was the one caught smirking over it the day that the teacher's cute daughter was subbing, and naturally enough, when she confiscated the book she couldn't help but notice the section bookmarked by so many hormonal headcases over the years.
8. One book you are currently readingI just bought Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red.
9. One book you've been meaning to readCharles Palliser, The Quincunx, which comes recommended by the smarties at Crooked Timber and has been waiting patiently on my bookshelf for a turn.
Apostropher, Becks, Emily—you have been memed!
Woo-hoo! Christmas comes early to the G.p homestead. Today I received from my dad 10 handsome volumes from Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf. I think he has several more (but not all 51 volumes) and supect that he's just bogarting the Shakespeare et al. Whatever, I'll take it—it being Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray (a lot of Thackeray), Goethe, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and whatever's at the bottom of the box. Also included: everything pops owned by Hemingway, who seems to have found disfavor in the court of Capps Sr. And: a Bible, which my dad's always nudging me to read. I think Vanity Fair, first.
The Weekly Standard reviews the new literature:
Ponnuru refrains from engaging in the kind of bitter vituperation and personal invective against those with whom he disagrees that fouls so much of contemporary political discourse.That's Wesley J. Smith writing about Ramesh Ponnuru's The Party of Death, whose "provocative title" does not constitute a slur against the Democratic Party ("the primary engine driving our country toward accepting killing as an answer to life's difficulties," according to Smith.)
Totally civil and appropriate, and furthermore a much-needed antidote for the truly toxic harangues polluting the media—an unusually hostile example being my forthcoming book, Prat or Prick? Wesley J. Smith, Considered. In this text I argue that only a douchebag with a limited imagination and meager grasp of reality characterizes the Democratic platform as endorsing the following agenda items:
. . . euthanasia, treating nascent and cognitively disabled humans as mere natural resources (embryonic stem cell research, cloned fetal farming, organ harvesting from patients in a persistent vegetative state, etc.), and resurrecting eugenics policies that would not only wipe out people with Down Syndrome, which is already happening, but also potentially lead to genetic engineering aimed at creating a "post-human" race of superbeings.Admittedly, as an aside, I argue that the Democratic efforts to promote a regulated, progressive metahuman class are in fact a just development for society—"safe, legal, and rare" being the liberal motto. But without mincing words I riposte that Smith is, in fact, an invertebrate who has not yet exhibited secondary sexual characteristics (a subtle rejoinder, my reviewers say).
To be sure, in my book I take care to disambiguate Ponnuru and Smith, noting, in fairness, that there's little Smith could do to advance on the prattishness of Ponnuru's assessment of the Dems as "the party of the little guy" that "turned its back on the littlest guy of all." I respond to such simpering rhetoric by asserting that Ponnuru and Smith are "the party of two serious wimpsters."
But for the most part, my book is a thorough exploration of ways to mock Smith without addressing and thereby validating the distressing dishonesty at the root of his essay (and, apparently, in Ponnuru's book), a review the Weekly Standard should be above publishing. "Wesley Smith? More like Wesley Crusher," I write in the second chapter. And though my publisher won't be happy with me for revealing the exciting conclusion, in the final analysis, it in fact takes a total prat to write with the voice of measured conservatism and yet fail to even describe one legitimate aspect of liberal opinion on the subject. But reasonable minds will differ on the subject, and I grant that those who find Smith prickish have some solid ground on which to stand.
The National Geographic Society announced today the authentication of a recently discovered apocryphal text: the Gospel of Judas. It's a Coptic copy dating from AD 300 of the Greek original, which would have been compiled a century beforehand by the same Gnostics who brought you the accounts of Philip, Thomas, and Mary Magdalene. In it, Judas tells his side of the story:
The most revealing passages in the Judas manuscript begins, "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week, three days before he celebrated Passover."Greatly looking forward to the wave of supernatural whodunnits that this news will no doubt inspire. When can we read the translation?The account goes on to relate that Jesus refers to the other disciples, telling Judas "you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." By that, scholars familiar with Gnostic thinking said, Jesus meant that by helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus.
Unlike the accounts in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the anonymous author of the Gospel of Judas believed that Judas Iscariot alone among the 12 disciples understood the meaning of Jesus' teachings and acceded to his will. In the diversity of early Christian thought, a group known as Gnostics believed in a secret knowledge of how people could escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came.
Must say, I prefer Kieran Healy's edited version of Billy Collins's poem to the original.
Ben Wolfson posted a reading of Larkin's "This Be The Verse," and it is recommended.
I don't know too much about 20th century British poetry, but I would venture that Larkin's poem on biology and heritability also considers traits inherited over the history of poetry, hence the thumping iambic tetrameter. (Rhythm was not avoided in his work, to be sure.)
Larkin's title brings to mind an antecedent poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Requiem":
UNDER the wide and starry skyRelevant for the incidental or coincidental line but also for the address to his heirs.
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Your first stop for Gettygate news ought to be Modern Art Notes. (Any chance we can get a single round-up post of all the Getty stuff, Tyler?) But if you've cycled through all the artblogs and still crave new sources of Schadenfreude, pick up Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. I can't find the copy I stole from Yglesias (sorry, Yggy), but the introduction is a lengthy feature about Marion True and co. getting snowed over this forged kouros.
I didn't plan to write such a snipey post about it until I saw the Getty's text about the statue. Gladwell's account doesn't leave much doubt about the authenticity of the work, and even discusses the fact that the Getty antiques crew decided that they just didn't care whether everyone in the know thought it was a forgery. Appealing to future wisdom in the face of so many expert conclusions is a slap in the face of the scholarship, viewers, and puppies. Okay, JL is right in comments: never say never. There is an enormous amount of literature on the Getty acquisition, a gloss of which shows a strong consensus that the statue is a forgery. Technologies that currently do not exist could vindicate the piece, which seems to be the grounds for the agnostic camp. But as it stands, it's no cointoss, and I think the Getty misrepresents the debate as such in the text about the piece.
Also, as I mentioned, I have the Asian bird flu. Not much time left; better spend it mean.
Yes, Pinter. We know better than to hold an artist's work hostage to his political views—what's the controversy here? There's a substantive difference between the interplay of work and worldview for Pinter (factually incorrect, more-or-less peacenik) and, say, Céline (anti-Semitic, even eliminationist), and and the case can still be made for Céline's literary achievements. (But not by me—I'm not a fan.)
To be sure, Pinter's work measures up to the award. The Birthday Party remains the most underrated modernist play, in my opinion. To poach a comment I left on another thread (about football, of all things): If you hate Beckett, you won't like Pinter. If you just dislike Beckett, he may be your man. But you probably want to tuck the play in your bag if you're travelling through the Balkans.
UPDATE: Roger Kimball provides the must-read case against Pinter. To wit, Kimball says that Pinter's views on terrorism are too far beyond the pale for his theater to merit recognition. Indeed, I doubt the Swedes even stopped to consider whether Pinter votes Labour or Tory, walks his dog everyday, tips well, or suffices in any other sense as a playwright.
UPDATE II: Those clever Crooked Timberists.
G.p-fave The Dust Congress recently commissioned an Ess Eff poet whom he features regularly to compose a piece about Jack Abramoff. I submit for your approval.
THE MEN THE MACHINEClap your hands, say yeah.Without DeLay
Jack Abramoff
pled guilty
to persuasion
to lobbying
his way into
the earshot of
politicos for
sale inside
the Beltway
on the Hill.Five
counts of wire
fraud one
county of
conspiracy
these he did
deny with-
out DeLay
by his side.
-skyboxes
-heroin
-a chain of sandwich shops
-a “gang style hit”
-a Dial-a-Mattress franchise
all were
in the mix
oh
and
hundreds of
millions of
dollars.Tom DeLay
(R - Sugar Land)
a k a
The Hammer
The Exterminator
The ReDistrictinator
Hot Tub Tom
(who asked “Is-
n’t this kind of fun?”
of Katrina’s refugees)
soon had a felony
indictment of his
own to deny.DeLay
Abramoff Abramoff
DeLay vaudeville
or a law firm
or a debt we
all will pay
the interest on
for years and
years to come?—klipschutz
Of the characters in Rowling's universe I sympathize most with Severus Snape because, primarily, I absolutely despised Harry Potter and his phenomenon when it first manifested several years ago. I railed against the books and the final throes of (high) reading culture that they signaled, swore off friendships, persecuted enemies and loved ones in equal stride. It was solely in an intelligence-gathering effort that I read The Sorcerer's Stone . . . though less so with Chamber, Azkaban, Goblet, and Order, and arguably lesser still when I reread the set. Not that I've abandoned my mission—to eliminate fun, wherever it is being had!—just that I'm going about it by a circuitous route.
So, anyhow, I'm not done with Half-Blood Prince yet, having unwisely blown precious hours of the weekend seeing a few shows, eating meals, etc., and now I'm forced to suffer the ignominy of toting this tome on the Metro—which is all part of my grand, inscrutable scheme, naturally, but is maybe a bigger pill to swallow in the District than in some cities. I caught more than a few knowing glances this morning, both conspiratorial and contemptuous, which came at no surprise after having thrown them myself for a couple years. Not in my seat, with that Washington Times! You're not really reading Sammy's Hill on the way to your internship, are you? I fell into two conversations with total strangers about American foreign policy while reading Imperial Hubris; now I'm praying that no one asks me about Blast-Ended Skrewts.
Mostly because I know about Blast-Ended Skrewts, and we all know, who read these books, whether we do so as silly, childish fanboys or for justifiable reasons that do not compromise our elitist sensibilities. It's one thing for a book to really capture public attention, like, say, Into Thin Air; and another for a stream of books to attain a great deal of public confidence, like, say, the Oprah's Book Club label; but the Harry Potter series is the perfect storm of both phenomena. Did you catch those numbers that Kevin Drum posted? It's often noted that this is a unique moment, but, 10 million copies marks that as something of an understatement. Ten million copies, most of which read over the course of 24 hours? That's absurd.
There's an epiphenomenon at the root of the books' success, I suppose: The books are fun and easy to read and lots of people read them, then many many more read them specifically because they are so widely read that they become as much part social artifact as episodic adventure. But that's not what I really had to say about Half-Blood Prince. Short review (100-odd pages from the finish line): Suffers from the imperial hubris that we saw in Order; it's too long, and an editor with some say-so could make these books shorter, quicker, and tenser. I half wonder whether Rowling isn't bulking up these books (i.e., failing to trim them) in order to pacify a perceived public notion that more means better. Related anecdote: While I was sitting through a disastrous layover last Wednesday at DFW airport, I saw a UPS-type deliver a large, Potter-decorated box to the terminal bookstore. I cased the scene and cornered the clerk when the shop was empty. He told me that it took at least two signatures to open the case, then explained that there was no price at which a copy could be made available that was worth his job, and then (somewhat loudly) suggested that I might try checking with another bookstore, or flying somewhere. The hope is that my plan to finish the book in the office without arousing too much suspicion will be more fruitful. Really, though, just a casual observer here.
Top ten plots of all time, according to Gail Armstrong:
1) Boy meets girl (boy; a goat like no other; all of the above)An unfortunate degree of overlap between numbers 5 and 8 does present an opportunity to draft another rule. I propose "Boy meets car." I also feel that the case could be made for "Boy meets Axe."
2) Boy meets money, boy loses money, etc.
3) Boy meets windmill
4) Boy meets whale
5) Boy meets gun (multiples thereof; may involve aliens)
6) Boy meets The System
7) Boy meets ancestors
8) Boy meets foreigners
9) Boy meets inner whiny self
10) Girl makes casual acquaintance with inner self, realizes she prefers to shop
I've joined a reading group featuring the writers and readers at Unfogged, and we're going to work our way through Martin Heidegger's Being and Time. I'm unreasonably excited about this—it's probably not a book I would make time for otherwise, but a little paternalism (deadlines, assignments) goes a long way with me.
I believe there are some philo professionals in the group; Ogged (the guy who kickstarted the book club) has created a number of guidelines intended intended to steer the discussion toward accessibility (that's good for a layman such as myself). If you're interested, feel free to read along—the comments will be open, and I think I'll put up a link in the sidebar.
I'm not sure whether Ogged thinks of it in these terms, but I imagine that when it's finished, the blog could last as something of a Wiki-annotation of the book. Which isn't to say that this small group of readers is going to take Heidegger in new directions or anything, but there's really no telling who might end up reading it down the line and adding her thoughts. Most book clubs go about it the wrong way, I think, by meeting in person.
An inspired homage to Thomas Friedman, courtesy of one of Teresa Nielsen Hayden's readers:
FriedmandiasThat's terribly funny—thanks to Brad DeLong for pointing it out. I'm going to have to think about elevating my Roger Kimball Watch to more poetic heights.I met a traveller from the New York Times
Who said: ‘Two vast and Lexus legs of stone
Stand in Bangalore. Near their paradigms
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And open Windows, and sneer of the Berlin Wall,
Tell that its sculptor often ate at Pizza Hut
Which yet survive, stamped on this Lilliput,
T.I. that mocked them as ephemeral.
And on the plinth by this Michelangelo—
“My name is Friedmandias, king of the IPO:
Look on my prose, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing coherent stays. Round the decay
Of that steroidal wreck, boundless and bare
The level playing fields stretch far away.’
Do not fail to read the simply amazing news about the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The gist of the article is that new technology allows researchers to see these millenia-old papyrus texts as palimpsests; underneath the disintegrated texts on the fragments, researchers are able to "reveal" an infrared "layer" of ink (or something). Discovered in this manner were parts of a Sophocles tragedy about Thebes, a novel by Lucian, and a Trojan War epic poem (!) by Archilochos, with thousands more fragments remaining to be read.
The researchers believe they may even find "lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament." Astonishing. These works simply can't be translated quickly enough, assuming any text is complete enough to be published.
Mannahatta
I WAS asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.
Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient,
I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,
Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb,
Rich, hemmed thick all around with sail ships and steam ships, an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,
Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,
Tides swift and ample, well-loved by me, towards sundown,
The flowing sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining islands, the heights, the villas,
The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-modelled,
The down-town streets, the jobbers’ houses of business, the houses of business of the ship-merchants and money brokers, the river-streets,
Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week,
The carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses, the brown-faced sailors,
The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft,
The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the river, passing along up or down with the flood-tide or ebb-tide,
The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-formed, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes,
Trottoirs thronged, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and shows,
A million people—manners free and superb—open voices—hospitality—the most courageous and friendly young men,
City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!
City nested in bays! my city!
—Walt Whitman, 1855
When Dean Young Talks About Wine
The worm thrashes when it enters the tequila.
The grape cries out in the wine vat crusher.
But when Dean Young talks about wine, his voice is strangely calm.
Yet it seems that wine is rarely mentioned.
He says, Great first chapter but no plot.
He says, Long runway, short flight.
He says, This one never had a secret.
He says, You can't wear stripes with that.
He squints as if recalling his childhood in France.
He purses his lips and shakes his head at the glass.
Eight-four was a naughty year, he says,
and for a second I worry that California has turned him
into a sushi-eater in a cravat.
Then he says,
This one makes clear the difference
between a thoughtless remark
and an unwarranted intrusion.
Then he says, In this one the pacific last light of afternoon
stains the wings of the seagull pink
at the very edge of the postcard.
But where is the Cabernet of rent checks and asthma medication?
Where is the Burgundy of orthopedic shoes?
Where is the Chablis of skinned knees and jelly sandwiches?
with the aftertaste of cruel Little League coaches?
and the undertone of rusty stationwagon?
His mouth is purple as if from his own ventricle
he had drunk.
He sways like a fishing rod.
When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.
But when a man is hurt,
he makes himself an expert.
Then he stands there with a glass in his hand
staring into nothing
as if he were forming an opinion.
—Tony Hoagland, 2003
Has died. I came to know his work primarily by way of the praise that Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis showered on him, but I haven't yet read his greatest novels. That link should take you to a radio show in which Amis speaks about the shadow Bellow cast.
If you can't tell by the way that I've been phoning it in today, I've been busy preparing to get out of town—I hope to have some quality content from my trip to NYC. In the meantime, check out the Tournament of Books, hosted by The Morning News and complete with brackets. I could've seen Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell going all the way (I'd bet that Crooked Timber and Will Baude would back me up here) but I don't know what you can honestly expect 19th century wizards to do against Holocaust literature. In this regard I think you'll get a strong showing from The Plot Against America, who has the boosted advantage of playing in a comparatively weak conference. Entirely unexplained—how I Am Charlotte Simmons is alive after the first round.
Inspired by Sean Carroll's posting of Charles Simic's "The Death of Heraclitus," I thought I'd pass along Zbigniew Herbert's "Elegy of Fortinbras":
Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to manAs translated by Czeslaw Milosz.
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippersYou will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
there will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums
drums I know nothing exquisite those will be my manoeuvres before I start
to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bitAnyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breatheNow you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dialAdieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedyIt is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince
. . . if you're looking for charming but can't invest the time in Don Quixote, you can't go wrong with Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
Prompted by hearty endorsements from Henry, John Q., and Kieran of Crooked Timber (and my boss, of, uh, my workplace), I picked up Strange and licked it in short time. For a heavily footnoted book that is more academic tedium and scholarship than sorcery, it's a quick, gripping read. Now that Will Baude is reading it I've been meaning to help him spread the word.
(And Will is right—for such a Jacob Marley of a character, Mr. Norrell is shockingly more sympathetic than the heroic Jonathan Strange.)
I nearly forgot that today is Don Quixote's 400th birthday. It's worth noting, as any introduction to the novel will, that there is hardly a literary theory or construct that Cervantes did not prefigure in Don Quixote. (Modernist and postmodernist strategies not excluded, given the enduring theme of inescapable madness and the book's unreliable, polylingual narrators, metacritical narrative, and self-reflexive structure.) A fact made all the more signficant by Cervantes's indisputable contribution to the canon as its first member, his book being the first novel. I've heard that both Faulker and Tolstoy read it once a year.
Of course you don't reach for Don Quixote for all that, you read it because it's enchanting, hilarious, terrifying, everything you want from a novel, and any person whose nose doesn't scrunch up a little whenever Quixote describes his love for Dulcinea lacks soul.
Any time DQ comes up, it's noted how few people get around to reading it—even among good readers. There hasn't been a more appropriate year to resolve to read it in the last century. I recommend Burton Raffel's edition, not only because it's the version I've read, but because it has a strong supporting cast, including: other writings by Cervantes (including "Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man"), source material (selections from de Montalvo's Amadis of Gaul and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso), apocrypha (the Prologue to de Avellaneda's "false" Quijote), and scholarship, both good (Foucault and Borges, María Antonia Garceés's timely essay on Andalusia and the veil) and bad (Harold Bloom).
Don Quixote, ed. and tr. Burton Raffel
But I won't be mad atcha if you want to go with Edith Grossman's economical, sexy new translation (though, with it you only get a Bloom intro).
Don Quixote, tr. Edith Grossman
If we're all parts Quixote and Sancho, bloggers are surely a bit more of the former: "[Don Quixote] had no desire to postpone his plan for even a moment longer, propelled by the thought of how badly the world might suffer if he delayed, for he intended to undo endless wrongs, set right endless injustices, correct endless errors, fix endless abuses, and atone for endless sins."
America: banned in America. It's really quite funny that the Jackson-George Regional Library System of Mississippi have joined Wal-Mart in its decision to ban the book by Jon Stewart and his Daily Show cohorts. Yes, precisely because it features small, fictitious nude illustrations of the Supreme Court justices, which certain individuals have deemed it to be adult material. The decision begs the question as to the state of aphrodisia in the province of Jackson-George Regional, MS. Then again, I don't even need to hazard a Google search to feel confident that somewhere in that great wide Web, a SCOTUS fetish site is happy to accept your credit card number.
I'm reading Wendy Steiner's The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in the Age of Fundamentalism, and one historical aspect of these sorts of decisions that she emphasizes is how difficult it is to ascribe prurient "intent" to photography. Not just art, but photography in particular: with its thorough formal correspondence with reality—by dint of its accurate pictorial representational ability and its fundamental place in our lives—photography has rendered the question of obscenity in literature entirely void and rendered the question of obscenity in painting obsolete. (When was the last time Lady Chatterly's Lover came up for parole?) The finer free speech question that photographic material and art poses is sufficiently difficult that our censors simply no longer care about literary or other visual erotica (or art). Satire, though, is still as challenging as ever.
Well, fuck me. Remember when I said I was going to write up something on I Am Charlotte Simmons? I really wanted to at least get a smirk out of someone to purchase the time I wasted reading the goddamn thing. But Unf has gone and written what you need to know about the book:
As for Wolfe's latest, its not so good. The wierd verbal tics (someone may wish to inform Mr. Wolfe that no one in the English speaking world uses the phrase "loamy loins") are a lot more difficult to get over when you're reading a novel about an 18 year old female college student written by a 70 year old foppish reactionary. Which is to say, this novel suffers from a lack of realism that makes it pretty difficult to get through without chuckling off and on at how tin Wolfe's ear has become.I'd have said more, but that's about what you need to know. To illustrate just how embarrassing it is to read this book, at one point Wolfe tries incorporat the word "torpor" in the lyrics of a "crunk rap" song playing in the background. Worse still—at multiple points—Wolfe uses the onomatopoeia, "rutrutrut," to describe sex. (G.p pleads with its readers: Once your sweet lovemaking goes "rutrutrut," it's time to refrain from the sweet lovemaking. Even the thinking about the sweet lovemaking.) Wolfe deserves a congressional medal of honor, though, for his identification and etiology of "fuck patois" (e.g., "Fuckin what the fuck?").
Fafnir is sharing his review, which you should read . . . if you are of the opinion that Fafnir and Unf are different people.
I really have only one substantive comment: does it ever occur to people who mock the idea of “queering” the Renaissance or the Victorian novel that a good deal of literature has in fact been written on the subject of sexuality, some of it by writers of various sexualities? When Strausbaugh sneers at “the race/sexuality/avant-gardist trifecta of ‘Feeling Around in the Dark: Black Queer Experimental Poetry,’” is he really sneering at the MLA– or at the fact that there is such a thing as black queer experimental poetry, and such a thing as critics who attend to it? And more important, should the New York Times really be encouraging this sort of thing in the first place? I mean, if you were at a dinner party where someone mentioned the work of, say, Audre Lorde or Essex Hemphill, and someone else rolled his eyes and said, ‘oh, right, the race/sexuality/avant-gardist trifecta again,’ would you consider Mr. Else to be a serious person worth a serious response? Or would you turn and say, “I beg your pardon, John, but why don’t you just take your sophomoric little remarks to the New Criterion, where they still go in for that kind of thing?”Yeah. Timely to a number of discussions I've seen lately. You have to consider Strausbaugh's trifecta in a zero-sum equation. You can't reject the terms of one side (black/queer/experimental) without projecting some other normative set of terms (white/straight/male/Christian/from a state where "real" Americans live/uses Windows/watches The OC).
Though with all due respect, something must be done about this recent spate of conference blogging. The MLA? The APA? What is it, Take Your Readers to Work Week? I think we need another election.
Died on December 28 at age 71. How to classify Susan Sontag's enormous contributions to American criticism and culture, to the position of the United States in global criticism and culture? I felt a personal pang when I heard about her death. From On Photography, In America, and I, Etcetera—the finest examples of her essays and literature—to "Regarding the Torture of Others"—her dauntless political criticism—Sontag was a model critic, a model mind.
To reflect Christmas loot and a recent trip to Half-Price Books—how I have missed that bookstore from DC, and how nice of them to welcome me home with an additional 20 percent–off sale—I've updated the sidebar with some new books and music. Two of those books in particular I'm anxious to crack: Mimesis, which has been teasing me for so long that I'm embarrassed that I never read it earlier; and The Adventures of Augie March, a novel that causes Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens to compete as to who can out-effuse the other in praising Saul Bellow for writing it.
A word on Half Price: It's a treasure no matter what, but may I submit that the Mesquite, Texas location might be less treasurable than some others. The "Philosophy/Religion," naturally enough, was more religion than philosophy—but by about a 4:1 ratio, I'd wager. Two walls of books on religion? that spilled over into an entire religious display island? and weren't theology texts, mind you, but advice books for bringing the spirit of the Early Church into your customer service department or whatever? It was a bit much. By the time I was at the front counter behind a couple with a stack of books including Ann Coulter's How To Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) and the like, I thought we had crossed over into parody.
Speaking of the South: James Wolcott notes that the Oxford American is back in business. Before the magazine went ashore of financial shoals a couple years back, the Southern Magazine of Good Writing was the premiere Antebellum journal of southern letters. After having just moved to Little Rock, they've lateralled to another Arkansas headquarters; no one pushed for Wesley Clark like these guys did, so my guess is that they needed some time off to recover.
Check out Brad DeLong and Mark Kleiman's discussion regarding which Greek hero makes the best liberal role model. I'd say that Kleiman's criticisms of Odysseus's liberal ideological purity would make an excellent launch for a case defending Aeneas, if we're able to nominate from epics outside the Greek. (Recognizing, of course, that Virgil's sociopolitical era was far closer to ours in time and resemblance than Homer's.) Virgil's Turnus, Aeneas's Etruscan enemy, is an adaptation of the complaints against Achilles that DeLong and Kleiman outline, and in defeating Turnus and rooting the long-suffering peoples of Troy, is a liberal improvement on the occasionally terrorist tendencies of Odysseus and war-mongering ways of Achilles. The family-values set really can't approve of the way Aeneas handled his outside-the-sanctity-of-marriage relationship with Dido, which only improves his liberal bonafides, right?
Liberal critics of America's noncritical support for Israel may pass on Virgil, however—Aeneas didn't exactly show up in Rome offering a two-state solution.
