Rod Dreher linked to my piece on Gogol yesterday, and we got to discussing the difference between people who like Austen and those who like Russian novels. In an email, I suggested:
In my experience, Austen fans love her because of the detailed character portraits, the well-turned phrase, subtle plot development. etc.
Russian novels tend to be novels of ideas. The dialogue is often abrupt and slightly off balance–when Russian characters are angry, the world is black; when they are happy, they are positively giddy. It’s as if they are all manic depressives. People read Russian novels–at least most of them–for the ideas represented in characters’ actions, the social commentary, the existential crises. This is all speaking very generally, of course. When I put it like this, there are a number of objections that pop into my head, but voila.
Two questions: First, I’m sure this distinction has been made by others, but what do you think? Is it accurate? Second, Dreher—who admits to struggling to get into Russian novels—asks his readers for their favorites. What are yours?
Over at Books & Culture, John Wilson offers his books of the year. I love John’s methodology: the best books are those that first come to mind after a year of reading. Here are a couple of the more interesting titles:
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. + Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar. Viktor Shklovsky. Two Russian masters. Solzhenitsyn’s late stories come in pairs (“binaries,” he called them) that play off each other. A bonus story, the ninth, was translated by AIS’s son Stephen. Shklovsky’s book was published in the USSR in 1970, when he was 76, and is available (at last!) in English translation, thanks to Shushan Avagyan and the Dalkey Archive Press. It’s a look at how literature works, and literature’s relation to life. Both books draw on a lifetime of memory, experience, and hard-won wisdom.
Scenes from Village Life. Amos Oz. + This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon. Linda McCullough Moore. Two collections of linked stories, the first a dark, uncanny report from Israel , the second a life in condensed form (leaving the blank spaces blank). Even better when read together. (Warning: the last story from Oz, a coda of sorts, left me nonplussed. Maybe I missed the point.)
New Criterion art critic James Panero has curated what looks to be an interesting exhibition of portraits of injured U.S. service personnel. Too often artists use military injuries or deaths as mere fodder for the next piece of political art. That’s not the case here. The exhibit will run September 1-18.
We will be screening Walker Percy: A Documentary Film at Houston Baptist University tomorrow night. I’ll be giving a brief introduction to Percy before the film and would love to meet any fellow readers of First Things. The screening is free and open to the public. It begins at 8:30 p.m. in the Mabee Teaching Theatre on campus. Hope to see some of you there.
I’m not a big fan of purely political art, but the Pratt Institute has no problem with it—as long as it’s the right kind of politics, that is. The New Criterion’s James Panero reports:
You don’t have to be an art critic to see something tasteless going on at Pratt Institute. Since 1887, this venerable New York institution has been dedicated to educating “artists and creative professionals to be responsible contributors to society.” Yet teachers and administrators at Pratt have been nothing but irresponsible in their recent dealings with a fifth-year drawing student named Steve DeQuattro.
Hamlet was sane when he stabbed Polonius according to a court in California. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy presided. While the court was unable to reach a unanimous decision, ten out twelve jurors “believed Hamlet to be sane, thus able to be held criminally culpable.”
In today’s online article at Books & Culture, Marcus Goodyear explains a new poetry game on Twitter where poets tweet lines of poetry on a particular topic in an effort to outwit each other. The purpose, Goodyear remarks, is to remind us that poetry is fun:
In the end, Tweet Speak Poetry is more than a game, it is a philosophy of poetry as a game. The rules and resources of the game are mostly decided by the rules and resources of poetry itself. Sometimes our attempts to study poetry in university settings can take the joy out it. We forget how to play with T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” and try instead to wrestle the meaning from it. If we play poetry at all, we treat the poem like an opponent, to be pummelled into submission. If we are to win, the poem must lose.
Applying game theory to poetry has helped us rediscover the fun of it—using our wits, exploring language through social media, imposing new boundaries on ourselves, and reminding ourselves that the outcome of the game is simple: more people who love poetry and write poetry.
Most of all, though, playing poetry games gives us permission to be silly again. We love T. S. Eliot, but we also love W. H. Auden. We love Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson and Julia Kasdorf and Scott Cairns and Luci Shaw, but we also love Shel Silverstein. We can’t be serious and disciplined about something if we forget how to play.
I don’t see any problem with this as a game. After all, some of Donne’s early poems and John Wilmot’s epigrams are mostly playful witticisms. However, as “a philosophy of poetry,” it is woefully inadequate.
I’ll have more to say on poetry and Twitter later this month at Public Discourse, but in the meantime: the idea that poetry is nothing but a game is to ignore, or at least minimize, the moral nature of poetry. This view of poetry often goes hand in hand with a purely materialistic view of reality that reduces the self, love, good and evil to the neuron firings of the brain. According to this view, if love, good and evil do not really exist, it is naive for the poet to write about them. What is left for the poet to do is to play word games that produce immediate pleasure via witticisms or jeux de mots. Frank O’Hara espoused this view in part when he said that it was most important for a poet to be “not boring.”
A better philosophy of poetry would explain that the pleasure poetry produces is not found in witticisms alone, but also in the truth that it expresses about who we are, or the nature of goodness or evil. Otherwise, the poem is merely technique, devoid of anything human. Yes, poetry can often function like a game (as Hans-Georg Gadamer has pointed out), but it is also much more than one.
While our culture tends to eschew religious polemics, great disagreements have produced not only some of the most awe-inspiring moments in human history, but also some of the most beautiful lines of prose. So argues Carl Truman in the latest issue of Themelios:
[P]olemic has produced some moments of great beauty in church history, and we should not let the modern cultural antipathy to religious controversy blind us to that fact. I need to be somewhat nuanced here, lest I am misunderstood, and distinguish two kinds of beauty in polemic. The first I call the polemics where, in the words of Yeats, ‘a terrible beauty is born.’ Yeats was writing about the Easter Uprising in Dublin and about the way that the cause of Irish national independence gave, in a moment of explosive violence, a terrible, frightening grandeur to men who had, up to that point, occupied mundane common-or-garden jobs.
* * *
There is another kind of polemical beauty, however, and this is of a kind that you might not even notice was polemical unless it was explained as such. Some of the most beautiful lines in church history have been penned precisely as beautiful, if quiet, polemic.
The crisis in the humanities has “officially” arrived, Stanley Fish asserts in his October 11th piece for The New York Times. Why now? Because on October 1st, SUNY Albany decided to cut the French, Italian, classics, Russian and theatre programs from the university curriculum. The elimination of French, in particular, “was a shocker.”
Sounding ever so desperate and disoriented, Fish’s solution—though he admits it probably won’t work—is for “senior administrators” to save the humanities by explaining and defending “the core enterprise . . . to legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others.” And what is the “core enterprise” of the humanities according to Fish? To employ humanities professors, of course! Fish states that there is “something” of value in the humanities, though he is at a loss as to what that might be, and concludes with this:
I have always had trouble believing in the high-minded case for a core curriculum—that it preserves and transmits the best that has been thought and said—but I believe fully in the core curriculum as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists.
A few weeks ago, David Mills mentioned The City. The fall issue is now out. To whet your appetite: Matt Milliner discusses the two art worlds, Jay Richards writes on Christianity and socialism, and Albert Mohler reviews Christian Smith. Read it here.
“For a crowd is not a company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.” (From “Of Friendship,” The Essays)
Over the past few days, poet Thomas Sayers Ellis has posted “Ten Rules for Changing the Game of Poetry” to his Facebook profile. (The full list can be found here.)
Ellis’s ten rules actually reveal a lot about the state of poetry today. Apparently it’s necessary to tell poets things like: “Don’t Publish for Publication’s Sake” and “A book of poetry is not a novel.” (Though First Things readers know otherwise!)
He does say some good things (like: “Young poets should practice integrity when acquiring blurbs”), but the list also contains a lot of poststructuralist mumbo-jumbo and downright silliness, like: “Every Time Writing Tries to Write You, Re-write It or Revise You.”
Anyway, I’m not a poet, just a poor, parasitical critic, but Ellis’s list seems less like rules for “changing the game” and more like asking for overtime. So here’s my humble alternative. I couldn’t come up with ten, just seven, and I haven’t put them in my Facebook status or Twitter feed. Hopefully that won’t make them too uninteresting:
Like me, Caspar Melville is bored with New Atheism. It has been good for some things, Melville writes, like creating copy for journalists and arguing against odious “Christian religious fundamentalism.” Regarding the latter:
The origins of the New Atheists’ impulse, according to philosopher Richard Norman, lie in 9/11 and the reappearance of a particularly aggressive strain of Christian religious fundamentalism. If, as Norman also argues, New Atheism can be over-generalising and crude in its response to religion, this is because it is a response to crude and nonspecific articulations of religiosity – what could be less specific than bombing a skyscraper, or cruder than Biblical creationism?
(Um, how about implying that Christian “fundamentalists” (which is often used as code for orthodox believers in New Atheism) are no different from Islamic terrorists?)
But, overall, Melville finds the New Atheist simplistic, not because they make errors like above, but because they make no distinction between “fundamentalists” and those kindly “moderates”:
I was bored with Hawking’s statement about God before he even made it, but this zinger from Richard Lea at The Guardian is worth sharing. Reminding us that Hawking has far outsold his fellow scientists who have tried their hand at trade books precisely because of “his willingness to talk about God,” Lea observes: “You may not need God to create a universe, but a little religion goes a long way in creating a bestseller.”
Outing overrated writers is a favorite pastime of critics everywhere, and this summer particularly so.
First there was Gabriel Josipivici’s attack in The Guardian on Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. They exhibit a “petty-bourgeois uptightness,” a “terror of not being in control,” and a “schoolboy desire to boast and to shock,” Josipivici is reported to have said. Reading them, he continues, “leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner.” Clearly.
And not to be outdone by their fellow anglophones, Alex Good and Steven W. Beattie gave us the ten most overrated Canadian writers in The National Post–you know, people like the Erin Moure and Joseph Boyden.
Anyway, I like these lists as much as the next person and agree that, overall, literature in the West is in a sad state of decline. But to give our poor contemporary writers some respite, here are a couple of the most outrageously blunt critical statements ever made, listed in no particular order, some more justified than others:
Ayn Rand acolyte, Nick Newcomen, has driven 12,328 miles with a GPS tracking device on to spell out “Read Ayn Rand”.
According to The Guardian, “Newcomen took about 10 days to complete each word, turning on his GPS logger when he wanted to write and turning it off between letters, videoing himself at landmarks along the route for documentation.” Sounds like a “second-hander” to me.
Adam Kirsch, whose poetry I admire, has a surprisingly muddled argument on the value of great books for world leaders in a recent article for The New Republic. Responding to Charles Hill’s argument in Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order that great books tutor leaders in statecraft, Kirsch writes that literature is, in fact, “a very dubious basis for political leadership.”
Kirsch is right, of course, that such texts are hardly sufficient for forming political leaders (and I doubt that this is Hill’s point either); however, he goes on to argue that they are unhelpful in any real way because (1) classical texts like The Iliad glorify “imperialism and conquest,” teaching us, Kirsch writes with breezy simplicity, “to admire what our reason would condemn,” (2) such texts often offer impractical advice and tend to mystify leadership, and (3) literary texts, whose meaning is “always interpretable,” “can be used to support many different political beliefs and courses of action.”
With that, out go The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Henry V, and all other canonical texts of Western literature, as if these texts have nothing to say to world leaders regarding the dangers of hubris, the value of perseverance or the strength (and dangers) of trust. I especially like the touch of conflating “our reason” with reason tout court and the wonderful illogic of the statement that because such texts can be abused by world leaders they are somehow useless.
I would not want to reduce the value of literary works to their relative wisdom alone, nor would I argue that such texts are necessary for forming good political leaders, but Kirsch’s response is over-the-top. If modern politicians haven’t learned much from the classics, it seems strange, to say the least, to blame the texts themselves and not the politicians.
Last month I received the latest issue of PMLA (the Publication of the Modern Language Association) that included a lead article with the title, “Queer Ecology.” Why I’m still a member, I’m not sure.
What is queer ecology? Well, it’s the latest literary theory that begins with the “fact” that nature is partially queer—because “cells reproduce asexually” and some “plants and animals are hermaphroditic.” The author goes on to argue, using a rather standard post-structuralist trick, that because all things are interdependent, all things are equal and somehow have rights. And by all the things, he means all things, including silicon.
What is the scientific evidence of the supposed “queerness” of nature? I am sure Stephen Barr could give us a much more informed evaluation, but to me, the arguments seem to rely mostly on sleight of hand—anecdotal references to splitting cells, hermaphroditism in invertebrates, or two females caring for a single offspring, none of which have anything to do with sexual relations between two males or two females. Even Paul Vasey, who researches “homosexual behavior in free-ranging Japanese macaques,” put the problem this way in a recent New York Times piece: “Homosexuality is a tough case, because it appears to violate that central tenet, that all of sexual behavior is about reproduction.” Indeed, which is why, to get around this problem, Vasey and others define homosexuality as something else besides sex between two animals of the same gender—usually a set of behavioral characteristics that we associate with homosexuality, which is then superimposed on the animals being observed.
Of course, the “queerness” of nature is treated as almost scientific fact in the PMLA piece, but never mind accuracy and nuance. What matters is style! To wit:
Pro-life is on the rise and has been for the past fifteen years. Since May 2009, the majority of Americans (47 percent to 45 percent) now identify themselves as pro-life. What’s striking, however, is that the percentage of Americans ages 18 to 29 who view abortion as “illegal in all circumstances” is up from 15 percent to 23 percent.
Why? Because of the “demonization of sex,” of course! Aimee R. Thorne-Thomsen, who is the former executive director of the Pro-Choice Public Education Project, argues that the increase among twenty-somethings can be attributed to the fact that they have “grown up under a political system that demonized sexuality. Their consciousness has been under abstinence-only, promotion-of-marriage initiatives, so it’s a very narrowly based idea of appropriate behavior.” So those puritanical policies of Bill Clinton and the massive increase in the production and accessibility of pornography was all part of some master plot to encourage young people not to have sex. Who’da figured?
Joe: I second Ryan on this. I am no legal scholar, but it seems to me that, technically, he is not guilty of treason until he has been convicted in a court of law or some other judicial body.
Andy McCarthy’s response to Kevin Williamson is unconvincing in this regard as well. He cites the 2009 Military Commissions Act and 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force as providing the President with the authority to kill enemy combatants, but neither of these address the issue of assassinating Americans. And the Quirin decision, which he cites as a precedent, is not a precedent for assassination but for military tribunals that first convict Americans for treason before meting out the death penalty.
If Anwar Al-Awlaki is killed on the battlefield, that’s one thing, but targeting him for assassination is something else. Assassinations have a somewhat troubled legal history. No doubt, the fight against terrorism is a different kind of war that makes a situation like this difficult, but there must be a better solution than throwing out due process and overtly targeting American citizens for assassination.
Speaking of art and reproduction, having probably just read Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Cubist Painters or one of André Breton’s surrealist manifestos, eighteen-year-old German Helene Hegemann has written a book on “Berlin’s club scene” incorporating large portions of another writer’s prose. Charges of plagiarism flew, as they always do on such occasions. However, instead of responding with “the plagiarism-gotcha script of contrition and retraction,” as The New York Times puts it, Hegemann stated that she intended to “borrow” the material all along—thus supposedly making the action art, not plagiarism. “There’s no such thing as originality, just authenticity,” Hegemann is reported to have said to the collective sigh of philosophy professors worldwide.
Tacitly, Ms. Hegemann’s actions can be understood as a critique (and rightly so) of the definition of art in terms of originality alone. All writers and artists borrow from each other. There is “nothing new under the sun.”
Ironically, however, subversive efforts like Ms. Hegemann’s to challenge this reductive definition of art—most notoriously, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain—have often been lauded because of their original critique of originality itself, encouraging other artists to create increasingly bizarre and shocking pieces of “anti-art” in a never-ending, but profitable, game of one-upmanship.
I wonder if Ms. Hegemann is hoping to profit from exactly this sort of game? Duchamp’s Fountain was once defended by an anonymous art critic as a work of art on the grounds that “[h]e CHOSE it.” This is exactly how Ms. Hegemann seems to be positioning herself by evoking her intentions. Because she chose to include another writer’s words, it’s not plagiarism, but art, of which she no doubt hopes to reap the benefits. And so far, she seems to be doing nicely.
Whatever Ms. Hegemann’s ultimate intentions, the fact is this subversive approach to art and literature (and perhaps what is left of the avant-garde) is now less about critiquing the notion of originality than benefiting from it. A real critique of the overblown emphasis on originality is not more concept art, but less. There may be no new ideas, but there are better and worse ways of expressing those ideas. Thus, a renewed emphasis on craft would redress the balance nicely enough.
These things never end well, and I have no interest in taking sides. Yet, did not Alan Jacobs make Ford’s very point two years ago with so much more nuance when he noted Amis’s troublesome preoccupation in his recent political works with style over substance? Yes, I think he did.
If only Ms. Ford had been a reader of, First Things, she might have hit Amis where it really hurts.
The Giro d’Italia—the second most important stage race in cycling after the Tour de France—is starting in Amsterdam this year, and a politician from the left-wing GroenLinks party has suggested that instead of having podium girls kiss victorious cyclists “podium guys” should be used. Heterosexuals, er, I mean, podium girls are “hopelessly outdated and sexist,” says Marco de Goede. Of course, de Goede is right that the use of podium girls is “sexist.” So let’s just have all the girls (and guys) stay home this year.
Clearly the homosexual agenda—both here and in Europe—is not tolerance but the celebration of homosexuality throughout society.
For all of you Walker Percy fans (and I am one of them), be on the lookout for the new Walker Percy documentary by Winston Riley. Mr. Riley’s previous documentary—on the artist Walter Anderson—won a number of awards and was broadcast on PBS.
According to Mr. Riley, the Percy film is intended for broadcast later this year, but there may be a few local screenings at film festivals. Or, if you are in New Orleans, you can catch a preview screening of the film scheduled to be shown in conjunction with the opening of the Walker Percy Center at Loyola on March 10th.
