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“Blue Ridge Mountains” by Fleet Foxes

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 16:25:18 -0400

“Blue Ridge Mountains” by Fleet Foxes

#14. “tinkers,” by paul harding

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:46:06 -0400

#14. “tinkers,” by paul harding

The heartbreak of a cold sun. A red sun. Fusion blue sky behind...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 23:45:00 -0400

The heartbreak of a cold sun. A red sun. Fusion blue sky behind the cardinal star. The grass is brittle and broken, snapped like a back. Flecks of dust collect in bitter clouds of particulate, turgid brown wisps rolling haphazard across the sterile plain. The dirt: ashen, stale, from ancient mountains pulped by the long crush of time.

* “The heartbreak of a cold sun,” comes from Paul Harding’s “Tinkers.” The rest comes from my brain.

The thing I wrote this weekend about David Shields and Renata Adler is running in the blog rail of...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:11:52 -0400

The thing I wrote this weekend about David Shields and Renata Adler is running in the blog rail of HuffPost Books and New York today.

Check it out.

Saturday, New York Public Library

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 23:37:29 -0400

Saturday, New York Public Library

WikiLeaks Cable: Vatican Dismissed Pinochet Massacre Reports As 'Communist Propaganda'

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:02:00 -0400

WikiLeaks Cable: Vatican Dismissed Pinochet Massacre Reports As 'Communist Propaganda'

In Which Ross Douthat Kind Of Gets It Right

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 15:44:00 -0400

Ross Douthat wrote an interesting column today! Lots to chew on:

On the one hand, Douthat treats the Ivory Tower as this monolithic thing, a new aristocracy, where privilege and influence are passed down nearly perfectly from one generation to the next — which maybe he meant hyperbolically, but it does dovetail with that particular mode of new-world-order, reptilian-conspiracy paranoia bred in the fringe circles of the tinfoil hat brigade. Not great. His column also betrays, more broadly, a knee-jerk mistrust of academia — shocking, I know! — and encourages that mistrust by conflating academia with a patrician social order.

Food for thought:

FWIW, many of my college friends were the children of immigrants. Very few were the children of Ivy League grads. nyti.ms/Zl6GvG

April 7, 2013

But Douthat is right that Ivy League schools are as much about the creation of social networks as they are about pure education.

April 7, 2013

There are also maybe some Affirmative Action dog-whistles in there, all the yammering about “disadvantaging talented kids — often white and working class…” Which I’m not very amenable to, in general.

Douthat is right in alluding to the presumption of intrinsic superiority a lot of people with HYP degrees tend to assume — and also about the kinds of anxieties (“the dread phenomenon known as ‘regression to the mean’”) that encourage social striations along academic fault lines — so good job there, I guess.

Maureen O’Connor still said it better, though.

The Guardian: "Sam Parnia -- The Man Who Could Bring You Back From The Dead"

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 14:54:00 -0400

The Guardian: "Sam Parnia -- The Man Who Could Bring You Back From The Dead":

Really interesting article. The one place where Parnia lost me, however, was when he started suggesting the possibility of mystical properties in near-death experiences. The problem with people who say they felt their minds extracted from their bodies, that they saw themselves from above on the operating table, is that those people don’t really have any idea what was going on in their minds (as distinct from their brains) in the moments when they were “clinically dead.” It’s impossible, as consciousness, to actually intuit the lack thereof.

What they describe as out-of-body experiences are all filtered through cognition in the present. It’s just as fair to assume, and in fact I think a great deal fairer, that these people are projecting thoughts from their present onto the moments of cardiac arrest when their minds had gone blank. Nature abhors a vacuum, etc etc. [/pretentious]

The Thing About David Shields And Renata Adler Is...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:05:00 -0400

Anybody who’s kept up with this blog over the past few months (SUP, MOM) knows that I’ve been reading a little bit of David Shields lately. What you don’t know — unless you had the bad luck of catching me at one of those times where I feel like, you know, expounding — is how totally his books have bowled me over.

Shields writes in “collage,” which is to say that his recent books, the ones I’ve read, while loosely structured around certain ideas, are composed of quazi-related bits and pieces, vignettes that share some peripheral, tangential attributes but remain nonetheless discrete and self-sufficient. What makes for an amazing reading experience is the piecing together an argument from the fragments — how an anecdote about Iowa basketball and another about briefly wishing Tiger Woods were dead, and a hundred other asides all coalesce into something coherent and, yes, important about how we live and how we live together. The guy is a maestro.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw that Shields would be appearing at The Strand bookstore, just below Union Square in Manhattan, for a Q&A session with another author, Renata Adler. (Her book “Speedboat,” loved by many, including Shields, was just reprinted by the New York Review of Books.) I marked the event on my calendar, and last night I went.

Shields and Adler are both fixated on communication (chiefly, its flaws) and they talked at length about it over the course of the discussion. One moment in particular seemed to (maybe, serendipitously) catch at their meanings.

Talking back and forth, along with a moderator, whose name and occupation escape me (sorry, guy), both were animated, articulate, and as smart as you would expect authors who’d written critically celebrated books to be. Both were also mostly at ease, his tall frame bending casually against the frame of his heavy leather chair, her tiny one sunk comfortably into hers.

This isn’t to say there weren’t hiccups. There were, for one, some problems with acoustics. Really, I should say, with Renata Adler’s mic. And, really, I should say, with the fact that Renata Adler was having a certain amount of difficulty speaking directly into her mic. As a result, many of her wonderful musings were lost on the audience during the first portion of the event. Shields joked that she was making a point about the hazards of communication. The Strand’s staff eventually, and helpfully, supplied her with a mic stand, and the problem was remedied.

Shields, meanwhile, who has written at length about his lifelong battle against stuttering (the hazards of communication, etc), but nonetheless spoke with impeccable diction throughout the Q&A portion of the event, tripped over his words on a few occasions when the time came to read a passage from his book. Something about the change in dynamic — and I won’t guess what exactly it might have been, except to say that the feeling of intimacy available in conversation doesn’t translate very well into a one-to-many address — had a visible affect on his relationship with talking.

At another point, he laughed at a joke he had told, which I can’t quite remember, while the audience remained deathly silent. (And, man, did I feel for him, having a children’s treasury of catastrophically failed jokes to my name.) Anyway, he rebounded immediately, and I’m sure nobody but me even remembers, so whatever.

Point being: Speaking in front of people is tricky, even for the seasoned professional. Promotional events like these, conversational or no, are performative as much as anything else, and that has a way of creating distance between the sender and the receiver.

There was one moment, however, when the artifice of the event melted away. Shields mentioned the book “The Smoking Diaries,” by Simon Gray, which he identified as his favorite (or was it the “best”?) book of the past 15 years. The name “Proust” was thrown around. Shields is trying to get Vintage to re-print. Etc.

“Oh, yes,” Adler chimed in, by way of acclamation. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“You’ve read it, too!” And there was genuine excitement in his voice, the two unexpectedly caught in a shared moment of literary fandom. When he dove back into his discussion of the many merits of “The Smoking Diaries,” he seemed more energized than before.

Earlier on, Adler talked about how language and literature were these things we all share, cultural touchstones. She used the example of a line from “Richard III,” in which the mad tyrant, having just had two children murdered, begs his wife, Lady Anne, to deny his guilt. To which Anne replies: “Then say they were not slain. But dead they are, and devilish slave, by thee.” A line first written by Shakespeare, then passed down through generations and then, as Adler recounted, repeated at the Nuremberg trials, and again at a murder trial in Mississippi.

Adler worried that these touchstones are fewer than before.

She referred to “we” (the “we” in the room?) as “the last generation of readers.” She also acknowledged that hers was a perspective shared by the older generations past, all the way back to the birth of technology, and that things had worked out okay so far. She lamented, nonetheless.

Shields recounted later a line from David Foster Wallace, which he repeated in “How Literature Saved My Life.” It went:

We’re existentially alone on the planet. I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling and you can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling. And the very best works construct a bride across that abyss of human loneliness.

“The Smoking Diaries” did that at The Strand. Shields was excited. Adler was excited. I was excited, despite the better than even odds I’ll never even read the damn book. Throughout the room you could see audience members grabbing for their phones or a piece of paper to jot down its name. Everybody forgot everything else other than that this was something we all wanted to share.

Wherein The Papal Bull Is A Burn Book: "The Vatican Diaries," by John Thavis

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 16:28:00 -0400

John Thavis was a reporter embedded for decades in the Vatican. His book is arranged episodically, covering a lot of territory, but generally highlighting the fractiousness and balkanization of the Vatican hierarchy. At different points, “The Vatican Diaries” reminded me of the following, mostly hypothetical things:

Roman Curia-“Mean Girls” mash-up
Movie loosely based on “All The President’s Men,” where Deep Throat is literally everyone who has ever worked at the Vatican.
A comedy of manners in which a bunch of cardinals and bishops argue over the proper way to say Mass, often (ineptly) trying to negotiate a favorable outcome by going around and behind one another’s backs. This usually backfires hilariously. Arguments are heated, but everybody ultimately has the same goal at heart and the same God in mind. (Oh, and some of the characters are crazy anti-semites.)
There’s a scene in “Network” where a collection of militant radicals who’ve been greenlit for a network television show (“The Mao Tse Tung Hour”) wind up in a combative argument about contractual minutiae: stock options, gross proceeds, licensing, etc. ”I’m paying Metro twenty percent of all foreign and Canadian distribution,” shouts one militant, “and that’s after recoupment! The Communist Party’s not going to see a nickel out of this goddamn show until we go to syndication!” There’s a chapter in the book about a Vatican office trying to build a parking lot over an ancient graveyard, and… yeah, that.
A fucking horror story. Google “Marcial Maciel.” Or don’t, if you’d rather, you know, sleep at night.

#13. “the vatican diaries,” by john thavis Thoughts...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 16:19:49 -0400

#13. “the vatican diaries,” by john thavis

Thoughts TK.

#12. “how to live safely in a science fictional...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:33:00 -0400

#12. “how to live safely in a science fictional universe,” by charles yu

My head hurts… but in a good way? “The book is the book in the book,” I explained to a confused coworker, whilst also being confused myself. Recursion, man. The real stuff.

11. “the thing about life is that one day you’ll be...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:11:00 -0400

11. “the thing about life is that one day you’ll be dead,” by david shields.

Shields, man.

#10. “by night in chile,” by roberto bolano

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 02:37:00 -0400

#10. “by night in chile,” by roberto bolano

#9. “the brief and frightening reign of phil,” by...

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 22:12:43 -0400

#9. “the brief and frightening reign of phil,” by george saunders

A Very Unpopular James Bond Opinion

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 13:32:00 -0500

I raised some eyebrows at work the other day when I shared my thoughts on the recent entries into the James Bond canon. Here is my attempt to explain those unpopular positions:

“Quantum of Solace” is the very best of the three modern Bonds, and for exactly the reasons so many people malign it: It’s bleak, all but devoid of the typical Bond kitsch and charm; and, most importantly, human in a way Bond rarely ever is. (Some evidence above in the final scene from the film.)

Craig’s secret agent does something he hasn’t really done before (or since, for that matter), which is reckon with the bodies he leaves in his wake. His Bond doesn’t exist in a vacuum, where the reset button is pressed at the end of every installment (notwithstanding a few plot points and characters here and there: SPECTRE, Moneypenny, Q, etc etc). His Bond isn’t a sociopath. (Connery’s, on the other hand…) He’s a human being. We see it most clearly in QoS. We see him cope with guilt and regret.

“Qauntum” builds on the momentum of “Casino Royale” (also a very good movie, but saddled with a little more plot than it needed), where Bond likewise does something we haven’t seen him do before: fall in love. With Vesper dead, his nascent personal life in ruins, Bond gives himself over to a monomaniacal hunger for revenge.

What’s missing is the typical Bond garnishments. Few gadgets, little innuendo. It makes for a leaner 007 movie, registering at 1:40, the shortest in the series. Everything is meant to move the plot, or Bond’s character, forward. Even where “Quantum” does actually nod back to Bond iconography — specifically, the death of MI6 officer Strawberry Fields (she’s found covered head-to-heel in oil, reminiscent of the most famous Bond fatality of all) — it seems to draw this Bond apart from previous iterations. This time, Bond can see he’s responsible. A price was exacted.

“Skyfall,” by contrast, while very well acted and very pretty to look at, is filled with so much fluff, and thinks so uncritically about the Bond character, and those around him, that whatever ambivalence it’s trying to affect toward MI6, and clandestine services in general, is effectively undone.

A question is raised — whether or not Judi Dench’s M is worthy of Bond’s devotion — but it’s never seriously considered. We never see Bond struggle with the idea. He gets shot, he disappears for a while, plays drinking games with a scorpion, and then reappears when duty calls. M viewed him as expendable, the same way she had viewed Javier Bardem’s Silva, a former agent, as expendable. But, whereas Silva considered his allegiance and decided on revenge, we never see Bond try his hand at similar introspection. His decision was barely a decision at all.

The movie doesn’t earn Bond’s devotion to M. Instead, it spends much of its energy asking the far less interesting question: is Bond getting too old for this shit? The focus on Bond’s physicality seems to affirm that, yes, Bond is nothing more than a piece of meat, without any real agency, trained to do the bidding of his superiors by whatever means necessary. He’s a reversion to the basic Bond stereotype, no longer the thinking man’s super spy.

“BUT DOES HE STILL HAVE IT?!?” (Who cares?)

It didn’t have to be this way. “[M] sent you knowing that you were not ready, that you’d likely die,” says Bardem’s Meta-Assenge, having hacked the relevant information. It’s true, but Bond is unconvinced. More than that, he’s unfazed. More than that, he doesn’t care — or at least we never get the impression he does. Bad guys hold grudges, not good guys. Zzzz.

None of this is to mention that — where “Quantum’s” main conflict evinced the amoral character (and ‘enemy-of-my-enemy’ machinations) of covert intelligence outfits — “Skyfall” is mostly just like, “Yeah, well it’s probably for the best anyway, so whatever.” It wears Toryism on its sleave in such a way that Daniel Craig’s appearance with the Queen during an Olympics telecast last year becomes weirdly prescient.

The best spy movie I’ve seen recently (maybe ever) was “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” a smoky, roiling, quietly paranoid and deeply discomfiting vision of crumbling empires at the gloaming of the Cold War. Intricate to the point of confusion, moody, cynical, and pervaded by an indelible sense of tragedy: it’s everything a spy movie should be.

The one advantage the 007 series has over something like TTSS is the cultural cachet of James Bond. People recognize the character, and that lends each installment in the series outsize power of persuasion. “Quantum of Solace” uses that familiarity and an easy linear format to make an interesting point about regret. “Skyfall” could’ve done the same, and said something meaningful about post-imperial power. (Before you object: Yeah, it’s “just a Bond movie,” but it also clearly has these things on its mind.) Instead, it attends to reconstructing the tired old Bond mythology, only with some veneer (ultimately shallow) of soul searching. It uses the trust the Bond franchise has built with audiences, especially after “Casino Royale,” to ask: What if Moneypenny were a spy before being a secretary??

Very brave.

dceiver: THE WEEK IN WELTSCHMERZ: What does it say that the...

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 12:52:22 -0500

dceiver:

THE WEEK IN WELTSCHMERZ: What does it say that the stock market hits an all time high amid some of the shakiest economic conditions you can measure? Nothing good. (With Zach Carter)

#8. “ways of going home,” by alejandro zambra

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 12:46:00 -0500

#8. “ways of going home,” by alejandro zambra

"As recently as October of last year, Atlantic associate editor David A. Graham wrote that it was..."

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 12:39:39 -0500

“

As recently as October of last year, Atlantic associate editor David A. Graham wrote that it was “stunning” that 93 percent of front-page newspaper stories about that year’s election were written by white people, especially considering that “[i]ssues pertaining to race and ethnicity have been incredibly important to the 2012 election.”

Graham’s awe at the racial disparity was merely the latest in a spate of media people wringing their hands about the fact that there isn’t enough diversity in their editorial meetings and newsrooms and magazine awards dinners. These people are right to be concerned about the homogeneity of media, a problem that worries me as well.

But it’s then incumbent upon all of us to recognize that this is the culture we breed when we offer to pay writers nothing or next to nothing, thereby immediately eliminating anyone who needs a paycheck in order to feed themselves and keep a roof over their heads. Some writers may be able to hustle double-duty for a while, filing short stories during the day while waiting tables at night until their big break hits. But the field will still be overpopulated by people who came into it with money and security behind them.

”

- Gawker

#7. “how literature saved my life,” by david...

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 04:23:00 -0500

#7. “how literature saved my life,” by david shields

Actual genius.

Blogocchiaro

“Blue Ridge Mountains” by Fleet Foxes

#14. “tinkers,” by paul harding

The heartbreak of a cold sun. A red sun. Fusion blue sky behind...

The thing I wrote this weekend about David Shields and Renata Adler is running in the blog rail of...

Saturday, New York Public Library

WikiLeaks Cable: Vatican Dismissed Pinochet Massacre Reports As 'Communist Propaganda'

In Which Ross Douthat *Kind Of* Gets It Right

The Guardian: "Sam Parnia -- The Man Who Could Bring You Back From The Dead"

The Thing About David Shields And Renata Adler Is...

Wherein The Papal Bull Is A Burn Book: "The Vatican Diaries," by John Thavis

#13. “the vatican diaries,” by john thavis Thoughts...

#12. “how to live safely in a science fictional...

11. “the thing about life is that one day you’ll be...

#10. “by night in chile,” by roberto bolano

#9. “the brief and frightening reign of phil,” by...

A Very Unpopular James Bond Opinion

dceiver: THE WEEK IN WELTSCHMERZ: What does it say that the...

#8. “ways of going home,” by alejandro zambra

"As recently as October of last year, Atlantic associate editor David A. Graham wrote that it was..."

#7. “how literature saved my life,” by david...

In Which Ross Douthat Kind Of Gets It Right