Ladislaw Said the Right Thing to Dorothea

A friend asked what I thought. Here's what I said:

1. The Nobels are like the Oscars: they insist on giving them every year, no matter to what extent
Sturgeon's Law ("95% of everything is crap") is in evidence. After a few years, inevitably, people look
back at the best picture winner and say, "Really?" (Often followed by, "They screwed Scorcese again?")
There's a built-in problem with any such system; this isn't helped by the quality of the judges.

2. The committee says this is about the shifts in the stated policies and commitments of the U.S.
They didn't even pretend that it was about substantial changes in situations "on the ground."
It's somewhat like giving an art critic like Ruskin an award for painting.

3. Regardless of their stated purposes, this is pretty clearly a flipping-off of Bush and his fellow
chickenhawks.

4. Obama should make a statement about the award being a kind of promissory note (though really
it's an albatross) for the work he intends to move forward. The prize money should go to some
childhood foundation or consortium of free clinics.

Good piece in the New Yorker. My favorite line: "We evolved on the savannahs of Africa. We now live in Candyland."

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/20/090720crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=1



http://wmpreston.blogspot.com

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
The Endurance, Caroline Alexander (non-fiction)
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Middlemarch, George Eliot
The Hamlet, William Faulkner
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor (stories)
Dr. Fischer of Geneva; or, The Bomb Party, Graham Greene
Nickel Mountain, John Gardner
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard (non-fiction)
Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Plague, Albert Camus
Fun House, Alison Bechdel (graphic novel)
The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

(I had Faulkner's novel on there twice; replaced one of those with the Marquez. Then I properly credited Bradbury. Magnus Mills, whose name had been there before due to some moving and deleting, is the author of the wonderful Explorers of the New Century--an astounding book, but not in the top 15 for its impact on me.)

Following the lead of Livejournal's wendigomountain and selfavowedgeek, I'm listing 15 books that have had a huge impact. Tough to whittle it down, and some major influences have been left off. As I look at them, I realize what binds them together: Each book did something that, prior to reading that book, I did not realize you could do.

In no order:

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
The Endurance, Caroline Alexander (non-fiction)
The Hamlet, William Faulkner
Middlemarch, George Eliot
The Hamlet, William Faulkner
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor (stories)
Dr. Fischer of Geneva; or, The Bomb Party, Graham Greene
Nickel Mountain, John Gardner
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard (non-fiction)
Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Plague, Albert Camus
Fun House, Alison Bechdel (graphic novel)
The Martian Chronicles, Magnus Mills
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

. . . rather absurdly leaving out any Shakespeare (Hamlet) or a book of the Bible (Gospel of Luke) or a book of poetry (maybe Louise Glück's Wild Iris).

http://wpreston.blogspot.com

I found this to be terrible and fascinating:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7984436.stm

All about creating an image--a white image. As Bruce sings, "Believe half of what you hear and less of what you see."


http://wmpreston.blogspot.com

There's now a lovely (I think) picture of my dog to greet you at wmpreston.blogspot.com.

I changed the name of the thing. We'll see if this one sticks.

Don't take it personally, but I'm shifting away from livejournal. My new blog, mostly on the written word, will be at wmpreston.blogspot.com ("This Earthly World"). I have two blogs already at blogspot (and I'll likely add a third one next year) for use with the classes I teach.

Feel free to stop by. I'll still pop by here to check in on friends.

Bill

Long-awaited by whom? Good question.

I'll break it into categories:

Reading
I'd recommend the books I've read this December, The Paris Enigma, by Pablo de Santis (an Argentinian writer), and Atmospheric Disturbances, by Rivka Galchen. Both books have "genre" elements to them, but neither is, narrowly speaking, a genre novel.

The de Santis book concerns a narrator who reads about the exploits of The Twelve, a group of world-famous detectives from various parts of the globe. He apprentices himself to the Argentinian member of the group and, due to that detective's final and most morally problematic case, he fills in for the detective at a meeting of The Twelve in Paris for the World's Fair. There, mysteries abound, implicating and affecting the other detectives. The book presents a classically styled mystery to solve, but it also asks questions about the role of "the enigma" in one's life, and how, in Heisenbergian fashion, the observer of the enigma becomes its co-creator. Really a terrific story and, assuming one can judge on the basis of a translation, well told.

Galchen's novel builds its narrative with a series of science fictional ideas: a doppelganger, parallel worlds, international conspiracies, the fluid nature of reality. I don't want to spoil the book for anyone, but it's clear from the beginning that something's "off" with our narrator, a husband who is convinced (and obviously this makes no sense) that his wife has been replaced by a duplicate. How he's come to this realization, the events in his life that set him up for these circumstances, and the steps he takes to locate his "real" wife--this is the structure of the story, which I found entertaining and well written. A fine first novel.

I am presently reading a few things: Paul Auster's Man in the Dark, which is not impressing me, but I only have 60 pages to go; Jay Parini's Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America, which would be a great basis for a history or humanities class; and Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, by Jeanette Winterson--I'm finding that I have to stop after every few paragraphs to just soak in Winterson's observations and thoughts; it's brilliant, so far; I highly enjoyed her bravura novel Written on the Body earlier this year.

I've also been reading short fiction by Ben Fountain and learning more about Robert Frost's poetry.

Writing
There's less of this during the school year than during the summer. I am mostly finished with a draft of a story called, at the moment, "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down." I did not, until a few days ago, see it as a genre tale, but it could probably fit quite easily at Asimov's or F&SF. The draft is 7,500 words, but it's not complete, and the whole thing needs to be organized and then studied for repetition; I wrote scenes and fragments and lines largely without regard to their order, as things occurred to me.

I do occasionally make forays into my novels, planting a line here and there for place-holding until my eventual return. The novels are The Drowned Book and the somewhat fantastic In the Deep Woods Where I Found Her. I'm looking forward to getting back to them.

School
With very little effort, you can find the two blogs and schedules I keep for my school courses, an 8th-grade English class and a film studies class called "The Language of Film."

Here's the picture referred to by Colin Powell:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/09/29/slideshow_080929_platon?slide=16#showHeader

Other photos from the piece are also available through that link. Again, cheers to Powell for addressing that particular issue better than the Democrats have managed to do.

Beautifully done, and taking to task his own party for its tone and tactics.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/19/colin-powell-endorses-oba_n_135895.html

Oh, so it's socialists we're supposed to be afraid of! (And here I've always liked George Orwell. I guess he's not such a good guy after all.)

Sen. Voinovich of Ohio called Obama a socialist, but it's a charge the McCain campaign has been building toward ever since the VP debate (at least, that's when I first noticed it; it's possible this has been stewing longer out on the stump). Palin talked about Biden and Obama supporting "redistribution" of wealth, which is a charge that means someone is supporting a socialist policy. (I mentioned this to my students, since we were reading Animal Farm, and kids kept wanting to talk about the debates; I explained that a code word was used to suggest socialism, a term Americans tend to respond to negatively and a charge leveled at FDR regarding his policies.) McCain followed up in the latest debate with his use of Obama's "spread the wealth around" line. Still, no one had said "the s word." Now it's out there.

On top of the McCain "robo-calls," with their rhetoric of fear, and the McCarthy-like rantings of Minnesota Rep. Bachmann, we're seeing how far a politician I once liked and admired has fallen. This was a man who spoke about "agents of intolerance" back in 2000, and I was stunned that he spoke up in that way. Now, he hopes to play on ignorance and fear in the hopes that Americans, like Orwells sheep, can be driven to follow . . . well, pigs.

Frank Rich's nice summary of my own concerns regarding McCain, Palin, and the rhetoric of terror:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I read an earlier piece by RFK Jr. in which he mentioned the Pegler quote in Palin's acceptance speech. The speech was written--I believe--by Matt Scully, a former Bush speech writer who penned an incendiary animal-rights book, Dominion. I didn't disagree with many of Scully's points in the book, but the rhetoric seemed less than helpful. I suppose this proves that, when the cause is "right," he doesn't care whether the language (what Sarah Palin would term "verbage") starts fires. McCain's campaign slogan should be: Not Your Grandfather's Idea of Citizenship.

I hadn't heard or read most of this. I find especially illuminating the information on his time in the service--not because he's slandered as a bad person, but because, in his current incarnation, he misportrays himself--and allows himself to be misportrayed--as a better person than he ever was. I've wondered so much recently what became of the honor he once possessed; now I see that perhaps it was a fiction I believed, and recent actions and statements do tellingly represent his true character.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain

This is what happen when you loose the dogs of war--both in a real war and on the homefront:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/10/mccain-defends-his-rabid_n_133710.html

I'd noticed, watching McCain while Palin spoke this week, that McCain looked pained and uncomfortable. He has been a decent person, which may explain why he can't bring up the more incendiary charges in Obama's presence (nor can he look at the man, oddly), and his attempts, detailed above, to rein in the wild horses of bigotry and fear, tell me that he knows he's leading his fellow "mavericks" into No Man's Land.

[For a fascinating history lesson on the word (and family name) "maverick," see this link: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Original_Maverick_family_upset_that_McCain_1009.html]

As is also evidenced by the first piece, it's easier to get the crowds riled than to get them cooled. I assume this behavior will dismay independents as well as most Republicans, but what will be the outcome of the kind of hate speech the campaign has encouraged (and in some cases spoken)? McCain doesn't want to be culpable. Guess what? It's too late.

"The evil that men do lives after them.
The good is oft interrèd in their bones."

If you've been wondering just how far things may descend as the McCain campaign tosses decency out the door to get the Big Job:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/06/mccain-does-nothing-as-cr_n_132366.html

It's not terribly surprising. Bigotry and fear are never far below the surface in our culture. Republican leaders, sadly, have done much over the past few decades to play on those fears. Obama, whatever his virtues and weaknesses, is the perfect target.

I've been wondering how Palin sleeps at night, but she seems possessed of that kind of certitude that belongs only to the unstable or the devoutly convinced. A recent piece on her in The New Republic suggests something of the roots of her anger about "elites" (which seemingly includes "people who are conversant with national issues" and "those who read").

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=8c130fe3-adab-4cb3-8443-c363f085cf13

I keep remember Max Von Sydow's line from Hannah and Her Sisters: "If Jesus Christ came back to earth today and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up!"

First, a funny piece from The Onion about who we're not bringing on board The Change Train:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/obama_modifies_yes_we_can_message?utm_source=EMTF_Onion

Then there's serious stuff from my local paper; I know both parties have said they'll address the VA issue. Of course, what any party will be able to do given the economic crunch we can't avoid in the coming years, I don't know.

http://www.syracuse.com/poststandard/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-11/1221900924286160.xml&coll=1

Here's a nicely frightened piece from the Huffingtonpost:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-mckay/were-gonna-frickin-lose-t_b_124772.html

I'm not understanding folks. What part of Roe v Wade going down the toilet do they not understand? Hell, what part of "unprovoked war that killed many thousands and displaced millions" have they not understood? Are this many people simply frightened of hard truths, trusting of selfish leaders, or just happy to be deluded so long as their immediate needs are met?

As Dostoevsky once said of his fellow Russians, "We get the leaders we deserve."

So many brains in this land are thoughtless, selfish sacks of shit.

McSweeney's submission guidelines state that if you haven't heard from them in three months, feel free to send them your work again. (It's been five months.) I'm pretty sure that doesn't really count as "professional." In any case, The Onion has a good McSweeney's-related piece.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/mcsweeneys_rejects_mike_mussinas

Flying to Chicago and back last week (with layovers in Philly) did give me reading time, at least.

Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body had me fooled for a while. The clever writing--funny, smart, enticing, and open to the cracking of grammar when the need arose--engaged me, but it caused me to think the whole short book would continue in that vein. Then the plot kicks in, and you realize what she's been doing all along with this voice, as the narrator's soul is both malformed and formed by the story's key events. It's a passionate love story; that's all you need to know. The essence of the tale is not the plot but the narrator, whose whole body is bound up in the plot, as yours will be. The story takes you deep into yourself--challenging how you think of yourself and your own views of "love"--as you accompany the teller into the soul's (and body's) dark night. Highly recommended.

I also started reading Annie Dillard's For the Time Being (don't read that title the way you normally would) and Graham Greene's so-far-masterful The Heart of the Matter. More on those when I finish them.

Alison Bechdel's name came up on silk-noir's blog, which made me want to mention it here for a different reason. (The other blog refers to a "test" (it's not really) employed by another blogger, mo, in reference to something said once by Bechdel. The discussion of this is here: http://thehathorlegacy.com/why-film-schools-teach-screenwriters-not-to-pass-the-bechdel-test/. As I said, it's not a test, but a certain quality Bechdel and mo look for when scoping out possible movies to see.)

Bechdel is the author of Fun Home (http://www.amazon.com/Fun-Home-Tragicomic-Alison-Bechdel/dp/0618871713/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219779813&sr=8-1), an outstanding graphic novel that is also one of the best books I've ever read. Funny and touching, it is less about Bechdel's exploration of her sexuality--and her growing understanding of her father's sexual life--than it is about the enduring and problematic love between parent and child. A wonderful work.