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.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
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.
Monday, November 25, 2013
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.
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.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
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.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
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.
Friday, November 15, 2013
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?
Thursday, November 14, 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
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.
Saturday, November 9, 2013
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.'"
Friday, November 8, 2013
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.
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
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.
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.
Monday, November 4, 2013
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.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
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.
Friday, November 1, 2013
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)