Colini's "Still Life No. 3" 

Vacation Days (Part III)

A few days after our visit to Christopher Ries , Betsy Green of Lizza Studios arranged for us to visit an artist in Scranton, which is only about a half-hour drive from Tunkhannock.
In the Renaissance, artists tended to identify themselves by reference to their place of birth (Leonardo, for example, was born in Vinci). Which is why Vojen Cech (pronounced Voyen Check), who was born in 1924 in Kolin, a town in the Czech Republic where his father was the municipal architect, signs his paintings as Colini.
That isn't the only thing Colini's paintings have in common with Renaissance art. The medium he works in is the same demanding one used during the Renaissance: Egg Tempera. Even Colini's imagery bears a certain resemblance to what you might see in a Renaissance painting. Sometimes, that's because he's painting his home town, which still resembles a medieval city. But usually it's because some essential part of Colini's soul resides in the Renaissance. He's been called a magic surrealist, but his surrealism is grounded, not in dreams, but in memory -- and whimsy.
How did an artist born 81 years ago in what was then Czechoslovakia end up in Scranton? Well, he got there by a very circuitous route. By the time the Communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948 Colini was already in Switzerland. From there he went to -- where else? -- Paris. But he couldn't stay in France, because he didn't have papers. So he went to Venezuela and became a Venezuelan citizen. Eventually he moved to Canada and had his first show in Toronto. He left Canada for New York and divided his time between there and visits to Europe to show his paintings. Then, for a few years he and his wife, Megan, lived in Clark Summit, just outside Scranton. But two years ago they moved into a combination studio/apartment/gallery on the fourth floor of what used to be a big laundry.
Colini is the gentlest artist I have ever met. Talking about his paintings he is like a child telling you a story. Megan, by contrast, is as delightfully down-to-earth as you can get. Born in Brooklyn, she spent a good part of her life in Michigan and Texas. Debbie and I stopped by expecting to spend maybe an hour. We didn't leave until after 6 in the evening. The paintings, the couple, the stories all made the time fly by. The day felt like it was over too soon, in fact.

Time out for a factoid ...

In 1957, Pottsville native John O'Hara won the National Book Award for Ten North Frederick. Four years later, the National Book Award was given to Conrad Richter for The Waters of Kronos (an excellent book, by the way). Richter grew up about a 20-minute drive from Pottsville, in Pine Grove.

Quite a discussion ...

My post of last week, A Literary visit ... has elicited quite a few comments, all of them interesting. But I found one comment in particular especially interesting. SteveD offered what he called his "two cents":
... emotions run high around Kerouac. The same's true about the nebulous grouping we call "the Beats." Regardless of who makes our Beat cut, the impact has been considerable. Yes, conspicuous lifestyles can become the focus of our attention. Kerouac expended quite a bit of energy both in his books and in his magazine articles (many of them collected in Lonesome Traveler) promoting and commodifying the Beat lifestyle as the place to be and to be free, to create better art and better social relations. His art led to and fed the art of musicians (Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Jim Morrison, etc.) and writers (Ginsberg, Burroughs, Pynchon, etc.) alike. Visions of Gerard, a particularly idiosyncratic Kerouac novel (yes, even for Kerouac), did well in my last Kerouac class. My three favorite Kerouac novels are Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans, and Desolation Angels, but most Kerouac novels appeal on some level. That is, they appeal to me. Just as "Howl," "Kaddish," and "Sunflower Sutra" do. They needn't register power or appreciation or feeling (whatever you want to call it) with everyone to have worth as literature separable from the notorious lives that produced them. Taste is taste. When I teach Kerouac, I teach the books and it isn't long before Kerouac On-the-Roaders (the kids who romanticize the lifestyle) see complexity and artful intent and execution. They also see failure and sadness. And as it should be, some students just don't dig it. I can't think of any writer's work that everyone should revere.
I especially agree that Kerouac's -- or any other books -- "needn't register power or appreciation or feeling (whatever you want to call it) with everyone to have worth as literature." I have never been able to get into George Eliot, but I would never deny that she has literary merit. Moreover, as Van Wyck Brooks once pointed out, a work of literature need not be perfect in order to have value as literature. Theodore Dreiser is a fairly clunky writer, but his works have power. Most people would agree that Faulkner is a great writer. But he can also be uneven. J.B. Priestly wrote that "within the limits of fifty pages [Faulkner] can be one of the best and one of the worst novelists in the world." Priestley cites Light in August as an example. He says it begins "wonderfully, so that we feel we are reading a masterpiece." But later on, he says, it "involve[s] us in all manner of turgid and dubious stuff, like a dream half-remembered but grandiloquently related."
But I digress. I think SteveD's students should count themselves blessed to have such a passionate teacher. I hope he can encourage them to toss in their own two cents when classes resume.
From John O'Hara to Jack Kerouac. Two American writers who wrote about the towns they grew up in. Who inspired some strong reactions in readers and neither of whom has probably be given a fair shake by critics. Also very, very different.

America's bard ...

A century and a half ago this month Walt Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal ran a characteristically over-the-top but altogether accurate assessment of Whitman by Harold Bloom.

Notice the play of light on the walls cast from Christopher Ries's sculptures. 

One of Christopher Ries's glass sculptures in his studio gallery. 

And another.  

Vacation Days (Part II)

During our first visit to Lizza Studios, gallery director Betsy Green suggested that Debbie and I visit the studio of glass sculptor Christopher Ries in Keelersburg. She called ahead for us and it turned out that Ries himself would be there. It was only a fifteen-minute drive away, so we went. I know what you're thinking. "Glass sculpture -- what's that? Something like Steuben glass figures?" Well, if you've clicked on the link to his Web site you already know that what Ries does isn't remotely like that. Steuben glass figures are splendidly crafted manufactured objects. But, like all manufactured objects, they are short on individuality.
Ries's sculptures are nothing if not individual. He takes 3,000-pound blocks of crystal glass, cuts them where the flaw is (like a diamond cutter), then carves the somewhat smaller block into an abstract form, but into the form another form -- a flower, say -- will be etched, which will in turn be refracted by the light striking the sculpture and projected throughout the form. Sculpture is not usually transparent. Because of their transparency, because of the way the light, striking them, changes the pieces as the light moves, and as you move around to see the pieces from different angles, Ries's works seem to take on a further dimensionality.
Ries himself is an impressive fellow, absolutely fascinating to talk to, which Debbie and I did for a couple of hours. Many years ago I was a gallery director. I've met a lot of artists in my time. All of the best usually like to talk, not about themselves, or even about individual works, but rather about the material they work with and what goes into the process of working with it. Talking to Christopher Ries about carving glass is like talking to a mystic about God. He gives the impression of a man for whom a particular vision of -- yes, I'm going to use that word -- beauty is never for long out of his mind.
I do not mean to suggest he is some hopelessly impractical visionary. Visionary yes, but impractical -- not at all. His studio is an old barn, and has been wondrously restored -- by him. It's on a farm only yards from the Susquehanna. Ries himself grew up on a farm in Ohio, not far from the part of the state that gave the world some of its most famous pottery, including Roseville. Ries's mother wanted him to be a musician and in some way, looking at the play of light striking his sculptures, or the play of light on the wall cast by those sculptures, that is what he has become -- a composer and arranger of light. Light is an integral part of each work and he calculates the effect the light will have while he works. This is extraordinary art.

An important anniversary ...

On this date in 1905 in Jönköping, Swed., Dag Hammarskjöld was born. He was a great man, and certainly the greatest to hold the position of United Nations Secretary-General. He also wrote a book, Markings, which was the first I ever reviewed professionally. Markings, which Hammarskjöld described as "a sort of White Book concerning my negotiations with myself - and with God," was in the news earlier this year, when questions were again raised as to the accuracy of the translation, done by poet W.H. Auden in collaboboration with Leif Sjöberg. I had some questions myself at the time, but not about the Swedish, which I remain incompetent to comment upon. I thought the translation of one part of Hölderlin's "Hälfte des Lebens" was peculiar (I haven't the text in front of me, so I can't be more specific). Nevertheless, I think that Markings should perhaps be read with caution, but it should be read. And maybe somebody should do a new translation.

Lizza Fine Art Studios in Tunkhannock used to be a roller skating rink. Hence, the fine hardwood floors. 

This matted collage looks like layers colored bits of paper -- and the original is precisely that. But this is a giclee print scanned at Lizza Fine Art Studios in Tunkhannock. 

Vacation Days (Part I)

For me much of the pleasure derived from a vacation is negative: not having to answer email, or take or return phone calls, or open, sort and shelve books. Still, I don't leave my job behind entirely, for the simple reason that I like what I do. Who wouldn't? I read books. I get to sound off about them. And I get paid for it.
On this last vacation I managed to read about six books, write four reviews, a couple of poems, and some miscellaneous things.
But it was far from being a busman's holiday. My wife, Debbie, paints and sculpts, and when she noticed there was a gallery in Tunkhannock she wanted to go. And go we did to Lizza Fine Art Studios, which proved to be a very nice exhibition space with beautiful hardwood floors (it used to be a roller skating rink). But it had more than just paintings on the walls (by Nancy Ruch Kim, a graduate of Moore College of Art & Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts) and sculptures and ceramics on pedestals (the former by Douglas Leidy, the latter by Mark Chuck).
We got to talking with owner Bob Lizza and gallery director Betsy Green and learned that, thanks to Lizza Studios, little Tunkhannock, Pa., has won itself a place in the sun in the world of art. Seems that New York's mighty Metropolitan Museum of Art had a tapestry and a painting scanned there.
Also scanned there was a painting titled "La Madonna Della Luce" ("Our Lady of Light") painted by the Vatican artist of the year, Natalia Tsarkova. (The painting was commissioned by the Primavera Fine Art Foundation for Pope John Paul II and the foundation says it has been informed that it was one of the last works of art blessed by the Pontiff before his death. The painting -- which represents the Mysteries of Light the Pope added to the rosary -- will eventually hang in the Vatican, but right now it's on tour.
Why was the scanning done in Tunkhannock? Turns out Lizza Studios has one of the few Cruse CS 285 ST Scanners in the world. Which means they can make the best giclee prints imaginable. Just how good these prints are was brought home to Debbie and me when we were looking at a matted collage by Marvin Baker in the back of the studio. Betsy remarked that it was one of their showpieces and Bob suggested to Debbie that she reach over and pluck off one of the slips of paper the collage was made of. She asked him if he was sure he wanted her to do that and he assured her it was OK. Of course, when she reached over to do it, she found there was nothing to pluck: It just looked vividly two-dimensional.
And this first visit to the Lizza Studios was only the beginning of our artistic adventures in Tunkhannock.

An interesting date ...

Today's a date filled with literary anniversaries. Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on this date in 1844. Twenty-two years later, on the same date, Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit, was born. And finally, in 1907 on July 28, Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano was born.
In 1655, Cyrano de Bergerac died in Paris.

Roger Simon links to a fine piece on Ibsen by Theodore Dalrymple. A key passage:
However, most people find it more comforting to believe in perfectibility than in imperfectibility—an example of what Dr. Johnson called the triumph of hope over experience. The notion of imperfectibility not only fans existential anxieties, but also—by precluding simple solutions to all human problems—places much tougher intellectual demands upon us than utopianism does. Not every question can be answered by reference to a few simple abstract principles that, if followed with sufficient rigor, will supposedly lead to perfection—which is why conservatism is so much more difficult to reduce to slogans than its much more abstract competitors.
This is worth bearing mind when reading this dialogue in Foreign Policy between Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, and Bjorn Lonborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Dalrymple is, I believe, right about the Ibsen plays he discusses. But I think Ibsen's work as a whole ought to be judged by his later plays, especially The Master Builder and John Gabriel Borkman. In these, the egoism at the center of the others is itself weighed in the balance and found wanting.

A literary visit ...

Pottsville was only a little out of the way en route to the house in Vosburg — about five miles west of Tunkhannock — where my wife and I spent the last couple of weeks. So we stopped and spent a night in Pottsville, where novelist John O'Hara was born a century ago. While there I read “The Girl on the Baggage Truck,” the first of the three novellas that comprise Sermons and Soda-Water, one of his best books, published in 1960, a decade before his death.
O’Hara was pretty much persona non grata in Pottsville while he was alive, but now there are markers around and about the town indicating sites that served as the originals for those in O’Hara’s “Gibbsville.” The model for the John Gibb Hotel is right at the corner of Centre Street and Mahantongo (which O’Hara renamed Latenengo). Next door is the office of the Pottsville Republican, O’Hara’s Gibbsville Standard. Across the street is the Reading Iron and Coal Co., a few doors away is the building O’Hara was born in, and where his physician father’s office remained after the family moved up the street (on the other side, across from the mansions). Not too far up, right next to the Yuengling brewery, is St. Patrick’s Church, which O’Hara reconsecrated as SS. Peter and Paul.
These places are a matter of yards apart. It seems an extremely small space to have a fictional world from. But maybe not. I suppose we’ve all had the experience of revisiting a place we knew only as small children and being surprised at how small it is compared to how large it loomed in our memory. But we were small when we experienced and that is what we remember. A person sensitive enough while still young might later on easily construct in imagination an entire world out of so large a piece of memory.

This house on Mahantongo Street is where John O' Hara and his family lived. O'Hara renamed the street Letenengo. 

Taking a break

A hearty thanks to Katie for filling in for Frank for the past few days. Starting today, Books, Inq. is going on hiatus until Frank gets back in late July.

Read "The Great Switcheroo" and you'll see what I mean

Margaret Talbot has a nice essay about Roald Dahl in this week's New Yorker. She writes that while kids devour his stuff, it puts many adults off—the children's books, anyway. "Dahl’s books regularly show up on the American Library Association’s list of titles that patrons ask to be restricted from young children or removed from the shelves," she writes. Indeed, his stories were often lurid, violent, and eccentric. But that's exactly why kids like them, Talbot says. Virtuous children fight—and win—the good fight, and rotten grownups always get theirs in the end.

Most of Dahl's early stories were for adults, Talbot writes, and while The New Yorker accepted a few early in his career their popularity soon waned. "Dahl's adult stories were crisply, shiveringly enjoyable—rather like "Twilight Zone" episodes—but they showed little compassion or psychological penetration. It was children, it seemed, not adults, on whom Dahl could lavish empathy."

True, they don't brim with benevolence. In one, "Lamb to the Slaughter," a lady gives her disagreeable husband the quietus with a frozen leg of lamb, then cooks and serves it to the cops who come to investigate the murder. But again, that nastiness is Dahl's charm. He could be viciously funny or deliciously droll, and his perceptions were dead-on. I've always remembered this description from "The Way Up to Heaven": "The chauffeur, a man with a small rebellious Irish mouth, didn't care very much for any of this..." And the stories in Switch Bitch, incidentally, are downright scandalous. The two books that make up his memoirs, Boy and Going Solo, bridge the kid-adult gap nicely. No questionable content, lots of exciting accounts from his days as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot, and the underlying sweetness of his worldview—his pro-underdog sentiments, his intense love of family—shines through on every page.

Thoughts?

--Katie

Zines, found poetry, and other literature for the people, by the people

Hello everyone!

I'm Katie, and I'm delighted to be taking over the Inquirer's books blog for a couple of weeks. Frank was kind enough to mention that I do a print zine on language called The La-La Theory, so I think I'll take the opportunity to tell you about the third annual Philadelphia Zine Fest, which is taking place next weekend.

Last year's fest was a success, and an absolute blast. Zinesters and other artists came from all over the country to pack themselves into the stuffy Rotunda (remember how hot it was last summer?) and share their work. Zines are handmade, one-of-a-kind, self-published journals on every subject imaginable, often traded for other zines or sold for not much more than $1 a copy. I still have copies of Christoph Meyer's lovely, spooky little story, "The Heart Star," with its linoleum block print cover; "The Glovebox Chronicles," a multiple-collaborator collection of road trip stories; "Suburban Gothic" Issue 3.5, a tiny photocopied account of depression; and "The Joy of Tuna," a totally insane photo/word/recipe collage devoted to the wonderment that is canned tuna fish. The zine movement is often considered an early-90s phenomenon, and indeed, that's when it was in the public eye for a hot 15 minutes. But clearly, here in the 21st century, the lively, delightful spirit of the DIY revolution is alive and well.

The La-La Theory takes its name from the oddball term Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) gave to one of the theories of the origin of language: that it was borne of the human need to express love and poetry. Unlikely, theory-wise, but awfully nice. One issue is called "Mrkgnao!", and it's about the ways different languages express animal sounds. (That weird word is the sound Mr. Bloom's cat makes in Ulysses.) I'll also bring a few copies of Word Math, a collection of found poetry I made for last year's fest. Found poetry is exciting because it takes the DIY idea to an even higher level. Essentially, the idea is to make (well, find, really) poetry from any non-poetic context: street signs, rearranged sentences from a physics textbook, you name it. Here's what poet Tom Hansen said about the creation of found poetry:

"Most found poems begin their lives as passages of expository prose. Their intended purpose is to feed easily digestible information to the reader. Nothing could be less poetic. But suddenly poetry is discovered embedded within the prose. The discoverer is someone alert to the possibilities of irony, absurdity, and other incongruities." ("Letting Language Do: Some Speculations on Finding Found Poems," College English 42, 1979)

In other words, the discoverer—the poet—can be anyone. Like me. And you.

Till soon,
Katie

Hail and farewell ...

Tomorrow, my wife and I will be taking off for two weeks in a cabin (a very nicely appointed cabin) near Tunkhannock, Wyoming County. We return July 25. So no more blogging for me for awhile. In my absence, the blogging duties will be assumed by Katie Haegele, who reviews young adult novels (and much else besides) for The Inquirer. She's also responsible for a zine about language called The La-La Theory (Katie studied linguistics at Penn). So welcome Katie!

On second thought ...

I realize that, in the luncheon talk I gave at the Franklin Inn Club recently, I overstated my case at one point and I want to clear things up before I take off on vacation. I said it was silly for people talk about reading the Bible literally. "No text, least of all one as rich as the Bible, deserves to be read that way, because it reduces words to mere signs." Allow me to rephrase that: No text as rich as the Bible deserves to be read that way.
But not all texts are rich and not all texts are meant to be. This occurred to me as I thought over some remarks that were made after my talk by Gresham Riley, the former president of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Gresham thought that what I had to say had some bearing on the debate over constitutional interpretation -- the "original intent" people versus the "living document" crowd. At first I was inclined to agree somewhat, but then I thought to myself that one thing I didn't want to suggest was that we can read a text any way we like.
There are necessary limits on our intrepretive freedom. One should, for instance, make sure that one undertsand the words in the sense that the author understood them. Words do accrue meanings over the years and a later sense will not apply to a text written before that sense developed.
Also, there are texts that we want to be unambiguously clear: for instance, the instructions for assembling the toy you bought one of your kids for Christmas.
I do not think the Constitution is a rich text, nor do I think it was meant to be. The problems that arise over interpreting it tend to derive from one or another party wanting it to address what it in fact does not. There is nothing in the Constitution about abortion because no one in 1789 would have thought to put it there.
I think that what we need to do with regard to the text of the Constitution is not align ourselves with any school of interpretation, but rather devote some more of our time to simply reading it for ourselves. After all, before you can determine what a document means, you must first determine as accurately as you can what it says. If more people were better acquainted with the text of the Constitution fewer people would be able to get away with bloviating on it.

Evan Hunter (1926-2005)

Evan Hunter, author of Blackboard Jungle, was perhaps better known as Ed McBain, author of the 87th Precinct novels, the prototype of the police procedural subgenre of crime fiction. Hunter/McBain -- who was born Salvatore Lombino -- died Wednesday. Here is an obit in the Times of London and another in the Daily Telegraph.
In a way, Hunter made a major contribution to the creation of modern youth culture: Richard Brooks' 1955 film version of Blackboard Jungle, starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier, was the first film to feature rock music on the sound track -- Bill Haley and the Comets doing "Rock Around the Clock."

Christopher Fry (1907-2005)

One of Margaret Thatcher's most famous lines occurred in response to speculation as to whether she would make an about-turn on her anti-inflationary policies. "To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn," she said, "I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning!"
She was alluding, of course, to Christopher Fry's play The Lady's Not for Burning, quite a hit in its day, as was Fry himself. The self-centered grousing of John Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the like drove lyrical optimists like Fry out of the theater.
Fry died on Thursday last. Here is an obituary in the Daily Telgraph and another in the Times of London.

Steppenwolf and the Pope ...

Back in May, Chris Bauer had some interesting things to say about Pope Benedict XVI and Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf and ... Lance Armstrong, as well as a few other things. Definitely worth a look.

A literary birthday ...

I first encountered Hermann Hesse in German class. I don't recall now if it was in high school or college. But the story was called "Der Wolf."
I know I was a sophomore in college when I came upon Steppenwolf. It was an odd Friday noght when I had nothing better to do and I stayed up reading until I finished the book.
I was immensely affected by it (it is also a favorite book of the new Pope).
The version I read was a newly-released Modern Library edition and, except for the New Directions edition of Siddartha, was the only book of Hesse's available in this country at the time (this was at the beginning of 1962). But there was a little bookstore on 15th Street, near Market, that started to stock editions of Hesse's novels published in Britain. Which is how I got to read all of them long before Hesse became a cult author. I haven't read them since and suspect I would not enjoy them as much as I did then. Anymore than I would enjoy being again who I was then.
Hermann Hesse was born on this date in 1877 in Calw, Germany.

A luncheon talk ...

I was invited to speak this afternoon over lunch at the Franklin Inn Club. What follows is a version of my remarks:

My topic is Reading as a Creative Act.
What’s that supposed to mean? Writing — that’s creative, at least it can be. But reading? What’s creative about that?
Well, let me remind you of an experience I suspect everyone in this room has had at one time or another:
You go the movies and see a picture based on a novel that you’ve read and enjoyed. And you find you’re disappointed — because you imagined it all differently from the way the filmmakers did. You imagined it in your own particular way, a highly personal way.
So consider: An imaginative writer — a novelist, say — creates a text. But that text remains in what the medieval scholastics called a state of potency until somebody reads it. Reading actuates the potency. But the reader does that by bringing to bear on the text his or her own imagination.
It’s a lot like what happens when an instrumentalist plays a piece of music. If you heard me play the Prelude No. 1 from Bach’s first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier and then put on a recording of Sviatoslav Richter playing the same piece, you’d know right away who was the more creative reader of the score.
Moreover, when you play a piece of music and everything goes right, even though it’s your fingers striking the keys, and your foot on the pedal, the experience you have sitting there isn’t so much of something that you’re doing as it is of something that is happening through you. “You are the music while the music lasts,” as Eliot put it. No good musician ever plays exactly what’s written down. He brings to what he is playing a wealth of knowledge, skill, taste, and experience.
The same thing happens often when you’re reading. You get completely absorbed. You lose all sense of time and place and even, sometimes, the sense of yourself. You’re with Nostromo in Panama or soaring over the rooftops of London with Scrooge and one of the Christmas ghosts. You’re no longer here and now. Now, you’re there.
That’s why it’s so silly when people talk about reading the Bible literally. No text, least of all one as rich as the Bible, deserves to be read that way, because it reduces words to mere signs. And words are more than signs. They’re symbols. They have connotations. They resonate. They’re redolent.
This is something I’ve come to think about a lot since becoming The Inquirer’s book review editor five years ago. I’ve been reviewing books professionally for over 40 years, and I’ve been an avid reader since childhood. But when I got this job I found myself reading more than I ever had before.
And I discovered something very intriguing. I found my interest in more passive forms of entertainment had dropped noticeably. I can hardly watch television at all. Most of the shows seem hardly to rub elbows with reality. I also find myself impatient at movies. As often as not they don’t engage me as quickly and completely as a good book can. They leave too little up to my imagination.
This has led me to a better understanding of what I think my job ought to be about. I have found that a lot of people in my position think that they are somehow or other in the service of LIT-rature. I see myself as being in the service of reading — and readers. Because I think it is very important that people realize how essential the act of reading is to maintaining a mind that is active.
Of course, there is reading and there is reading. Readers can fall into a rut, reading the same sort of thing over and over. That’s fine if what you’re reading and re-reading is something like Dante’s Divina Commedia or Shakespeare’s plays. Those texts are practically infinite in their richness. Now I like thrillers; I read and review a lot of them — but a steady diet of them lulls the mind into a pattern of repetition. And repetition weakens the mind.
That’s why it’s important to maintain one’s acquaintance with the classics. And with poetry, the richest, most concentrated form of verbal expression. Engagement with a truly rich text enables the mind to encounter the world afresh. And we feel more alive when the world looks fresh.
So I will conclude with a poem, one by Wallace Stevens, which makes some of the same points I have been trying to — but in a far more elegant way than I ever could. It’s called “The house was quiet and the world was calm.”

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Tales of two novelists ...

On Friday Ann Althouse linked to Richard Lawrence Cohen's example of a Literary Rivalry. Part Two of Rivalry appeared on Sunday.
I think the first of these defines two equally valid approaches. Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene traveled the world. Jane Austen and William Faulkner pretty much stayed at home.
The second difference I'm not so sure about. I think most writers work at their craft every day, and make their own inspiration.

Blogging hiatus ...

I was so busy last week I didn't realize how large the blogging gap had become. But we were short-handed at the office (which happens this time of the year), so we all pitched in to get things done.
But this gives me an opportunity to let people behind the scenes, which is one of the things this blog is about.
I went to BookExpo America at the beginning of June. That meant being out of the office for a couple of days. And that meant that email, books, and regular mail would pile up. So what? you ask. It's only a couple of days. A couple of days in my job can mean a couple of hundred books and at least a couple of hundred emails. I have nearly 2,000 in my inbox right now, which I must dutifully plow through before I start my vacation on July 8.
But that's not all. After I got back from BEA, I had to prepare for a panel I was on at the Rosenbach Museum as part of its annual Bloomsday celebration. And I was a featured reader at Bloomsday as well. All such things require preparation -- unless you're content to make a fool of yourself in public, which I admit I'm reluctant to do. This week I'm trying to move reviews for the rest of July -- and I'm scheduled to give a talk at the Franklin Inn cLub on Thursday.
All of which means I will barely keep my head above the waters of the clerical flood.
Still, I plan to resume regular blogging tomorrow morning.

A Joycean coincidence ...

Last year, Inquirer photographer Eric Mencher and I went to Dublin to follow in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom in order to do a piece for the Bloomsday Centenary.
Last week, Eric was at the Consitution Center taking photos for the paper and met an Italian journalist, Anna Casanova, who was here to write a travel piece about our fair city. Eric suggested she visit the Rosenbach Museum & Library, which was just about to celebrate Bloomsday once again, as it does every year (the manuscript of Ulysses resides there). Ms. Casanova told him she had already been there, that it was the reason she was in the city. Seems she had seen the work Eric and I did online (which really means she was taken by his spectacular photos) and used it to pitch a story about Philly.
Sounds like something Joyce would have made up.

Italian journalist Anna Casanova outside the Constitution Center in Philadellphia. (Photo by Eric Mencher) 

Orwell to the rescue ...

For those inclined to give Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin a pass on his remarks this past week comparing alleged bad behavior at Gitmo to the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the Cambodian Killing Fields, I link to George Orwell's Politics and the English Language.
Consider this: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
And this: "When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy ... And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved ...."
But read the whole thing. It will do wonders for your prose.

On blind chance ...

Rumor has it my previous post will stir up a hornet's nest. Well, that's good. If everyone stays reasonable we may all end up learning something. In the meantime, here's a passage worth pondering from A.S. Byatt's novel Still Life:

Consider the bee orchid, that trap in the form of a female bee that invites the agitated male to grasp, to penetrate, to shake on the flower flesh that then tips him into a vegetable prison where he must roll, for its fertilization, until it withers. Marcus, like most human beings was constrained to see this as a work of intelligence, not of pure chance. If over millenia the form of the flower has more and more exactly approached the deceptive form of the bee, and the live mechanism has been perfected, it is beyond our intelligence to conceieve of this happening without intelligence. Blind chance is so much harder to imagine, and bears little relation to what we usually mean by chance, the random blow of fate or stroke of luck, the falling of the coin, or rocketing of the billiard balls, this way or that. Through centuries we have believed that our minds mirror the order of things and can therefore appreciate it. The flower has no eyes to see the exactness of its parody. How it knows, if it knows, that it is exact is beyond the scope of our apprehension. Because of the bee orchid, because of that disturbing trope (like Coleridge's marble peach in once sense, a copy, not an image), Marcus had come to extend his ant-god into a pervasive organizing intelligence. He still believed it had nothing to do with him. He struggled not to say, "It was designed to look like a female bee," but it was almost impossible not to believe in a Designer.

Evolution, Intelligent Design, and category errors ...

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit linked last week to a piece on Intelligent Design by Jim Pinkerton at TechCentral. This is one of the better discussions of ID theory that I have seen. Maybe I think that because it raises the same objection I have: that a metaphysical answer to a scientific question is no answer at all -- and that is what ID theory proposes. Of course, a scientific answer to a metaphysical question is no answer at all, either. Both wrong answers constitute what is known in philosophy as category error.

There is another problem with Intelligent Design theory. A couple of years ago I reviewed a book called The Probability of God by Stephen D. Unwin. In it I noted that Unwin, a theoretical physicist turned risk analyst, had raised "one of the more interesting objections to intelligent design theory: Given that we 'lack so much understanding of God,' the 'engineering notion of intelligent design' seems not only naive but also presumptuous." I have always thought it better to think that God as Creator has more in common with Michelangelo or Bach than with Edison or Ford.

Still, neo-Darwinian theory isn't without it's problems either. The question Michael Behe raises about irreducible complexity happens to be a good one -- and it is not answered by speculating about how such complexity could have come about in accordance with random selection. Factual data is what is needed, not a sequence of suppositions. The fact is we don't know how something like the eye developed. Saying God made it happen doesn't tell us anything, since God -- for those of us who believe in God -- makes everything happen. But saying it could have developed this way or that if such and such were the case, etc. doesn't tell us anything, either.
There happen to be very good, strictly scientific objections to the Darwinian model of evolution (I put it that way because I think that, except for those who think the world was made about 6,000 years ago in six 24-hour periods, most people think that life and species developed over time from simpler to more complex forms).
A pretty thorough overview of these objections -- and much else besides -- can be found here.
In the meantime, maybe it's worth taking another look at Teilhard de Chardin. Here's a piece in Wired about the Jesuit paleontologist and friend of Julian Huxley who saw evolution in religious -- indeed mystical -- terms.
Eugene Volokh also has some thoughts on evolution and religion that are well worth considering.

A night off ...

Taking a break from blogging and just about everything else tonight. Working on some poems. Because every now and then it's good to go back to what got you interested in something in the first place.

Where have all the critics gone?

The excellent Arts & Letters Daily recently linked to an artcle by Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times titled Critical condition. Key paragraph:
... many newspaper and magazine critics pine for a golden age when giants walked the Earth: When the imposing Clement Greenberg was shaping modernism in painting, the biting H.L. Mencken was exhuming the reputation of Theodore Dreiser, and the impious Leslie Fiedler found unsettling Freudian meanings in the novels of Mark Twain.
I'm not sure we're any worse off for the lack of a dominant arbiter of taste. A good part of the 20th century was for a while called the Age of Eliot. I like Eliot's poetry. I like his criticism less. I can do without F.R. Leavis pretty much altogether. Criticism that lasts is a form of memoir. We meet the person through what he tells us of his likes and dislikes. The actual judgments are more or less beside the point -- unless they happen to be especially cogent, which they often aren't. I suspect that there will emerge eventually from the blogosphere a number a strong personalities who will exert a powerful influence on contemporary taste. I just hope the number is large enough to allow for some variety. What is not needed is a single domineering voice.

Is art anything?

Central Arts has posted an article by John Carey that ran in the Sunday Times on May 22. It's an excerpt from Carey's book What Good Are the Arts? -- just out in Britain, but apparently not available on these shores yet -- and its conclusion is that something is a work of art if someone thinks it is. My own feeling is that to be unable to differentiate between Bach's B-minor Mass and a can of human excrement is evidence of a profound failure of language and logic.
A review by David Lodge of Carey's book ran in the Sunday Times on May 29.

On the matter of embargoes ....

At the BEA on Saturday I attended a panel discussion about book embargoes.
From time to time publishers don't want anything about a partiular book published before a particular time. Recent examples would be Bill Clinton's, Jane Fonda's, and Bob Dylan's exercises in autobiography.
In the case of the Dylan opus, when I was asked by the publisher to consider it for review -- a request accompanied by an announcement that the book would be embargoed and that no review copies would be available until the publication date -- I replied that I might have been interested if I hadn't known that the New York Times would have a review out the very same day the book hit the stores ... because the Times would have somehow been given a copy beforehand.
The publisher responded by agreeing to provide a review copy on condition that I sign an agreement promising not to release anything about the book prior to its pub date. I signed, they sent the book, and music critic Tom Moon had a piece about the book the same day it book came out.
The BEA panel included freelancer John Freeman (who reviews regularly for The Inquirer), San Francisco Chronicle book critic David Kipen, Chicago Trubune book editor Elizabeth Taylor, and former Nation book editor Art Winslow. Unanimously, they declared that they had never, ever signed any such agreement, and never would. Freeman had the best reason: He'd be signing for himself, not on behalf of some large entity like a metropolitan daily newspaper, and would be personally liable. Under such circumstances I probably wouldn't sign either.
Otherwise I beg to differ with all of these distinguished colleagues of mine. Except for Freeman, all seemed to think that not signing was some kind of badge of honor, a demonstration of some sort of purity of motive and intent. Nobody seemed to be thinking about what the readers of their respective publications might want. The sort of books that get embargoed aren't usually the kind book review editors care that much about. But lifestyle editors and pop arts editors do care about them. They would like their readers to read about them as soon as possible, certainly as soon as readers of the New Yoprk Times can.
No one on the panel brought up what may be obvious from what I said above: What bothers me is that the same publisher who would keep me from getting a review copy of a book won't be so careful to keep the Times from getting one.
As for the fact that, by signing, I'm aiding and abetting the publicity campaign on behalf of the book -- well, folks, all those booths outside the room where the panel was taking place were put there by businesses. The BEA, mirabile dictu, is a business convention. Books are a product, a commodity, and if they don't get sold, the only thing any of us will be signing is a foreclosure document.

Not so live after all ...

Live blogging turned out to be impossible. Odd that the Javits Center should have no Internet facilities. And HarperCollins may have offered free wireless service, but my laptop wasn't connecting to it and I wasn't the only one having that problem. There was an Internet cafe, but the BEA is so large, and the Javits Center so sprawling that one simply doesn't have the time to go off somewhere for a while and blog or do much else. You're lucky if you can catch a bite to eat or a cup of coffee.
I plan to write a piece about it -- mostly of my impressions -- and when I get back to Philly tomorrow I'll post a couple of photos that I hope prove neat. But except for going to dinner I've been most on my feet since 9:30 this morning. I've talked to publicist upon publicist, taken a shot of some Star Wars soldiers, and another of Ben Franklin, who was incarnated at least twice at the event, one presence fairly svelte, the other rather plump.

Not live yet at the BEA...

No chance to live blog at the BEA today. Too many people to meet and chat with, too much to scope out – and the Javits Center doesn’t have wireless. Things look better for tomorrow. HarperCollins is offering free wireless, which I hope to avail myself of.
In the meantime Melville Goodwin, commenting on my previous post, posed a question that does seem to be getting some buzz: How are commercial publishers reacting to the explosion of self-publishing?
As it happens, last night I talked about just that with Mike Shatzkin, CEO of TheIdeaLogical Company, a publishing consulting firm. Mike thinks the self-publishing companies can be for traditional commercial publishers what farm teams are for sports franchises (we were at a Mets game). The problem is coming up with an effective filtering system that will identify the genuine prospects as quickly as possible. He has an idea similar to one I had already talked about with some people at The Inquirer (but I'll leave it at that, because it’s such a good idea, I don’t want it to get around just yet. Still open to other ideas, though.
My day is not over. I have another appointment. Maybe I can get back here later and give some idea of what exactly BEA is like.

I'll take Manhattan

Off to NYC for BookExpo America, the grand annual confab of the publishing industry. Hope to do some live blogging from there starting tomorrow (if all goes well technically, as it did not the last time I went on the road). Have any questions you want put to the publishers' reps? Post them, and I'll pose them.

Chaucer in the Senate ...

Over at Power Line, Sen. Robert Byrd’s recent disquisition on Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale” draws some pointed commentary. Read the whole thing. But then consider what George Lyman Kittredge had to say about the Pardoner in Chaucer and His Poetry. The Pardoner, Kittredge notes, “cynically reminds his fellow-travellers of what he told them at the outset, — that he is merely giving them a specimen of his pulpit oratory: “And lo, sires, thus I preche!”
But something happens:
Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, without an instant’s warning, his cynicism falls away, and he utters the solemn words: “May Christ, the physician of our souls, grant you His pardon, for that is better than mine! I will not deceive you, though I get my living by fraud!” … The Pardoner has not always been an assassin of souls. … Once he preached for Christ’s sake; and now, under the spell of the wonderful story he has told and of recollections that stir within him, he suffers a very paroxysm of agonized sincerity. It can last but a moment. The crisis passes.… He takes refuge from himself in a wild orgy of reckless jesting … nobody but Geoffrey Chaucer divined the tragic face behind the satyr’s mask.
Would that windbag from West Virginia might have such a moment of authenticity!

Happy Birthday ...

... author William Trevor, who turns 77 today.

Internet buzz ...

Back in March, in a post titled Original works at Project Gutenberg, I mentioned some works by Steven Sills that had been published online. I also linked to reviews of one of those works, American Papyrus. Now I have learned of a review of Sills’s Corpus of a Siam Mosquito. This one is by Janet Darbey, who lives and writes on the Greek island of Corfu. In my post yesterday I suggested that Internet buzz might be the way that alternatively published works may come to the attention of readers, commercial publishers, and reviewers. Sills, it seems, is getting some buzz.

A must read ...

Today in Literature has the fascinating story of Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon.

A note on self-publishing ...

Last month, in a post titled The blogging saga … I discussed, in connection with the reported decline in reading, the obvious increase in writing. I mentioned Blogit, which hosts some 25,000 bloggers.
That post got quite a response. Dirk Lenaerts of Brugge, in Belgium, who joined Blogit in March, wrote to say he found it a lot of fun but cautioned against doing it “for the money, as you put in a lot more than you ever can earn. … No, your only motive must be the joy of writing and reading, otherwise you become depressed pretty soon.”
Dirk’s post reminded me that the word amateur means “lover” and we might all do well to remind ourselves of those many amateurs, especially among the British, who pursue an interest not for fame or fortune, but for the sheer love of the subject or activity.
I, of course, do write for money — which is to say I have a job that involves writing. It also involves publishing what I write, so I have a lot to be happy about. True, what I write is largely of an ephemeral nature, but much of life is ephemeral.
Still, what about all those other people who are writing away? They’d like be to read, too. Which explains why the self-publishing business is booming, as Sarah Glazer demonstrated in The New York Times Book Review last month. I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss this phenomenon. Suppose someone starts a blog and it catches on. Readers like what the blogger writes and like the way the blog is written. I imagine if that blogger put together a book and advertised on it on the blog, fans would likely want to read it.
For a book review editor, the growing number of self-published books poses a particular problem. As it is, not even many commercially published books get reviewed. But it seems dumb to completely ignore the self-published ones. Recently, I ran a review of one — James A. Freeman’s Parade of Days. Inquirer staffer Marc Schogol voiced one reservation, but otherwise rather liked the book, saying that characters’ “stories stay with you.”
Freeman may have published this book with Xlibris, but he’s published quite a few books the old-fashioned way and is a tenured professor of English — in other words, he’s really a pro who just happened to choose this time to do the publishing on his own.
I put another self-published book out for review also, but the results were less encouraging. I had read the first 50 or 60 pages of the book and found it intriguing and thought it had possibilities. So did my reviewer — after reading the first 50 or 60 pages. But ultimately, he didn’t think the book worked and thought it wouldn’t serve any purpose to review it.
The problem, obviously, is figuring out which self-published books are worth reviewing. The self-publishing houses themselves could help, by differentiating between books aimed at a specialty audience and those aimed at the average reader. After all, Random House doesn’t go out of its way to promote every book it publishes. It focuses on the ones it thinks have the best chance to sell.
I think in the long run it will be buzz in the blogging community that will bring certain self-published books to wider attention. Another reason for people like me to pay attention to what is going on in the blogosphere.

Revise and dissent ...

Rocket Man over at Power Line helps refresh Frank Rich’s memory of Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. Makes you want to read the book again.

Ritual language ...

Last week, I ended my Editor’s Choice review of Neil Olson’s The Icon by quoting a passage in which the main character comes to an understanding of the value of ritual language. He is praying in Greek, and “the Greek served him as he imagined Latin did others, giving the words mystery and power, and creating a sense of ritual that removed the individual from the process.” I then suggested that that those who advocate the Roman Catholic Church’s “numbingly banal vernacular Mass” take note.
This elicited only two email responses, one puzzled, the other approving.
My dim view of the English version of what is officially known as the Novus Ordo Populi is reinforced every Sunday at Mass. It reaches maximum intensity during the responsorial psalm. In the missal used at my parish church, the music for all of these has been composed by someone named Owen Alstott, who is my candidate for the worst composer who has ever lived. His psalm settings are so bland and devoid of character that it’s hard to believe they were actually composed by a human being. And today — on what used to be Pentecost Sunday but is now called the “solemnity” of Pentecost (how is that an improvement?) — I noticed that Alstott is also the fellow responsible for appropriating Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” tune for use as a hymn in the Catholic Church. May God forgive him. I certainly can't.
But my point isn’t about music. It’s about language. Anyone who has read the Book of Common Prayer knows that English can be quite serviceable as a ritual language. But the English translation of the Novus Ordo is simply awful — inaccurate and tin-eared. Credo continues to mean I believe, not we believe. Et cum spiritu tuo still means and with your spirit, not and also with you. And take that phrase alone — "and also with you." Can you get more banal than that? The entire Mass has been translated into the worst journalese — because “liturgists” think that’s the way to get things across to the poor “common people” in the pews.
I have news for them. The King James Bible has been read by countless numbers of relatively unschooled people for centuries. They didn’t have any problem with it or its formal language, which I rather suspect they regarded as appropriate under the circumstances. Plenty of noted authors have understood this as well. Which is why we have titles like The Sun Also Rises, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden. Which is also the real reason why the Bible should be taught in public schools: because it’s well-nigh impossible to understand large chunks of English literature without being acquainted with the Authorized Version.

The Ruby Range in northeastern Nevada in January. 

Cowboy poetry revisited ...

You can get an idea of what the National Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev., is like on Saturday night at 10 EST by visiting the Western Folklife Center, which will be hostng a live cybercast of music, poetry and stories inspired by the Grand Canyon. In January, I covered this year’s Gathering for The Inquirer and found it an unforgettable experience, not least because of all the wonderful people I met, especially Steve and Thayla Walden, who very generously had me over for Sunday dinner — so I didn’t have to spend the entire day at the Elko airport waiting to start the first leg of my flight home. They live not far from Elko, in Spring Creek, and the photo above is a shot of the Ruby Range taken from the front of their home. Pretty nice view, eh?

Challenging literature ... and Saturday

Andrew Ervin raises an interesting point in a post attached to my previous one: Why do "so many critics (and reviewers) feel the need to apologize for so-called "difficult" literature. I've certainly been guilty of it in the past. 'This is a brilliant novel but a challenging one.' When did difficulty become a problem? Shouldn't we be advocating some literature because it challenges us?"
I don't think we should apologize. But we shouldn't think of difficulty as aliterary value in itself.There has to be some reward for facing up to the challenge. Ulysses is challenging, but well worth whatever effort it takes to read it. Tatiana Tolstoya's The Slynx, on the other hand, poses no particular challenge other than having slog through the gloom.
But let's consider the most problematic novel I've reviewed recently, Ian McEwan's Saturday. The more time that elapses since my reading it, the less I like it. There's nothing difficult about it, but it is problematic. One problem is the clinically detached style, which has the effect of telling you -- and showing -- that the protagonist is an admirable man, but somehow manages not to let you actually feelthat he is.
I said in my review that any objection one can raise to the book can be easily countered as fitting in perfectly with its design. That the protagonist should just happen to be a neurosurgeon who just happens to be accosted by a tough who he happens to notice shows symptoms of Huntington's disease is all pretty coincidental. But one of the themes of the book is that life is grounded in randomness. Yet another implication throughout the book is that everything is governed by iron-clad natural laws that determine what's going to happen. This mix of randomness and determinism is seriously flawed logically.
Then there are the kids. There's the daughter who seems to have gathered material for her first collection of poems by sleeping around. But who has genuinely fallen in love with the guy who has made her pregnant. Again, it all fits if everything is grounded in randomness.
As for the son, he has dropped out of school and wants to be a bluesman. But his grandfather happens to know Jack Bruce (formerly of Cream) who listens to the kid's playing and encourages him. Then there's the master class with Eric Clapton that someone gets him into, and the gig in Manhattan that someone arranges. We're a long way from the Mississippi mud. An overprivileged twit with connections singing the blues. But the blues are grounded in the grittiest of human suffering. We're not talking about learning to write fugues.
It's all perfectly plausible, but it's also missing something, and has a certain smugness to it that, for me at least, spoils everything.
Nevertheless, it is, as I said in my review, fascinating, and worth reading for that reason alone. It's one of those books each and every reader will have to make up his or her own mind about.

My column ...

I have been asked from time to time why, in my "Editor's Choice" column, I only review books that I like. Well, there are a number of reasons.
I started writing the column because budget cuts made it likely that I would have to run a wire review to fill the space on the page on Sunday. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to run only original reviews, written specifically for The Iquirer. So I decided to write one review a week myself.
One of the first I chose to read was The Slynx, by Tatiana Tolstoya. It is a very gloomy book, hard to pick up once you've put it down. I wasn't looking forward to spending a weekend in its company. Whereupon the thought occurred to me that I didn't have to. Why not spend my time looking for books I enjoyed and telling other readers about them? Space is at a premium in newspapers these days. Why waste it telling people how much I didn't like something?
Bear in mind it's easy to write a negative review. They practically write themselves. It's much harder to explain why you think a book is good.
Moreover, not everything I review is recommended without qualification. I had definite reservations about Chet Raymo's Climbing Brandon. But Raymo is such an engaging writer and so much that he has to say is informative that I felt the good far outweighed the bad. More problematic was Ian McEwan's Saturday.
But I'll have more to say about that in my next post.

My absence ...

The Green Berets placed great emphasis on what they termed PPP — Proper Prior Planning. The hiatus in my blogging was a consequence of improper planning on my part. I was trying to fit the blogging in somewhere amid my other responsibilities. Problem was things were starting to get neglected — my home office was getting cluttered, my desk at work was beginning to pile up with unattended notes and news releases and, of course, books. So I decided to step back, put things in order, then get back on a strict blogging schedule. I even took Friday off to facilitate this. But I also had to prepare for a TV interview Friday evening, so Friday wasn’t quite as productive as it might have been. And I am posting this later than I would have liked. But, that all said, progress is being made.

Original interactivity ...

Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit links to and comments on a piece by James Pinkerton over at TechCentral about the immense popularity of video games, in which Pinkerton wonders why Hollywood has failed to notice the lure of interactivity. Movies, comments Reynolds, “encourage passive titillation; videogames encourage active involvement.”
Which brings me to my favorite form of interactive entertainment: reading. Ever notice how often, when you see a movie based on a book you’ve read, you’re disappointed? That’s because you imagined it all differently. Reading is not at all a passive activity. It demands an active imagination, not only the part of writer, but also on the part of the reader. Not surprisingly, I’ve always been a reader, but never more than since getting this job. And I find that the more I read the less I enjoy movies and TV. To say nothing of a lot of other things that clamor for my attention.

The cover of Archipelago Books' selection of writings by Peter Altenberg. 

Peter Altenberg looking characteristically casual. 

Introducing Peter Altenberg

Peter Altenberg (1859-1919) was the pen name of Richard Englaender. He was the quintessential Viennese bohemian, pioneering a leisurely style of dress, who usually wore sandals and sported a great, bushy mustache (which did not make him look mean at all). His most characteristic writings are short, seemingly spontaneous pieces. Typical is his account of How I Became a Writer. He would have made a perfect blogger.
I first heard of him on the Jack Paar Show, back when I was in high school. One of Paar's regular guests, author Alexander King, a native of Vienna and quite a bohemian himself, often told stories about Altenberg. One of them I have never forgotten:
It seems that Altenberg -- who lived in a hotel room and gave the Cafe Central (a favorite hangout of Vienna's intellectual set) as his official address -- woke up one morning after a night of overindulgence and decided to spend the day in bed. But, just as he was falling back to sleep, he remembered it was the birthday of a woman he very much loved. So he roused himself, got dressed, and went to the florist's, where he bought a large bouquet consisting all different sizes, shades and varieties of yellow flowers, and sent it the woman -- but without a card.
Later that day, he stopped by the woman's house to pay his respects. Only she wasn't home. But her maid told Altenberg about the wonderful bouquet someone had sent the woman. The maid said she just hoped that the bouquet was from Mr. Spellmann, because her mistress was very much in love with Spellmann. Whereupon Altenberg assured her that it was indeed from Spellmann. He knew, he told her, because he had been with Spellmann when he bought it.
Still later in the day, Spellmann dropped by to pay his respects, and the woman showered him with kisses and thank-yous for the wonderful bouquet. Spellmann had no idea what she was talking about, but didn't want to spoil her joy either, so he took the maid aside and asked her about it. The maid told him what Altenberg had said, and Spellmann put two and two together and went out and bought a second bouquet, this one made up of all different sizes and shades and colors of different flowers -- and sent it to the woman with Altenberg's card.
That night, when the woman was retiring, she said to her maid, "You know, I just received another beautiful bouquet, this one from Mr. Altenberg. But you know, I like the other bouquet better, the yellow one, because it was sent by someone who really loves me. A woman can tell such things."
Thanks to Archipelago Books, you can read a representative selection of Altenberg's writings, very nicely translated by Peter Wortsman. It's called Telegrams of the Soul.

Of storage systems and form ...

One of the problems facing anyone who wants to blog is how to find the time. Obviously, successful bloggers have found solutions to that problem. But those of us just starting out have to find our own. Here's mine:
Most days I walk to work. It's a distance of 2.2 miles and takes about 35 minutes. A lot of ideas come to me then -- most of them, naturally, having something to do with my job -- and I've decided to make note of them on this blog when I come in.
The idea that hit me today -- and it hit me, actually, before I even left the house -- is that books, first and foremost, are a storage system. Before we had books, we had scrolls. And now, thanks to computers, we're back scrolling again. But, like a lot of people, I find find scrolling through and reading large chunks of prose on a computer screen tiring. I think that's why blog posts that are short and to the point work better than longer ones.
This made me think that the nature of the storage system must have some bearing on the form of the writing. And it leads me to suspect that a new form of the essay is already evolving out of the practice of blogging. In Vienna, around the turn of the last century, there was a writer whose style was ideally suited to blogging. His name was Peter Altenberg. I'll have more to say about him in a subsequent post.

An anniversary ...

Walter de la Mare, one of my favorite poets, was born on April 25, 1873. Here's a link to his best-known poem, The Listeners. And here's another, to The Walter de la Mare Society.

The blogging saga ...

On Friday I got an email informing me that Blogit, which describes itself as "the first blog-for-pay community," and which features 25,000 blogs on its site, had reached the 1 million mark in terms of writers' posts and readers' commentaries. The way Blogit -- which only started up three years ago -- works is that readers subscribe and half of the money from the subscription fees is distributed to the writers of the blogs proportionally -- the more people read a given blog, the more money that blogger gets.
We hear all the time that reading is in decline. But anyone in my position has to be aware that there's something funny about that -- because more people than ever, it seems, want to write. And people who write are usually people who read.
We also hear a lot about the public's disaffection with tradional journalism. But I have the distinct impression that there is just as much disaffection with traditional publishing. Computers and the Internet have given the gatecrashers around the gatekeepers.
Back in 1997, I wrote a piece for The Inquirer about how the Internet had completely revolutionized the second-hand book business. It's now in the process of revolutionizing both publishing and journalism. At least Rupert Murdoch seems to think so.
What is interesting about Blogit is that it is a community of writers and readers. In fact, it is precisely the relationship between reader and writer that blogging can bring about that makes blogging worthwhile.
Which brings me to what I hope becomes the point of this blog, which has as much to do with what's going out there, among the consumers of books and other reading matter, as it does with anything else. If this blog works out the way I hope it will, it will become the cyberspace equivalent of an 18th-century coffee house.
Charles Mandel at Books, Booze and Bikes posts a few observations that have some bearing on this.

Happy birthday ...

J.P. Donleavy, author of The Ginger Man ,The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B., and other books celebrates his 79th birthday today. You can see an interview with him here.

The Orange Prize

Lionel Shriver, who has reviewed frequently for The Inquirer, is among three Americans -- out of six finalists -- nominated for the 2005 Orange Prize. She was nominated for her seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin. Here's the story in The Times of London.

Even older was this black oak, which is now 300 years old. 

This cucumber tree was already more than 50 years old when Charles Brockden Brown wrote his novel "Wieland," set in the Wissahickon Valley, in 1799. 

A literary setting ...

My wife and I spent the afternoon in the Wissahickon, the setting for Charles Brockden Brown's 1799 novel Wieland. Brown's novel was the original American Gothic, just as Brown was the original American novelist. Brown was much admired by Keats, Shelley, and Walter Scott. He exerted considerable influence on James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe. Thanks to Brown -- a birth-right Philadelphia Quaker who ran into trouble with the Society of Friends (his "having accomplished his marriage by the assistance of an hireling minister" was thought improper)-- the woods and hills above the Wissahickon helped form in European minds the image of "wild America." Some of the trees that were standing when Brown wrote about the place still stand, as the photos attest.

Hair, hair!

Ann Althouse throws down the gauntlet on the subject of mustaches.

Words to ponder ...

"A real book-lover looks with infinite indulgence upon the simplest person's choice of books. He has the wit to know that this flood of second-rate invention upon which so many feed their fancy and by which so many endure the monotony of their lives is something quite different from what it seems to the person who just glances at it as he passes by. He has the wit to know that every page of these second-rate books as it impresses the mind of the living reader is transmuted by the alchemy of the imagination into something beyond the literal meaning of the words. All readers are imaginative readers. They wouldn't be readers at all otherwise."
This is from The Enjoyment of Literature by John Cowper Powys, one of my favorite writers. It expresses well my own latitudinarian critical stance. One of the things that most prevents people from enjoying great literature is that they have it shoved down their throats at the wrong time and under the worst circumstances. I first encountered Jane Austen when I was a 15-year-old working-class kid going to Father Judge High in Northeast Philly. Pride and Prejudice was required reading. But the world portrayed therein was so far from the world I knew that it could have been written in Martian. To this day I have yet to warm to the charms of Miss Austen.
Readers should, like water, follow their own course and reach their own level. Nothing does literature greater harm than snobbery.

Portrait of the first tulip of the season. 

Whereabouts ...

I took a week off, I told myself, so I could hunker down and do some blogging on a regular basis. As it happened, I spent most of my time getting my South Philly patio garden in shape. Hard to believe such a tiny space could require so much work. The tulip in the photo has been the star of the garden so far.
I also spent a good deal of time thinking about what I wanted to concentrate on in this blog and figured I'd go with what people who have read it have said they liked best: shop talk. And I figured I'd resume blogging by giving some idea of the role I see for myself as a book review editor.
I certainly don't view myself as some Grand Poohbah of criticism. First of all, though reviewing has a critical component, there are differences between reviewing and criticism. When you write a critical essay you can pretty much assume that your readers are familiar with the work you're writing about. You can assume the opposite when you're writing a review.
The overwhelming factor is the overwhelming number of books and the underwhelming amount of space in which to review them. I prefer to review books that aren't being reviewed everywhere else. I also like to review books by lesser-known publishers, off-beat authors, and the like. And I don't like to waste space with negative reviews. Sometimes, they're unavoidable. Some books are news, and I work for a newspaper. If the newsworthy books turns out to be bad, then space has to be devoted to saying so.
But I'm really an advocate for reading. For me, book reviewing has more to do with bringing to people's attention something you've found worthwhile and telling them why. I've written some negative reviews and will certainly write some more. But on the whole I prefer to pass on the thumbs up/thumbs down business.

A play by Mr. Maugham ...

Last night, my wife and I went to the Walnut Street Theatre to see The Constant Wife by Somerset Maugham. I’m a Maughan fan. I know that many, especially academic, critics look down on him and his work, but I always find myself, after reading Maugham, better able to tolerate the weaknesses and foibles of my fellow humans — and even my own. I think his short stories are marvelous.
The Constant Wife proved to be a constant delight. If more plays like it were staged I’d go to the theater more often. As it is, just about the only contemporary playwright who can get to cough up the price of a ticket is Tom Stoppard.
The production at the Walnut, directed by Malcolm Black, is first-rate. Especially good were Nancy Dussault as Mrs. Culver, Alicia Roper as Constance Middleton (the wife of the title) and Greg Wood as her husband, John. Constance’s sister and mother and a friend have just learned that John is having an affair with Constance’s best friend. The sister especially feels Constance should know. Turns out, though, she already does.
Except for the manners and dress, the play could have been written last week. The dialogue sparkles from start to finish. It makes fun of social conventions, but never sermonizes (unlike so much contemporary drama).
If the Walnut stages more Maugham, they may rest assured that I’ll be there. Wouldn’t mind seeing some Terence Rattigan, either. And something by Ibsen besides Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House. Actually, I’d love to see The Master Builder.

The American Dream (cont'd)

Tono Rondone, in comments to my original post about Arthur Miller and the American Dream (see below), takes a dim view of America. I've been around for quite a few decades and have traveled a bit throughout our fair land and I honestly don't recognize the place Tono describes. Maybe he should take a look at what Portuguese poet Paulo Jose Miranda has to say on the subject. Here are some excerpts courtesy of Citizen Smash.

Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Poet Robert Creeley died Wednesday, age 78. Here's an obituary from the Times of London and a link to a Robert Creeley Web site, which has a selection of his poems.

Behind the scenes (con't) ...

I am half way through Ian McEwan's Saturday, which I am going to review on Sunday. The novel has been widely, even extravagantly, praised, and it's certainly a fascinating read. But at this juncture I can't quite say I like it. Though I can't quite say I don't, either. I mention this because I thought people might be interested in what goes through a reviewer's mind while reading the book under review. And anyone who reads this may be interested in seeing what I finally say about the book -- as I will myself.

Letters among the issues ...

A couple of blogs devoted usually to politics touch upon literature today: Power Line quotes Shakespeare and George Herbert (as quoted in a New York Times review of Camille Paglia's new book) and Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters comments on what Maureen Dowd has to say about the Vatican and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. And Wretchard at The Belmont Club has a very thoughtful post (which links to a most eloquent one by Donald Sensing) on the spirit of Easter. Note the literary power of the unbowlderized Biblical text.

Arthur Miller & the American Dream

When playwright Arthur Miller died last month, much was made in the obituaries about what his plays had to say about the so-called American Dream. Marilyn Berger, writing in the New York Times, said that Miller’s “work exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream.” CNN declared that his plays depicted “the American Dream gone awry.” The BBC called them “intricate musings on the darkness at the heart of the American Dream.” And Xan Brooks, in the Guardian, described Death of a Salesman, the play that won Miller the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1949, as “a savage assault on the American dream.”
Arthur Miller was decidedly a man of the left, and dissing the American Dream is a favorite pastime of the left. The complaint seems to derive from equating the American Dream with consumerism, the pursuit of material goods. Of course, the left is a bit inconsistent on this point. Only last year, in What’s the Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank tried to figure out why a majority of the citizens in his native state continue to vote for Republicans, who he says only cater to their “values,” and not for Democrats, whose policies he says favor their true interests — which are strictly material.
Arthur Miller embodied this inconsistency: That a man who hit the jackpot on Broadway early in life (he was only 33 when he won his Pulitzer), who lived an upscale existence in suburban Connecticut, and married Marilyn Monroe should make a career out of denouncing his fellow Americans’ desire for creature comforts is, at the very least, odd.
Moreover, the quest for wealth and comfort hardly started in America. Neither did criticism of it. Recall that Jesus warned his followers against laying up “treasures on earth, where dust and moth consume and thieves break in and steal.” And William Wordsworth, in 1807, composed a sonnet decrying how “the world is too much with us; late and soon,/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”
In this country, such criticism appeared early and has been repeated often. Henry David Thoreau, in Walden, deplored “creeping down the road of life, pushing ... a barn seventy-five feet by forty.” From Henry Adams to Henry Miller, from Theodore Dreiser to Sinclair Lewis, criticism of the downside of America’s system of free enterprise has been so common as to almost amount to a cliché.
The American Dream itself, however, can’t be easily equated with crass materialism. As it happens, the phrase “American Dream” not only had a precise time and place of origin, it also had a specific originator: historian James Truslow Adams coined it in his 1931 book The American Epic. According to Adams, it is “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” Small wonder the dream that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so famously had was, as he put it himself, “deeply in rooted in the American dream.”
In Time magazine’s obituary of Arthur Miller, critic Richard Corliss said that the playwright “saw the American Dream as a kind of curse, for it led us to mistake ambition for destiny, and to suffer the inevitable slump and crumble when reality makes mock of the dream.” I must beg to differ with my former classmate: It was Miller who was mistaken, not us. The glory of the American Dream lies in its challenging the very notion of a fixed and determining destiny for anyone. Americans prefer to shape their own destiny. Emerson, not Thoreau, sounded the authentic American refrain — when he admonished his countrymen to “hitch your wagon to a star.”

A book review editor's life (cont'd) ...

Inquirer Features copy editor Paula Goff, who handled Sunday copy a couple of weeks ago, sent me an email about March 20's book page: "Wow, Frank: Black Death. Buboes. Pogroms. Jonestown. Cat-killer. Slimy creature. Armageddon. Children killed. A 17-year-old convicted of murdering his father. Quite the cheery books section this week!"
I hadn't actually noticed any of this until Paula pointed it out, which says something about how one goes about deciding what to review and when. I started out pairing Henning Mankell's Before the Frost (Jonestown) and Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (cat-killer, slimy creature). Then had to sub for book critic Carlin Romano's column and the review of Max Hastings's Armageddon fit the space perfectly. As for my own review of The Great Mortality, about the Black Death -- and wherein porgroms and buboes figure -- well, I had that scheduled weeks before. So the grim consort came together more or less absent-mindedly.

An encounter with the donkey man ...

I had the pleasure last week of meeting Kevin O’Hara, the author of Last of the Donkey Pilgrims, the book I reviewed on March 13. He is every bit as engaging as his book, which I think will slowly find its audience and become a classic. Click on the link and take a look at the photos, the one thing the book lacks.

Layers of poetry ...

John Perreault has some fascinating poems at Milk Magazine. In the note to the selection from Motets, he points out that the poems "can be read line by line and by separating out the odd lines and then the even ones, to read two additional poems." Stolen Rhymes, from which four poems are slected, borrow the specific rhymes of specific poems (e.g., Byron's "She Walks in Beauty"). Virtuoso stuff.

Alice Thomas Ellis (1932-2005)

Novelist Alice Thomas Ellis, author of The Sin Eater and the Summerhouse Trilogy — The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987), The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1988) and The Fly in the Ointment (1989) — has died at age 72. Here are obits from the Telegraph and the Times of London. The Clothes in the Wardrobe was made into a wonderful film, The Summer House, starring Julie Walters, Joan Plowright, and Jeanne Moreau.

Original works at Project Gutenberg (cont'd) ...

I have been alerted to two reviews of one of Steven Sills’s books – An American Papyrus -- at Project Gutenberg.

The first is from the Arkansas Gazette:
http://www.authorzone.com/forums/showthread/t-195.html


The other is from ebookreviews.net:
http://www.ebook-reviews.net/cgi-script/csNews/csNews.cgi?command=viewnews&database=poetry.db

A mystery in real time via email ...

I visited one of the sites listed by Jill Walker, The Daughters of Freya (http://emailmystery.com/dof/index.php). This is an email mystery by Michael Betcherman and David Diamond. For $7.49 you get a few emails at random every day over a three-week period, which is how long it takes for the mystery to be resolved. You can read the first three emails for free, which is what I have just done. The story has to do with a cult in California (where else?) that thinks free sex is the answer to everything. And they do mean free: Members -- it's an all-female cult, by the way -- are encouraged to have sex with strangers. The parents of one member are less than amused and want the group investigated. That's all I know so far. Stay tuned.

Literary email

Jill Walker sends me an annotated list of email narratives that I've found online and it is very interesting. As I told Jill in an email, I don't know if this blog is doing anybody else any good, but I'm sure learning a lot from it.
It also seems people are interested in knowing more about what goes into newspaper book reviewing. So I'll continue with some behind-the-scenes info.
I get, on a good day, maybe 200 emails (not including the deluge of spam). Most are from publicists, some are from authors, others from reviewers, still others from those who would like to review, and some from readers. I actually have hundreds in my inbox that are as yet unread. Almost all of those are from publicists of one sort or another. I pretty much know what they're about and plan to get to them ASAP (of course).
I could spend every day doing nothing but responding to email. Then there's the regular mail. Conservatively estimated, about 500 books come into my office every week. Bins of letters and catalogs as well. But : I have to read a book and review it every week. I have to edit reviews and articles. Go to meetings. I have to figure out what to review and when and who to ask to review it. And so, lamentably, I am always behind. I hope that some of those who have tried to get in touch (I haven't even mentioned the phone) read this and understand that I do eventually look at it all and will almost certainly, eventually, get around to responding in some way, shape , or form.