Bar Talk and Tall Tales

For years I’d heard stories about the stories of Ray Wheeler, so I was very happy to get a copy of Bar Talk and Tall Tales, a collection of eight of his originals, recently published by Buffalo Commons Press, so I could see for myself if the hype matches the reality. I can say, without reservation, that it does.

Ray’s narrative voice, whether he’s speaking or writing, has an absurdist quality to it that captures very well the absurdity of living in western North Dakota, where winter temperatures can plunge, seemingly within minutes, to -24 and you can freeze to death if you get lost in the sudden whiteout of a blizzard. Where the wind blows so hard that it seems like you should be able to “retract” your legs and then “ride a wave of it to another country.” Where talking bison—perhaps imaginary, perhaps not—wander through open spaces and suggest quietly that you let the prairie revert back to a “buffalo commons.”

Ray might originally be from Kansas City, but he’s been in western North Dakota long enough (going on 50 years) that he’s seen the oil booms and busts come and go. In one of his stories, “A Kind of Texas,” he spins the tale of Eddie and Lee, two locals who spend most of their time at a bar lamenting the influx of Texans into their community during the latest boom. These Texans, the only folks able to afford the skyrocketing rents, steal their women and cheat them at pool. Eddie, however, is something of a poet (like Ray himself), and so he gets his revenge with a bit of filthy doggerel, but then he pays the price, both in physical and in existential pain.

In fact, in many of these stories there is a price to be paid. In one of my favorites, “How They Spend the Cold Nights Up There,” a writer of western fiction, talking with a washed-up cowboy, Shorty, on a winter’s night at the bar, silently prays that a woman—any woman, so long as she has a warm body and most of her real teeth—will come into the bar. A kind-hearted God answers his prayer, and a woman with luscious lips, calling herself “Belle Starr,” strides into the bar and says that she wants a shot of Scotch and a story. Unfortunately, though, she loses interest in the writer, and in his story about a heroic cowboy named “Dallas Gates,” when she gets drunk and thinks that Shorty, bow legs and all, is the real Dallas Gates. At closing time, she leaves the bar with Shorty, and the writer, whose story doesn’t have an ending, finds himself without an ending, too, as he walks home through the early morning arctic air.

Ray had a bit of a reputation as a playwright back in the 1980s, and if you ask him, he’ll tell you that he greatly admires the work of Sam Shepard. One of the stories in this collection, “The Dakota Kid,” reminds me of Shepard’s plays, such as True West, in that we have a narrative, composed mostly of laconic dialogue, about two desperados who stop off at a bar in Amidon, population 14, to swap their getaway car for a clean car. Adding a note of gothic absurdity to this suspense is the bar owner’s retarded son, who perches on a stool, eating sunflower seeds (as efficiently as a chickadee) and saying nothing except “The world is everything there is.” Nothing good can come from a situation such as this one, and nothing does.

I certainly hope that you’ll pick up this collection of stories, for I think that you’ll find reading them the next best thing to actually drinking some beer with Ray at the local watering hole as he tells you stories that will make you laugh until you cry.

The book is $15 from Buffalo Commons Press, PO Box 15, St. Peter, MN 56082.

How many novelists in the United States?

Dominic Smith estimates that the United States has more than a million novelists, but that number pales on a per capita basis with Iceland, where approximately 10% of the population publishes a novel. Smith uses a number of intriguing statics to reach his estimate.

If only there were enough readers!

Crossing the Heart of Africa

Since I’d rather someone else risk his life so that I can then live vicariously in my armchair while I sip tea, I’m a sucker for adventure travel books. Consequently, I happily downloaded Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure, by Julian Smith, and soon found myself in South Africa contemplating the challenges of traveling through some of the most dangerous territory in the world.

The book is divided into two parts, with chapters alternating between an account of Ewart Grogan’s attempt in 1898 to be the first person to transect Africa length-wise, from Cape Town to Cairo, and Smith’s attempt a few years ago to recreate the feat. Both attempts were inspired by love.

After dropping out of Cambridge University and then fighting in one of the many colonial wars of South Africa, Grogan decided to recuperate in New Zealand, where he soon met and fell in love with Gertrude Watt. She was from a wealthy background, however, and her protective stepfather didn’t have much use for this soldier of fortune from a middle-class background. Grogan said that would earn the stepdaughter’s hand by doing something magnificent, which ended up being an offer to the Royal Geographical Society to survey previously uncharted territory in central Africa, which would necessitate traveling, by foot mainly but by canoe on occasion, from South Africa to Egypt.

Accompanied part of the way by Gertrude’s uncle and large party of porters to carry equipment, Grogan encountered monumental obstacles, including fierce wildlife, disease, and warring tribes. The uncle, severely afflicted by malaria and dysentery, soon quit, as did most of the porters, but Grogan struggled on with just a few native guides until he completed the journey and won his future wife. After a triumphant lecture tour around England, the two then settled in Kenya, where Grogan became an influential plantation owner.

Flash forward to 2007, a little more than hundred years after Grogan’s successful trip, and Julian Smith, a struggling writer who’s afraid to commit to the woman he loves, reads about the feat and resolves to duplicate it. He offers a marriage proposal on the condition that his girlfriend will allow him to make the trip, which will be approximately 4,500 miles long and take a few months by train, car, and boat. She agrees.

These autobiographical chapters, which alternate with chapters describing Grogan’s trip, describe Smith’s adventures as he travels through modern-day South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, and Egypt (he skips Sudan because of its constant warfare). Although he faced few of the genuine dangers that Grogan faced, Smith has a few heart-stopping escapades along the way.

If, like me, you prefer to read about adventure travel instead of actually doing adventure travel, then Crossing the Heart of Africa is for you.

Why you should major in English

Gerald Howard, writing in the Times, makes a convincing argument for majoring in English. After convincing his bosses at Penguin to pay an advance to Alice Adams to publish two of her novels, he has an epiphany:

However, as I went back to my office I experienced an instance of what the French call “stair wit.” I thought, wait a minute, I am putting that $7,500 to work. It’s an investment. The chain of activity I am putting in motion will give work to printers and shippers. It will provide bookstores (there were still bookstores) with tangible goods to sell at a profit. The revenue from those sales will help to pay my salary, my colleagues’ salaries, even our C.F.O.’s salary. Alice Adams will have some thousands of dollars in her pocket — maybe to invest in a C.D. All this and a few thousand people fewer than I put down on the P. & L. (I’d lied, of course) will have bought and enjoyed two excellent novels that deserved to be in print.

Whereas if we’d just put that money in the hands of a bank, they would just ... well, I was pretty hazy on what a bank would actually do with that money, but my general sense was that it would sit there in a vault microbially propagating itself and what good would that do anybody? Economically I was putting my shoulder — or Penguin’s shoulder — to the wheel! I came away with the conviction that I wasn’t useless anymore.

Art makes you smart!

As this article in the Times reminds us, viewing and thinking about art will make you a better person:

Clearly, however, we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum.

Ambrose Bierce in the Civil War

My most recent essay for the New York Times just came out. You can read about Ambrose Bierce and his service in the Civil War.

So you want to be a writer?

Are you ready to chuck your staid career to embark on a life as a novelist? Ready to switch your major from accounting to creative writing? Vanessa Barbara, writing in the Times, suggests that you understand what you're getting into:

Let me give you some personal numbers. I wrote a book in 2008 that won a literary prize and recently sold its 3,000th copy. The book retails for around $15, the author’s royalty rate is 5 percent, so I earned $0.75 from each copy. So for the book that took me one year to write and four more years to sell, I earned a total of around $2,250 (and a bout of depression). I’d have done better donating my body to science.

Although she is specifically describing her experience as a writer in Brazil, I can attest that circumstances are not much better for writers in America, so know what you're getting into if you'd like to be a writer!

Unfamiliar Fishes

Sarah Vowell is my kind of woman: sharp-witted and on the left politically, with a deadpan sense of humor and a possessor of a large vocabulary. I'm not much of a radio listener so I've rarely heard her commentaries on NPR, but I've enjoyed her appearances on The Daily Show and have found three of her books to be well-written and thoughtful critiques of America and its citizens.

For example, in The Wordy Shipmates (2008), which is about the Pilgrims and their Massachusetts Bay Colony, Vowell analyzes the irony implicit in a group of people fleeing England because of repression but then being so intolerant toward the natives of the New World and any Europeans who didn't believe what they believed. Similarly, in Assassination Vacation (2005), an eccentric sort of travelogue, Vowell visits sites associated with the presidents who have been killed while in office (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy), which leads her to speculate about what makes America such a country of violence.

Vowell’s most recent book, Unfamiliar Fishes (2011), describes a trip to Hawaii for a vacation. While there, she tours the royal palace, and, on that same day in December 2003, U.S. troops capture Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This coincidence makes her realize that America has always been in the business of "regime change." Her new book, as she says in her introduction, tells the story about how the U.S. spent seventy-eight years "Americanizing" Hawaii—from sending the first missionaries to "civilize" the islands in 1820 to formal annexation in 1898. (The latter year, of course, also represents the peak of American imperialism as the U.S. declared war on Spain and ended up seizing Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam.) It's not a story that makes you proud to be an American.

Most of Unfamiliar Fishes is a detailed history of the American missionaries and whalers who began visiting the Sandwich Islands, as they were known until the 1850s, for religious and commercial reasons. These two groups, however, were rivals for the islands as the missionaries sought to convert the natives and the whalers sought some R&R while on shore leave. "Imagine, Vowell says, "if the Hawaii Convention Center in Waikiki hosted The Value Voters Summit and the Adult Entertainment Expo simultaneously—for forty years." As one could imagine, the two cannot possibly co-exist in harmony, and the only reason the conflict between them ended was the discovery, in the mid 19th century, that petroleum was a much cheaper alternative to whale oil, which led to the collapse of the whaling industry (the only reason, indeed, that the whales weren't hunted to extinction) and the triumph of missionary culture in Hawaii.

Although most Hawaiians appreciated how the missionaries contributed to a higher standard of living (particularly with their emphasis on public schools), they lamented the loss of independence that came with American annexation in 1898. Vowell, in fact, takes her title from a metaphor used by one 19^th-century Hawaiian writer to describe the situation of his native land: “If a big wave comes in, large and unfamiliar fishes will come in from the dark ocean, and when they see the small fishes of the shallows they will eat them up.”

Like her earlier books, Unfamiliar Fishes shines a light on a part of American history that is worth exploring, and, as such, I recommend Vowell’s book.

Stephen Fry

If you've never watched A Bit of Fry and Laurie or Jeeves & Wooster, then I don't know what to say. It's a crime if you're only familiar with Hugh Laurie from the American show House.

Unfortunately, Stephen Fry hasn't gotten quite the same recognition in the States as has his pal, Hugh. That's a shame. His movie Wilde is a quiet masterpiece, and his British television shows Last Chance to See and Stephen Fry in America are witty, urbane travel documentaries. His podcasts are among the most popular in Britain.

Here is one of Fry's podcasts, in which he expresses his irritation at overly punctilious grammarians.

This Town

Don't read This Town if you already have high blood pressure because, if you do, your head will start pounding and your eyes will start bulging. You've been warned!

You can't really call Mark Leibovich's book a political exposé because it simply confirms what most of us have already suspected, which is that Washington D.C. is a cesspool that exists simply to perpetuate itself. For example, while most of us want bipartisanship, Washington prefers gridlock because that's what pays. In fact, as Leibovich documents, again and again, today's status quo is perfect as senators and representatives go from being elected officials to lobbyists in order to "monetize" their public service.

Particular scorn is heaped upon those who claimed to be anti-Establishment while in office but are quick to jump on the gravy train after leaving. North Dakota's own Byron Dorgan is one such ex-Senator who was "contemptuously righteous" about lobbyists but then was quick to cash in. In fact, Dorgan didn't even delay the two-year period that office holders are supposed to wait before lobbying their former colleagues. Instead, he flouted that regulation by not officially registering as a "lobbyist" and joining a Washington law firm as a "senior policy adviser," one who just happens to oversee a staff of lobbyists.

Although the book is about Washington culture in general, much of it focuses on specific personalities—such as "super lawyer" Bob Barnett, Senators Harry Reid and Tom Coburn, the late Meet the Press host Tim Russert, and lobbyist Jack Quinn—to show just how morally bankrupt the current national political system is. Other individuals who come in for particular scrutiny are Darrell Issa, Dick Gephardt, Haley Barbour, and Richard Holbrooke, as well as dozens of staffers and assorted hangers on that you haven't heard of before. Even though This Town discusses literally hundred of people, there are no heroes in this story.

Washington media, usually more concerned about its own "branding" opportunities than about truly covering the news, also comes in for some scathing criticism. Leibovich cites, for example, how, in April 2010 after Justice John Paul Stevens retired, the website Politico asked why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hadn't been mentioned as a possible replacement for the Supreme Court, which then started a frenzy of "trending" discussions on other websites before the White House, less than 24 hours later, announced that Clinton would not be nominated. In the meantime, page views of Politico multiplied, which undoubtedly pleased its advertisers and likely allowed Politico to increase its ad rates.

This Town is a thoroughly depressing and dispiriting book, and as such, it should be read by everybody, for only by understanding how far off the rails our political system has gone will we be able to reform it.

Unless, of course, you read the book and then just throw up your hands in despair, which was my reaction.

Writing for money

Samuel Johnson, the great critic and lexicographer, once argued, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."

I generally adhere to that idea (by declining to write for the local newspaper, for example), but I'm obviously violating Johnson's principle right now on this blog. Tim Kreider, writing in the Times, agrees with Johnson, too:

Practicalities aside, money is also how our culture defines value, and being told that what you do is of no ($0.00) value to the society you live in is, frankly, demoralizing. Even sort of insulting. And of course when you live in a culture that treats your work as frivolous you can’t help but internalize some of that devaluation and think of yourself as something less than a bona fide grown-up.

So I’m writing this not only in the hope that everyone will cross me off the list of writers to hit up for free content but, more important, to make a plea to my younger colleagues. As an older, more accomplished, equally unsuccessful artist, I beseech you, don’t give it away. As a matter of principle. Do it for your colleagues, your fellow artists, because if we all consistently say no they might, eventually, take the hint. It shouldn’t be professionally or socially acceptable — it isn’t right — for people to tell us, over and over, that our vocation is worthless.

How we write

According to the Times, neuroscientists are trying to understand how the brains of writers and readers work. How, exactly, does the reader feel an emotional reaction to the death of a character, for example? And is it the same emotional reaction that the writer felt in creating the scene?

How, you ask, do scientists measure these reactions?

Hook up the writer and (later) his readers:

They have asked Mr. Grunberg to try to keep each chunk of text limited to one dominant emotion, and have tracked where his cursor was at various points in each writing session, to match his words with the physiological data. The 50 readers will read the novella on an e-reader, to allow similar tracking.

Think positive!

Bob Garfield of NPR, who I had the pleasure of hearing in person in Deadwood earlier this year, has some comments about BuzzFeed's recent decision to ban negative book reviews. He's all for it!

To my way of thinking, BuzzFeed’s heroic initiative will succeed even if it merely eradicates the depressing negativity that has for so long kept literary criticism from becoming a full-fledged economic sector, like agriculture, transport and erectile dysfunction.

It also brings us one step closer to my two lifelong dreams: first, a newspaper that delivers only good news; and second, diet bacon.

Mark Bowden on words

Mark Bowden is one of my favorite writers on military matters and international politics, Although I've only read one of his books so far (Black Hawk Down), I've been reading him for years in The Atlantic. In this blog post, he writes in praise of obscure words. Words that send him to the dictionary:

“Good prose is like a windowpane,” wrote George Orwell in his famous essay “Why I Write,” a rule that would seem to counsel against ever stopping a reader with an unfamiliar word. It’s good advice for beginners, but serious readers are also lovers of language. I find that the occasional obscure word, used correctly, spices prose.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo's award-winning book about slum life in Mumbai, is a stunningly heart-breaking report about people who are determined to get ahead even though their chances are nearly zero. We meet, for example, Abdul, a Muslim living in a Hindu area, who has worked his way from trash collector to a trash buyer and seller; Asha, who hopes to become the first female "slumlord" of her area; and Sunil, a Dalit (Untouchable), who knows that he is undersized for his age and is desperate to eat more so that he can grow and become successful. Boo, a long-time magazine reporter, has made it her mission in life to tell the stories of those who never get an opportunity to speak for themselves, and in this book, her first, she has written a masterpiece.

The book's arresting title comes from an advertising slogan for floor tiles—Beautiful Forever, Beautiful Forever, Beautiful Forever—on a wall by the Mumbai airport that prevents tourists from seeing the abject poverty in the slums adjacent to the airport. Boo emphasizes the contrast between bustling Mumbai, with its increasingly wealthy citizens, and the "undercity" of Annawadi, with its malnourished children who scour garbage heaps to find anything they can sell to a salvage company. In contrast to the tourists who zip past Annawadi, Boo refuses to avert her eyes and reports what day to day life is like for those living on the very margins of Indian society.

The book is divided into five parts, including a prologue that introduces the theme and sets the stage, and each part vividly describes daily life for the residents of Annawadi. Boos' approach is narrative, so she spends little time speculating about the sociological or political causes for the extremely inequitable society but, instead, simply focuses on telling the stories and letting her readers get to know the residents of Annawadi. In short, she treats these people like human beings, who deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity that all human beings deserve.

The central story that she tells is that of two neighboring Muslim families in conflict with each other. Matters come to a head one evening when the matriarch of one family catches fire, and members of the other family are accused of assaulting her, which then throws them into Mumbai's Kafkaesque legal system of incompetent jurists and corrupt police officers.

I can't say that Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a joy to read, for the overwhelming litany of daily tragedies is very depressing to read, but I can say that Behind the Beautiful Forevers is an important book that everyone should read.

Literary prizes?

Daniel Mendelsohn and Jennifer Szalai, writing in the Times, have an interesting debate about the value of literary prizes.They agree that the notion of giving an award for a work of art is a bit silly (especially since the valuation will always be subjective), but then Mendelsohn concludes that the process itself is valuable:

One thing is inarguable: that so many civilizations, over so many millenniums, have felt it crucial to award prizes to works of art — which is to say, to show that literature, art, theater and even criticism are prized. Whatever the names on the plaques and medals, the real winner, in the end, is culture itself.

Che

Although he has certainly directed his share of big-budget “Hollywood” films (Erin Brockovich, Ocean's Eleven, Contagion), Steven Soderbergh has made a number of personal, experimental films that I find more interesting. Traffic, for example. Or his first feature-length film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. One of his more recent films feels like an epic but has the sensibility and politics of the personal films. I'm talking about Che.

Che (2008), a two-part, five-hour film, starring Benicio del Toro as the Argentine revolutionary, isn't wholly successful, but it is always interesting. It's a bit flawed by being too long (Just how many times do we need to watch guerrillas hiking through a Cuban jungle?) and by a few other missteps (Hey, that's Matt Damon in a cameo speaking Spanish!), but nonetheless, Che continually challenges its viewers. It asks us, for example, to admire the commitment of one man, Che Guevara, to his ideals, even if we don't agree with those ideals. Moreover, it asks us to pay attention as the narrative is fractured by flashbacks that explore just what made Che, a physician with severe asthma, into a dedicated socialist determined to lift peasants around the world out of poverty through agrarian reform and education. In between raids on Batista's army in Cuba in the late 1950s, for example, Che would give physical exams to the local farmers or teach their children how to read, all the while serving as an exemplar for the other revolutionaries.

Benicio del Toro, also one of the film's producers, worked more than a decade to finance this labor of love. Although Soderbergh had agreed to help produce the film, he only became the director at the last minute when Terrence Malick dropped out. (It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the spacey Malick, director of Badlands, Days of Heaven, and Tree of Life, would have done with this film.) At any rate, Soderbergh grabbed the helm and subsequently produced a thoughtful film about a complex man.

Heart of Darkness

You might not have read Joseph Conrad’s classic short novel about colonialism in Africa, but if you’ve seen Apocalypse Now, then you’re familiar with the basic plot and major characters of Heart of Darkness, which was first published in 1899.

Like the film, the novel tells the story of a somewhat jaded man who travels up a river, through an increasingly more malevolent jungle filled with dangerous animals and hostile tribes, to find a fellow European who has “gone native” and can no longer be controlled by his superiors. Along the way, the traveler, Marlow, has many bizarre, even surreal encounters until he realizes that colonialism destroys the colonizer just as much as it destroys the colonized and that the true “heart of darkness” isn’t in the Belgian Congo but, instead, is in the chests of men.

Two ways of looking at the novel, I think, work best. The first way—the traditional interpretation—is to see the story as a metaphor for the workings of a mind. Marlow, as he steams from the sea to a remote trading post deep in the interior, travels not just back in time, as the jungle seems to become primeval and its inhabitants prehistoric, but also travels deep into collective consciousness. In a sense, he travels through the super-ego, ego, and then into the id, the part of the mind that is primal and instinctual. In this interior, he confronts the deepest fears and anxieties of the human race.

The second way of interpreting Heart of Darkness, which has come to dominate discussion in the past twenty years, is to see the novel as a post-colonial text. In short, the novel reveals more about European attitudes, most of them racist (conscious or subconscious), towards Africans. As Chinua Achebe said in an interview, “But you cannot compromise my humanity in order that you explore your own ambiguity. I cannot accept that. My humanity is not to be debated, nor is it to be used simply to illustrate European problems.” Achebe’s point is that critics who see the novel as reflective of the consciousness of all mankind are blind to the fact that it fails to present Africans truthfully. In short, Achebe asks, how can such an interpretation be taken seriously when it’s based on a lie?

However you choose to interpret the text, reading Heart of Darkness is a richly rewarding experience, and so I encourage you to check it out.

Hotels & libraries?

A hotel that also houses a library of historic books? Sounds good to me! I think I'll visit the Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland first before flying to the Ballyfin in Ireland. What would be better than trekking through gorgeous countryside (with a picnic lunch) during the day and then books, ale, and conversation by the fire in the evening?

Survival of the Wittiest

Now here's a reality show I'd watch:

Italian television has created a new show that requires budding writers to create fiction, in front of cameras, if they would like to score a publishing deal:

During the shooting of an episode last month, the expert panel — the novelists Andrea De Carlo, Giancarlo De Cataldo and Taiye Selasi — sat behind a desk while makeup artists darted about blotting foreheads and touching up lipstick. Facing the judges, four contestants perched behind their keyboards, with every typed word projected on screens for all to see, as a timer above their heads counted down and cameras swooped in for close-ups.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

First, shame on you if you haven’t yet read Mark Twain’s classic novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which might be the “great American novel.” Put aside this blog and crack open the book (or flip to a free copy on your iPad) and read it before continuing to my thoughts about the novel.

Okay, now that we’re all on the same page, so to speak, let’s look at some controversies surrounding the novel.

Oddly enough, the primary controversy in Twain’s lifetime, and the reason the novel was occasionally banned, isn’t the problem that has caused protests in our time. Almost immediately upon its publication in 1885, Huck Finn generated complaints because its protagonist is such a realistic boy from the lower class. In other words, he curses, plays hooky, and has no use for Sunday school. He also has the temerity to befriend a runaway slave, Jim, which completely contradicts the social mores of the time. Huck, in short, is definitely not a role model for young boys.

Twain, however, didn’t mind that Huck Finn caused such a ruckus that it was banned from the Concord, Massachusetts, public library. As I pointed out in the first of my two books about him, upon hearing the news, Twain exulted to one of his business agents, “That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure.” He was undoubtedly pleased, then, that his novel was regularly banned from libraries over the next 25 years of his life.

In our time, of course, the primary reason that Huck Finn has been banned is because of the word “nigger.”

It’s a troubling and unsettling word, no doubt, and on some pages of the novel, it seems like nearly every other word is “nigger,” which has led a number of school boards and libraries to ban the book as being racist. While I don’t doubt that that the novel’s language can cause pain, and therefore it needs to be discussed and taught with sensitivity, it’s clearly not a racist book.

First, and most obvious, the novel’s narrator, Huck, is using the only word he knows to describe the slaves that he sees in the Mississippi River valley ca. 1845. It’s never been a word used in polite society, but it was an everyday word, especially for people in Huck’s social class, and it’s really just a descriptive word for a black person, free or slave, in that time period in that part of the United States. In other words, when someone uses that word today, he undoubtedly wants to inflict emotional pain or start a fight, but the characters in the novel (aside from Pap, who is definitely abusive and violent) have no such intent. Just as I say “table” to describe a flat surface with four legs at waist-level, Huck Finn says “nigger” to describe a black person. Indeed, even Jim uses the word “nigger” to refer to himself or to other blacks.

Complicating matters, however, is that Twain certainly understood the paradox of Huck using that word so freely, especially after it’s clear that he has come to see Jim as a friend. For example, consider this passage late in the novel, which occurs when Huck, pretending to be Tom Sawyer, explains to Aunt Sally why his steamboat was late:

It warn’t the grounding—that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.

Good gracious! anybody hurt?

No’m. Killed a nigger.

Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.

It’s clear to me, from this passage, and from a few others in the novel, that Twain is offering a sort of dramatic irony to make a point about racism. In other words, Huck doesn’t grasp the significance of what he has just said (he doesn’t have a clue that it’s repugnant), but Twain’s readers do understand. In short, Twain shows us the callousness of Southern slaving-holding society in this scene, even though Huck and Aunt Sally don’t “get” their own callousness. I would argue that Huck and Aunt Sally certainly are racists but the book and its author are not. It’s a subtle distinction, one that is undoubtedly often lost except to careful readers, but it’s a crucial one.

Of course, one can also argue, with some evidence from the text and from Twain’s own reflections on the novel, that I’m probably over analyzing this passage. After all, Twain himself, not entirely tongue in cheek, warned at the beginning of the novel:

PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Where is the Mormon literary fiction?

I'd never really thought about why I don't read very many novelists who happen to be Mormons, but (quite simply) there aren't very many who write literary fiction. This provocative article, in the New York Times, tackles the question by interviewing Mormon authors. One, Shannon Hale, argues "that literary fiction tends to exalt the tragic, or the gloomy, while Mormon culture prefers the sunny and optimistic." Another, Rachel Ann Nunes, adds, "'I’ll tell you why they write young adult,' said Ms. Nunes. 'Because they don’t have to write the pages and pages of sex. They don’t want to spend a lot of time in the bedroom.'"

Them

Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001) is one of Jon Ronson's earliest books. Like his other books, it is a first-person account that explores the fringes of society. In this case, it is the people called political “extremists” by the mainstream. I’m a little unsettled by this book, but undoubtedly that is the feeling that Ronson wants me to have. Let me explain.

Most of the extremists that Ronson encounters come across as nut jobs that couldn’t wire a bomb together if they wanted to. Pre-9/11, which is when Ronson wrote these chapters, we would have simply laughed at these paranoid weirdoes spouting off about Jews secretly running the world. Post-9/11, however, we certainly know that some of these paranoid weirdoes are dangerous.

For example, the book's first chapter, "A Semi-Detached Ayatollah," is a profile of Omar Bakri Mohammad, who, even though he lives on welfare in a London suburb, is described in the media as "the most dangerous man in Britain." In Ronson's descriptions of him, based on months of interviews, Mohammad comes across as a complete buffoon. I'm not sure where the truth lies. There's no question that Mohammad, a native of Syria who wants legal residency in Britain, calls for jihad against his adopted land and argues for the imposition of Sharia law, but is he a true threat to security when he can’t even figure out how to launch small helium balloons with anti-British messages?

In the years after 9/11, however, Mohammad’s sermons certainly did raise money for al-Qaeda and certainly did inspire some of his followers to become suicide bombers against American or Israeli targets overseas. In the eyes of the American and British governments, he was unquestionably a dangerous man, and after the July 2005 bombings in London, he was expelled from British soil. In short, he strikes me as anything but a buffoon.

What, then, are we to make of Ronson’s reporting, which suggests that Mohammad is a harmless fool? I don’t know.

Ronson's second chapter is similarly troubling as it turns a sympathetic eye towards an American extremist, Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge fame. (To refresh your memory, after Weaver ignored a summons to appear on a charge of illegal gun sales, federal agents surrounded his house and, in the mayhem, an exchange of gunfire killed an FBI agent, as well as Weaver’s wife and 14-year-old son. It does seem that the feds were guilty of excessive force, but the Weavers are clearly dangerous customers.) Ronson interviews Weaver, his now-adult daughter, and some of his sympathizers, and he essentially accepts at face value that Weaver, while he might have some outlandish political views, is basically harmless.

But Weaver, as is well documented, associated with the Aryan Nations and had an arsenal of guns, including illegal sawed-off shotguns and automatic weapons. In fact, he received the summons for offering to sell illegal weapons to a man he thought was in the Aryan Nations (he was really an undercover AFT agent). In short, like Omar Bakri Mohammad, Randy Weaver strikes me as a dangerous man. While I think the situation should have been handled differently, I don’t think that Weaver is a sort of buffoon who should be left to live with his family in a cabin in the Idaho wilderness to sell illegal guns.

A few extremists in the book, however, are more clearly wacky but harmless. David Icke, for example. This former professional soccer player and BBC commentator thinks that a cabal of giant lizards from outer space have assumed human form and are actually ruling the world. Ronson interviews him at length, and then spends just as much time interviewing critics determined to debunk his beliefs. (Really? How long can it take to convince people that someone who believes in giant lizards from space is nuts?)  Other extremists—including members of the KKK—fall somewhere between the genuinely dangerous and the clearly wacky. Ronson also spends some time with anti-extremists, although they often come across as intolerant themselves.

Although the book is interesting, I can’t say that I found Them to be compelling as The Psychopath Test. I can say, however, that I intend to read many more books by Jon Ronson.

Faulkner's cold toddy

Robert Moor, writing on the blog of The Paris Review, describes how much he came to appreciate William Faulkner's fiction when he worked at a distillery:

I read Light in August over the course of about seven shifts that first summer. A significant portion of the book concerns the exploits of a pair of bootleggers—a topic with which Faulkner was familiar, having run boatfuls of illegal whiskey into New Orleans during Prohibition. There are lovely passages describing the act of drinking whiskey, which goes down “cold as molasses” before beginning its slow, warm uncoiling.

Helpfully, Moor also reprints Faulkner's recipe for the perfect cold toddy.

Words, words, words

“Words, words, words,” Hamlet complains to Polonius about some dry text he has been reading. But while Hamlet might find words to be dull and incapable of expressing truth, Ian Crouch and Brad Leithauser, both writing on the New Yorker blog, find words to be endlessly fascinating.

Crouch, speculating about neologisms (the coining of words), argues,

If neologisms seem suddenly ubiquitous, perhaps this proliferation is the result of our current pace of life. If we are expected to multitask, then shouldn’t our language have to, too?

Leithauser, meanwhile, worries about words that exist past their usefulness or are otherwise abandoned:

Words become unusable for all sorts of reasons. Though “niggard” and “niggardly” have a rich pedigree running through Chaucer and Shakespeare and Browning, they’ve recently fallen out of currency as the result of being near-homonyms to a hateful epithet.

Criticism on Twitter?

Contemporary writers, of course, use social media to promote their works and interact with readers, so it’s reasonable to assume hat writers of yesteryear would have used FaceBook, Vine, and Twitter, too. Imagine Oscar Wilde, for example, blasting out tweets!

Adam Hirsch, in the Times, wonders, however, if critics should use social media for their work. He thinks not:

But this kind of yes-or-no judgment is not a replacement for criticism, just as a 140-character tweet is not a replacement for literature. That’s because criticism, like literature, is not information but experience: the experience of a mind engaged with a text — that is, with another mind.

Anna Holmes, respectfully, disagrees:

If the point of contemporary literature and criticism is to comment on the human condition, to excavate and explicate the increasingly crowded, global and wired way we live, then a curiosity about — and embrace of — one of the most innovative and meritocratic communication technologies of the 21st century would seem a logical next step.

Gulp & Stiff

One of my favorite non-fiction authors is Mary Roach, who writes popular-science books about somewhat taboo subjects, such as the digestive system (Gulp, 2013) and death (Stiff, 2004). Unfortunately, as you can see from the aforementioned publication dates, she lacked the foresight to write her books in the logical order. But that’s my only complaint about her wonderfully informative and funny books.

Like all of her books, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal is impressively researched through a variety of primary and secondary sources, including citations to such papers as “Paradoxical Sphincter Contraction Is Rarely Indicative of Anismus,” published in Gut; and “The Quality of Colonic Flatus Excreted by the ‘Normal’ Individual,” published in American Journal of Digestive Diseases. She reads these studies so we don’t have to!

Roach begins Gulp in the logical location, the mouth, which has just eaten a meal. Subsequent chapters then trace the route of food, which is soon a bolus, from beginning to end. Various questions along the way lead to various digressions:

·      “Is it possible to eat so much that your stomach bursts?” (Yep.)

·      “Is it possible to asphyxiate yourself from particularly noxious farting?”  (Nope.)

The book concludes with a look at recent experiments in fecal transplants to cure patients whose guts have been wiped clean of the bacteria necessary for healthy digestion. As Roach points out, sometimes the simplest, cheapest solution to a deadly problem is the best.

For a look at what can happen after death, Roach gives us Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, which examines what happens to the bodies left to science. Some of these uses—anatomy classes in medical schools and crash tests for testing seat belts—you’ve probably heard of before, but she details some of the more obscure, sometimes outright bizarre uses for cadavers.

For example, Roach visits the “Body Farm,” at the University of Tennessee, to learn how cadavers, at various stages of decomposition, can help forensic scientists determine time and manner of death. One experiment might involve putting a nude body in a plastic bag and then leaving it in a car trunk in the summer sun and monitoring the number of maggots. Another experiment might involve putting a clothed body in a shallow grave and then regularly checking the chemical composition of the soil as the cadaver decays.

In other chapters, Roach writes about 18th-century French scientists who used condemned prisoners in an attempt to measure precisely the moment a person’s soul leaves the body and more recent Soviet scientists who attempted to reanimate the heads of cadavers. She concludes her book with alternatives to standard disposals of the body (i.e. burial or cremation), including a type of organic compositing that actually makes a lot of sense to me.

I can recommend two of her other books, as well: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2011), which is about training for a long-term adventure in space; and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), which is about--. Well, I’m sure you can guess its subject.