Thomas Pynchon's schlmiels

The first Thomas Pynchon book I read was V. Benny Profane became my hero because he was clumsy, becausehe was clumsy, but his clumsiness was explained by such a brilliant convention: he was clumsy because he was a schlemiel, and schlemiels were at war with the world of inanimate objects. I was an ungainly guy, and all my life I’d struggled to be able to do the physical activities that came naturally to other kids.

Profane was just the first in a line of schlmiel heroes of Pynchons, heroes who, I think, are self-portraits. Not every book has one, but most do. Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity’s Rainbow; Zoyd Wheeler of Vineland; and now Doc Sportello of Inherent Vice.

Pynchon’s relationship with these characters has evolved. Tyrone Slothrop, especially, seemed to be the butt of all the world’s jokes. The narrator of GR kept reminding us that Slothrop’s main flaw was that he just didn’t feel much, didn’t have many emotions. Sportello is also pretty cut off from his emotions, lustful at times, lonely, frightened that his world of surfers and hippies is going to be stolen away by the new Ronald Regan mindset; but never really subject to moments of passion. But whereas Slothrop’s emotional neutrality always seemed to be a character flaw, Sportello’s character is just a given circumstance of the book. There’s a sense that it’s too late to change it, and maybe it doesn’t need to be changed.

Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

Oct 17
I'm in Connecticut right now, visiting my grandfather, looking around the little city of Wallingford, on vacation, dipping into the dozen or so books that I'm curious about, including one about the city of San Francisco, about the way it represents the concept of Manifest Destiny, the idea that America's westward expansion is both an advance of a Christian nation into a Western Hemisphere Land of Canaan and the rebirth of the Roman Empire. The visual part of my mind is still nibbling away on the feast the new environment here offers me, sights you just can't see in Anchorage Alaska, all these old buildings, cemeteries, thick trunked trees, churches with roof-tiles like reptile scales on their spires--and I'm thinking of all the effort that must go into preserving these traces of old New England culture, Yankee culture, a culture that's at once inspiring and offensive, a culture which is linked to those founding fathers we're all supposed to admire and which also seems especially to embrace all the ugly, elitist, exclusionary traits of America.
My mind's a jumble of ideas. It's usually a jumble of ideas.
To me, Thomas Pynchon represents a sort of salvation, a messy, rummage sale of a mind that's able to take the chaos of life and order it, but that chooses instead to rearrange it into a different sort of jumble.
This new novel of his is a delight, and it touches on the politics of arranging and rearranging American space, the political forces that lie behind the sudden destruction of neighborhoods, the big monies that invest in new casinos, the monetary carrots that are dangled in front of metropolitan police departments and that therefore help determine how the law is enforced and that therefore determine who is effectively a criminal and who is not, and that therefore...and that therefore...and that therefore...
All these threads of logic that weave themselves into a tapestry that we don't have time to look at exactly...Nor time to summarize in full...
Who reads Thomas Pynchon? Sadly, I've met almost nobody who does. Two people in college, but after that, nobody. Maybe the Internet will help bring me to someone who does. I always daydream that if I were to meet a woman who shares my passion for this guy and his writing, I'll have found my wife. We'll see. In the meantime, I feel like it's time to use this book as an excuse for organizing and disorganizing some of my thoughts on this old fogy who has defined how it is I see the world, maybe more than any friend, lover or teacher ever has.


Top Headline September 10, 2009


Congress Unanimously Passes the New “Obama is a Nazi with Gay Cooties” Health Care Reform Plan


“It’s been a long and difficult road, as I predicted it would be,” said President Barack Obama as he signed the new comprehensive health care reform plan into law today after its being unanimously approved by both houses of Congress.
Critics on the left suggest that in the process of seeking support from Republicans, the bill may have been “watered down too much.” Specifically, some left wing pundits have expressed concern that nowhere in the bill is the issue of health care actually addressed. But moderate Democrats in Congress welcomed the bill.
“From the beginning, I expressed my doubts that the health care reform bill should not be too radical for the American people,” said Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), “And Obama listened to our concerns.”
Alaska’s Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski agrees, showing evidence of the surprising amount of across-the-aisle success that the bill has received since Mr Obama repackaged it in his speech on Wednesday, September 9.
“During the month of August, I repeatedly came out with vague warnings that we must not attempt to solve too many problems all at once,” said Murkowski. “And the President listened and came forward with a bill that does not solve any problems at all. This is the sort of bill that I'm proud to support, because it’s consistent with the sort of policy I’ve worked for since being appointed to office by my daddy in 2002.”
National Public Radio’s political analyst Ken Rudin noted in his Political Junkie column that this legislation was groundbreaking. “For a while there we thought Obama might not be able to do it. We were afraid that this would be exactly the same scenario as the 1993 attempt at health care reform, about which I’ve written extensively. But Obama surprised us by coming out with the only piece of legislation that I can remember that not only does nothing at all about the issue that it’s supposed to solve, but it’s also the first law that’s composed almost entirely of derogatory insults from start to finish.”
Some of those so-called insults, such as “We hereby resolve that Barack Obama is a big fat Kenyan atheist,” “Barack Obama is a two-timing skanky adulterous semi-human with Nazi rabies and nasty socks he doesn’t wash” and “There’s just something icky about that Obama guy,” were key in winning the enthusiastic support of the Tea Bagger Protest movement, which once seemed an unwinnable constituency.
In addition, Obama was able to win the approval of those who'd previously questioned the high price of the bill.
“Originally, we were worried that a trillion dollars spent over ten years to help make our health system more equitable and effective would be like just throwing money away,” said Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. “However, the current bill includes precisely zero dollars be spent in improving the health care system. Instead, the bill calls for a mere 5 trillion dollars to be spent in the next two months in giveaways to wall street bankers who have pledged to make America safer by building robots that will more efficiently kill Afghan civilians. If that's not a solid investment in our future, I don't know what is.”
During the signing ceremony held in the Oval Office, Obama discussed his efforts to court these and other parts of the American public.
“As early as my State of the Union Speech, I called on the American people to step forward and start a serious discussion of the health care issues that face our nation, issues such as the spiraling cost of health care, the large number of uninsured, and the difficulty that small businesses have providing coverage to their employees. I asked you for ideas about these and other important questions, and you, the American people, responded not with serious debate, but with the sort of irrational conspiracy theories, fear mongering, and bizarre distortions of simple truth which are guaranteed to distract and confuse, to frustrate the honest, bewilder the sensible, and ultimately crush and destroy the well meaning spirit of the hopeful. And I listened. I listened to our national news media as they focused relentlessly on the sort of trash talk and hate speech that you, the American people, are most interested in regurgitating and obsessing upon. And, with the help of my unique network of grass roots volunteers, I helped craft a piece of legislation that proves that I am not only the president of those who voted for me last year hoping for a serious shift toward a more civilized and humane union; nor only of the equally serious fiscal conservatives who worry about the financial soundness of our nation; but especially for those are scared to talk or even think about serious issues, but do enjoy seeing people get in shouting fights and hissy fits on cable television. You see, this was never about me; it’s about you. It’s about how loud you can shout, how much you can shock, and the incredible tenacity of American wing nuts in believing that the best way to confront frightening problems is by retreating into a bizarre, violent and disturbingly childish fantasy world.”
The bill gained strong support from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who lauded it’s provision legalizing the use of so-called “death-panels” to hunt down and kill the “stinking gay pinko Nazi ACLU swine who voted for that nasty Obama guy who isn’t even an American citizen anyway.”
“Death panels were my idea from the start,” said Palin, “And nothing makes me happier than to see them turned against some, some, of the people in this great land of plenty and teeming along the road of character and responsibility, and job losses, and a lot of the people I’ve talked to are afraid. But I think that’s okay, because deep down there are people who honor the idea of that American soldier who’s out there dyin’ for stuff that I think I believe in and I’ll betchya you probably believe in, too. To sum up, it’s all about the future, and about jobs, and responsibility, and forward funding education which are not all, but just some of the great things that you’re just not going to be able to get if, ya know, journalists just keep makin’ stuff up.”
Palin made no comment on rumors that she was planning to run the position of Divine Empress of the Galaxy in 2012.
Asked to comment on the health care bill, Organizing for America political strategist David Plouffe said, “Of course, some of the volunteers who came out and knocked on doors and made phone calls are probably feeling a little disappointed. They were hoping to get some protection for those hard working Americans who find themselves at the mercy of big insurance companies, for those Americans who are just one illness away from going bankrupt. They were hoping for a bill with a strong public option and instead they’re being hunted down by homeland security agents carrying submachine guns. But the important thing to remember is that progress doesn’t happen overnight. The small, incremental, nearly nonexistent victories we achieve today are almost sure to lead down a possibly inevitable path to hope and change which will be achieved sometime in the unspecified future.”
Plouffe appeared to want to say more, but was force to duck for cover to avoid being hit by sniper fire deployed by incoming Secretary of Homeland Security Secretary Scott Roeder.

Dog Sees God

I just wanted to throw in a quick plug for this excellent show now being performed at Out North theater here in Anchorage. It features some of our best young actors in town handling some really challenging material, and the results are incredible. I especially like the way that the script develops characters and ideas from the beloved Peanuts comic strip about philosophizing school kids. We're living in an era of official remakes, where Dr Seuss and JRR Tolkein and King Kong and Batman and the Dukes of Hazzard all have to be restarted again and again every few years in what resembles a sort of weird devotional cult behavior, returning again and again to the sources of past entertainment, leaving at their our virginal young audiences drugged into a stupor by the freshest flowers of our exotic garden of computer graphics. Some people may complain that Dog Sees God violates the sanctity of its beloved characters by showing them as high school kids who swear and and have sex and beat each other up, but to me it lends itself to exactly the sort of real, thoughtful creative exploration that made these characters interesting in the first place. If you have the opportunity, please see this show.

Grocery List

Good news! My play, Grocery List, has been accepted in the 4th Annual Chaos Theater Festival, which will take place in Chicago in November of this year! Grocery LIst had it's first public reading at this year's Last Frontier Theatre Conference Play Slam in Valdez at Prince William Sound Community College. Please stay tuned to this site for more information about the performances!

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind by Michael Axworthy (2008)

I read a book like this sort of like I read a novel; what hooks me into the book is the sense of being pulled along on the ups and downs of tumultuous fortune. But a novel is structured so that the plot is simplified. The author makes sure that you have relative ease catching the name of the leading characters, that you understand the setting and can vividly picture a lot of the action. I can honestly say that of all the hundreds of historical personages I was introduced to reading this book, I can only remember one, and that’s Nader Shah, a pretty fascinating “great man” of history whose rise to power was more meteoric than that of Sarah Palin’s.
It’s no surprise that I remember clearly the main thesis of the book, which is that the nation of Iran is defined more by its intellectual character than by any set of boundaries or affiliation with a particular political doctrine. Axworthy spells this out very clearly at the beginning of the book, and refers back to the idea enough times that you really see where he’s coming from.
But there are a number of incidental observations that also stuck with me. For instance, the idea that a government’s primary role really has to be defense in order to serve any useful purpose. It’s memorable because Axworthy does not come across as a particularly hawkish thinker. He never hesitates to criticize the many Iranian leaders who brought ruin on their land by pursuing overly ambitious military campaigns. It’s an interesting principle, the primacy of defense, because it begs the question of what legitimate defense is, and of what happens when aggression is carried out in the name of defense. There are lots of examples of this.
Another observation that stuck with me was that part of the reason Iran seemed to lag behind in terms of technology and modernization is that the terrain of Iran and the organization of its communities really wasn’t suited for the sort of railroad infrastructure that was springing up around Europe and America. Although later on, Iran suffered from the discrepancies in technology, the short-term prospect of investing in these technologies just didn’t exist.
And the observation that was most memorable to me, and also the most incidental of the three I list here, was that the history of empires tends to focus almost exclusively on the causes of their decline. Having studied a lot of German and Austrian history, I immediately said to myself, “Hey, that’s true, isn’t it. Why is that?” My guess is that a lot of the modern study of history in the western world is modeled after the study of the Greek and Roman Empires as seen from the far side of the chasm of the dark ages. Perhaps there’s a crime scene investigation aspect to the study of history, where the first and best question to ask is, “Why did this death happen. Why did this empire decline and fall?” From this vantage points, you get the best access to the eyewitnesses who watched the collapse and reported on it, and these witnesses are better sources than those who were present during the victorious rise of the empire, because during the rise of an empire there’s too much distortion and propaganda, too many people with skin in the game, too much state secrecy and too many people infatuated by political slogans and aspirations. There are too many variables, too many proposals.
Over the past few months, as the debate over national health care reform has occasionally struggled its way in front of Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin to take into the tabloid tinged spotlight of the collective American consciousness, I’ve wondered a lot about what’s really being debated is the health of this nation. Just yesterday I went to an Organizing for America rally held in a local junior high school. It was impressive to see about 150 people gathered and cheering every time the concept of a public option was raised. This is a big crowd for Alaska, and it may be a sign that there’s more political will behind the reform movement than the headlines have led us to believe.
I think that a serious reform of our nation’s health care system, one that provides coverage to the uninsured and includes a public option, is going to be a much more meaningful contribution to our national defense than any invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan. And yet there seems to be an unspoken rule that says we debate the lead up to military campaigns very differently than we debate the lead up to health care reform. In our national consciousness, a war in Iraq is not very different from buying a ticket to see a movie like Transformers or Batman. There’s a sense that, whoever you are, you just gotta see it. You just gotta shell out the money. Even if you have doubts, you don’t want to miss out on this. The money’s already been spent in advance. The troops are already moving in. The demographic tests were performed years ago. Smarter people than you have decided in advance: this is the movie you want to see. How will we pay for it? That doesn’t matter. It’s just a movie. It’ll be over quickly, and after it’s over, you’re supposed to forget about it. So what if the new Transformers movie sucked. Get over it. Only geeks care about old movies.
In the meantime, there’s a different mechanism built up around health-care reform. We’re supposed to think about this sort of issue, and make a mature decision. But what’s our model for thinking? To carry on the movie model, the difference between the Iraq war debate and the health care debate is the difference between a Transformers movie and a movie like The Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons. Yes, there’s a little more time to take in information, but not much more time.
The most salient idea to come out of the health care debate has been: Barack Obama is the Antichrist. His followers are mindless fanatics and they’re determined to take away America’s edge by euthanizing our grandparents.
Is this nonsense? Yes. But there are a lot of reasons why Barack Obama’s supporters haven’t been quicker to rally behind health care reform. Because in the months since his election, Obama has spent a lot more time meeting with the heads of big insurance companies than he’s spent meeting with the uninsured.
Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time working as a nurse in the operating room with surgeons and anesthesiologists. I’m privileged to spend so much of my time with these people, some of the best-educated people in the state of Alaska. None of them are really shy about speaking their minds when it comes to political issues, but it’s surprising that there really hasn’t been a lot of intelligent comment on the health care debate. When the issue get’s mentioned at all, it tends to be derisive. “Under ObamaCare, we’re not going to be able to do anything but tonsillectomies,” or “Did you heart them rip Dr Obama a new asshole on tv today?” At the same time that a lot of these docs were making jokes about the new dawn of American socialism, I saw a lot of these exact clustering in the hallways and talking excitedly about how they were taking advantage of the Cash for Clunkers program.
One thing that’s become clear to me over the past few years is that physicians are very smart, but they’re no more likely to form mature political views than anyone else. Just as anywhere else, there’s a lot of diversity of political opinion, and it’s an open secret that in the operating rooms where I work you get a harder time shooting your mouth off in support of a liberal point of view than you do of a conservative point of view.
Here’s a joke I heard recently from a surgeon who will remain nameless: “Did you hear that Obama’s going to tax aspirin now? It’s white and it works.”
Okay. That’s really low. Not only is that joke racist, it’s just not funny.
Physicians often don’t see nurses as their peers. That’s built into the structure of the health care system, and there’s reason for it. I can’t perform surgery, I’m not qualified, at least not at this point, to perform anesthesia. But I’m not stupid, and I do know that racist jokes are a far cry from rational debate.
One of our surgeons, Dr Mark Kimmins, has actually spent a lot of time seriously thinking and speaking in public on the issue of how the health care system works. One day I stopped him after an operation and asked him what he thought of the whole health care debate. While he didn’t exactly state that he was going on record, I don’t think that he’d hold it against me if I quote him when he told me that he thinks a nation ends up with a health care system that reflects its national character. He told me that he would give me a thousand dollars sight unseen if I could go into the doctor’s lounge right now and get any sort of consensus at all among whatever chance assemblage of physicians happened to be in there in the moment. Dr Kimmins spoke a little bit further about his own experience working with both the Canadian and the US health systems. Is the Canadian system perfect? He doesn’t think so, but he also doesn’t think that it’s a travesty. According to him, the nightmare situation where you have a government bureaucrat saying, “No, this surgery simply is not approved” just does not exist in Canada. But as with any system, including the current one we have in America, there is the system between infinite demand and finite resource.
I recently talked to a friend of mine who got a job loosely associated with the insurance industry after he lost a job in the restaurant industry after breaking up a brawl (My friend said, as an aside, that if his unemployment claims didn’t go through, he planned to sue the restaurant). I asked him what he thought of health care reform. He told me that he just doesn't think health care is a right that the government should be supporting. He’s happy with his own health insurance; he hasn’t been to the doctor in a few years and resents the thought of paying money for people who aren’t as smart about their own health care. He then digressed into talking about the fact that what he’s really upset about is the fact that his financial situation is a mess, and that he does fault the government for this because in all he years of education he’s had, he never got a firm grounding of personal finance.
I didn’t put my friend on the spot during that conversation, but I’m putting his thinking on the spot right now. It seems like what he’s doing is cherry picking his rights and responsibilities. At the moment, he feels like the government has a right not only to educate him, but also rather to make choices about his education, and if he comes away from the education making poor personal choices about money, well that’s the government’s fault. At the same time, he’s pretty sure that he’s in a situation now where he doesn’t have to worry about health care. If something bad happens to him, he’s covered, and nothing bad is likely to happen.
Well, I hope for his sake that he’s right. But I know a lot of people who think they’re covered until they get into a catastrophe, after which point they get a rude surprise.
I’m not perfectly happy with the presidency of Barack Obama so far, but I think that he’s right in calling for health care reform, and that we still do have a great opportunity for pushing such reform through in the next couple of months. I was heartened to see that the Organizing for America event I attended last night included some strong rallying cries in favor of the public option.
Health care reform is a complicated issue and I don’t pretend to be a great authority on it, but I do think that I’ve taken steps toward real understanding of the issue. I made a choice last night to throw my own weight heavily behind the Organizing for America initiative to push health care reform through. Do I have doubts? A few. Of course I do. I’m throwing my support behind the passage of legislation that hasn’t been written yet and that’s certain to come in a form that’s needlessly complex and inaccessible to the public understanding. But I’m also convinced that if this legislation does not pass, the situation will get much worse for ordinary Americans; many of us are not covered, and those of us who are find ourselves totally at the whim of whoever provides our coverage. Moreover, I agree with the assessment of Dr Kimmins: America will get a healthcare system that reflects its natural character, and I still do have hope that America’s national character is evolving and maturing toward something more civilized, more humane, and more likely to result in prosperity than the nightmare of the Bush administration.

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind by Michael Axworthy (2008)

I read a book like this sort of like I read a novel; what hooks me into the book is the sense of being pulled along on the ups and downs of tumultuous fortune. But a novel is structured so that the plot is simplified. The author makes sure that you have relative ease catching the name of the leading characters, that you understand the setting and can vividly picture a lot of the action. I can honestly say that of all the hundreds of historical personages I was introduced to reading this book, I can only remember one, and that’s Nader Shah, a pretty fascinating “great man” of history whose rise to power was more meteoric than that of Sarah Palin’s.
It’s no surprise that I remember clearly the main thesis of the book, which is that the nation of Iran is defined more by its intellectual character than by any set of boundaries or affiliation with a particular political doctrine. Axworthy spells this out very clearly at the beginning of the book, and refers back to the idea enough times that you really see where he’s coming from.
But there are a number of incidental observations that also stuck with me. For instance, the idea that a government’s primary role really has to be defense in order to serve any useful purpose. It’s memorable because Axworthy does not come across as a particularly hawkish thinker. He never hesitates to criticize the many Iranian leaders who brought ruin on their land by pursuing overly ambitious military campaigns. It’s an interesting principle, the primacy of defense, because it begs the question of what legitimate defense is, and of what happens when aggression is carried out in the name of defense. There are lots of examples of this.
Another observation that stuck with me was that part of the reason Iran seemed to lag behind in terms of technology and modernization is that the terrain of Iran and the organization of its communities really wasn’t suited for the sort of railroad infrastructure that was springing up around Europe and America. Although later on, Iran suffered from the discrepancies in technology, the short-term prospect of investing in these technologies just didn’t exist.
And the observation that was most memorable to me, and also the most incidental of the three I list here, was that the history of empires tends to focus almost exclusively on the causes of their decline. Having studied a lot of German and Austrian history, I immediately said to myself, “Hey, that’s true, isn’t it. Why is that?” My guess is that a lot of the modern study of history in the western world is modeled after the study of the Greek and Roman Empires as seen from the far side of the chasm of the dark ages. Perhaps there’s a crime scene investigation aspect to the study of history, where the first and best question to ask is, “Why did this death happen. Why did this empire decline and fall?” From this vantage points, you get the best access to the eyewitnesses who watched the collapse and reported on it, and these witnesses are better sources than those who were present during the victorious rise of the empire, because during the rise of an empire there’s too much distortion and propaganda, too many people with skin in the game, too much state secrecy and too many people infatuated by political slogans and aspirations. There are too many variables, too many proposals.
Over the past few months, as the debate over national health care reform has occasionally struggled its way in front of Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin to take into the tabloid tinged spotlight of the collective American consciousness, I’ve wondered a lot about what’s really being debated is the health of this nation. Just yesterday I went to an Organizing for America rally held in a local junior high school. It was impressive to see about 150 people gathered and cheering every time the concept of a public option was raised. This is a big crowd for Alaska, and it may be a sign that there’s more political will behind the reform movement than the headlines have led us to believe.
I think that a serious reform of our nation’s health care system, one that provides coverage to the uninsured and includes a public option, is going to be a much more meaningful contribution to our national defense than any invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan. And yet there seems to be an unspoken rule that says we debate the lead up to military campaigns very differently than we debate the lead up to health care reform. In our national consciousness, a war in Iraq is not very different from buying a ticket to see a movie like Transformers or Batman. There’s a sense that, whoever you are, you just gotta see it. You just gotta shell out the money. Even if you have doubts, you don’t want to miss out on this. The money’s already been spent in advance. The troops are already moving in. The demographic tests were performed years ago. Smarter people than you have decided in advance: this is the movie you want to see. How will we pay for it? That doesn’t matter. It’s just a movie. It’ll be over quickly, and after it’s over, you’re supposed to forget about it. So what if the new Transformers movie sucked. Get over it. Only geeks care about old movies.
In the meantime, there’s a different mechanism built up around health-care reform. We’re supposed to think about this sort of issue, and make a mature decision. But what’s our model for thinking? To carry on the movie model, the difference between the Iraq war debate and the health care debate is the difference between a Transformers movie and a movie like The Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons. Yes, there’s a little more time to take in information, but not much more time.
The most salient idea to come out of the health care debate has been: Barack Obama is the Antichrist. His followers are mindless fanatics and they’re determined to take away America’s edge by euthanizing our grandparents.
Is this nonsense? Yes. But there are a lot of reasons why Barack Obama’s supporters haven’t been quicker to rally behind health care reform. Because in the months since his election, Obama has spent a lot more time meeting with the heads of big insurance companies than he’s spent meeting with the uninsured.
Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time working as a nurse in the operating room with surgeons and anesthesiologists. I’m privileged to spend so much of my time with these people, some of the best-educated people in the state of Alaska. None of them are really shy about speaking their minds when it comes to political issues, but it’s surprising that there really hasn’t been a lot of intelligent comment on the health care debate. When the issue get’s mentioned at all, it tends to be derisive. “Under ObamaCare, we’re not going to be able to do anything but tonsillectomies,” or “Did you heart them rip Dr Obama a new asshole on tv today?” At the same time that a lot of these docs were making jokes about the new dawn of American socialism, I saw a lot of these exact clustering in the hallways and talking excitedly about how they were taking advantage of the Cash for Clunkers program.
One thing that’s become clear to me over the past few years is that physicians are very smart, but they’re no more likely to form mature political views than anyone else. Just as anywhere else, there’s a lot of diversity of political opinion, and it’s an open secret that in the operating rooms where I work you get a harder time shooting your mouth off in support of a liberal point of view than you do of a conservative point of view.
Here’s a joke I heard recently from a surgeon who will remain nameless: “Did you hear that Obama’s going to tax aspirin now? It’s white and it works.”
Okay. That’s really low. Not only is that joke racist, it’s just not funny.
Physicians often don’t see nurses as their peers. That’s built into the structure of the health care system, and there’s reason for it. I can’t perform surgery, I’m not qualified, at least not at this point, to perform anesthesia. But I’m not stupid, and I do know that racist jokes are a far cry from rational debate.
One of our surgeons, Dr Mark Kimmins, has actually spent a lot of time seriously thinking and speaking in public on the issue of how the health care system works. One day I stopped him after an operation and asked him what he thought of the whole health care debate. While he didn’t exactly state that he was going on record, I don’t think that he’d hold it against me if I quote him when he told me that he thinks a nation ends up with a health care system that reflects its national character. He told me that he would give me a thousand dollars sight unseen if I could go into the doctor’s lounge right now and get any sort of consensus at all among whatever chance assemblage of physicians happened to be in there in the moment. Dr Kimmins spoke a little bit further about his own experience working with both the Canadian and the US health systems. Is the Canadian system perfect? He doesn’t think so, but he also doesn’t think that it’s a travesty. According to him, the nightmare situation where you have a government bureaucrat saying, “No, this surgery simply is not approved” just does not exist in Canada. But as with any system, including the current one we have in America, there is the system between infinite demand and finite resource.
I recently talked to a friend of mine who got a job loosely associated with the insurance industry after he lost a job in the restaurant industry after breaking up a brawl (My friend said, as an aside, that if his unemployment claims didn’t go through, he planned to sue the restaurant). I asked him what he thought of health care reform. He told me that he just doesn't think health care is a right that the government should be supporting. He’s happy with his own health insurance; he hasn’t been to the doctor in a few years and resents the thought of paying money for people who aren’t as smart about their own health care. He then digressed into talking about the fact that what he’s really upset about is the fact that his financial situation is a mess, and that he does fault the government for this because in all he years of education he’s had, he never got a firm grounding of personal finance.
I didn’t put my friend on the spot during that conversation, but I’m putting his thinking on the spot right now. It seems like what he’s doing is cherry picking his rights and responsibilities. At the moment, he feels like the government has a right not only to educate him, but also rather to make choices about his education, and if he comes away from the education making poor personal choices about money, well that’s the government’s fault. At the same time, he’s pretty sure that he’s in a situation now where he doesn’t have to worry about health care. If something bad happens to him, he’s covered, and nothing bad is likely to happen.
Well, I hope for his sake that he’s right. But I know a lot of people who think they’re covered until they get into a catastrophe, after which point they get a rude surprise.
I’m not perfectly happy with the presidency of Barack Obama so far, but I think that he’s right in calling for health care reform, and that we still do have a great opportunity for pushing such reform through in the next couple of months. I was heartened to see that the Organizing for America event I attended last night included some strong rallying cries in favor of the public option.
Health care reform is a complicated issue and I don’t pretend to be a great authority on it, but I do think that I’ve taken steps toward real understanding of the issue. I made a choice last night to throw my own weight heavily behind the Organizing for America initiative to push health care reform through. Do I have doubts? A few. Of course I do. I’m throwing my support behind the passage of legislation that hasn’t been written yet and that’s certain to come in a form that’s needlessly complex and inaccessible to the public understanding. But I’m also convinced that if this legislation does not pass, the situation will get much worse for ordinary Americans; many of us are not covered, and those of us who are find ourselves totally at the whim of whoever provides our coverage. Moreover, I agree with the assessment of Dr Kimmins: America will get a healthcare system that reflects its natural character, and I still do have hope that America’s national character is evolving and maturing toward something more civilized, more humane, and more likely to result in prosperity than the nightmare of the Bush administration.

Race

by Studs Terkel

It was on election day last year that I learned Studs Terkel had died . . . I was a few days behind when it came to following along with the news. I’d never read a book by Terkel, I’d only ever heard a couple of interviews with him on the radio and seen a glimpse of him in Michael Moore’s film The Big One. But he’d achieved a sort of legendary status in my mind already as a figurehead of the Left, a man who’s always stood up for the underdog, a man who always lived by humbly and treated himself humbly, a man who’d been involved in the New Deal and had suffered from blacklisting, a man perennially enchanted by the profundity of who had prospered by learning to listen to the voices of ordinary people. I imagined him as our current version of the sage of the middle ages, of Spinoza toiling away in a garret by candlelight, getting his hand dirty with the ink from a quill pen as he jotted down ideas that came not from contemplation of abstract principles, but simply from listening to what people have to say, recording it on tape, and then writing it down.
In the introduction to Race, Terkel describes a scene from his everyday life in Chicago. Hampered by poor eyesight, he would give himself an extra layer of safety when he walked across the street by holding out his palms to oncoming cars as though he were directing traffic. I love the image of this little old man in thick-rimmed glasses signaling, “Stop!” to a whole river of cars.
The stories in Race are like a pocketful of pebbles, each one with it’s own details worth attending to, none of them towering over the rest. One interesting section focuses on a the conflict between a white man(C.P. Ellis) and a black woman (Ann Atwater) in the Durham, NC . . . Ellis had a history with the KKK, Atwater was a civil rights activist, but as time went on the Ellis began to understand things differently, began to see the divide between white and black as something imposed on the south in order to distract from the real issue of oppression of the poor. He and his Atwater collaborate on various local government campaigns, and eventually he becomes an important activist in the community, champion of all races.
As a sideline, we learn that while Ellis has remained vigorous and engaged, Atwater has suffered from declining health and fallen on hard times financially. In another writer’s work, this detail might be drawn out to support some other thesis. Terkel lets it stand as it is. There’s a sense that along with being interested in the issues of race and politics, he also has a great deal of sympathy for the human beings who are involved in the social and politics clashes that define history. There’s a sense that he understands the world as a stage on which we are only players, and that many of the players have these roles thrust upon us. Throughout race, there’s the sense that there’s a tangle of prefabricated narrative we’ve all been provided with to help us think about what’s going on in the world. In the multitude of interviews, you hear the same ideas come up again and again, people positioning themselves on predictable sides of the battle lines, but the artfulness of the book is in seeing how each individual untangles the narrative in a slightly different way.
On the day I learned Studs Terkel had died, I also learned that Barack Obama had been elected president. Since then there’s been an ongoing cycle of news waves, peaks and valleys of excitement based on health care and the war in Afghanistan, stimulus money and torture memos, racial profiling and beer summits, Israeli settlements and Iranian elections, racially insulting cartoons and the call for a renewed dialogue on race. I suppose I count myself among those liberals who feel disappointed at the lack of bold moves for change. I don’t like seeing drone attacks kill Pakistani civilians; I don’t like seeing the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered community put on hold in their struggle for equal rights; I don’t like hearing about Blue Dog Democrats fouling up the public option of the health care plan; I don’t like Timothy Geithner and his coterie of financial insiders cutting deals to give Wall Street an easy ride. But I also do have the sense that most of what I’ve been witnessing is a show, that we’re all being called on to take stands and argue for ourselves, to lobby and make donations and chit chat around the water cooler and pass on internet links and parrot talking points and kick up dust. As a writer, it’s always important to aware that when the dust settles and you see what the battlefield really looked like, you’ll probably meet with bigger surprises than any you might encounter in the heat of conflict.

How to Read A French Fry

by Russ Parsons (2001)

The book describes the process by which fluid fills the particles of flour, by which chopped bits of zucchini evaporate in a skillet as the oil surrounding them turns them golden brown. Sauces and pie crusts, mayonnaise and breaded fried chicken crusts—Russ Parsons takes us into the abstract world of chemistry in order to set up a chess-like strategy for maximizing the flavor in all these recipes.
A few years back I started enrolling in the prerequisite courses I needed in order to become a registered nurse. I started with psychology, anatomy and basic chemistry. I found I had a talent especially for chemistry, for drawing out the fish skeleton diagrams that describe carbohydrate chains, for understanding the Rube Goldberg contraptions of the cell membranes that drive the process of life. I fell in love with the menagerie of two-dimensional and three dimensional diagrams used to describe molecules—balls and sticks, maps of benzene rings, computer generated images of proteins coiled and fan-folded into structures that allowed them to carry out essential functions of life.
The paradox: I found myself immersed in a Wonderland of facts and specialized knowledge, cryptic terminology and brain-twisting challenges, all of which I found extremely inspirational. But at the same time, I had basically no time to write creatively.
In hindsight, I can get all sly with my former self and ask whether it was really a lack of time that was holding me back, or whether it was a faulty conception of what the prerequisites are of being able to write something.
It’s so easy as a writer to be intimidated. There are so many writers who have come before, and so many of them have succeeded by giving the impression of a deep and encyclopedic knowledge of . . . nearly everything. Herman Melville and the life of the whalers. Thomas Pynchon and the history of Germany after the Second World War. Annie Proulx and rough, homespun culture of Newfoundland. One imagines the time these authors spent researching their subjects and comes away feeling eminently unqualified. Not only do I not know anything about whaling, post-war Gemany or Newfoundland, I don’t even know as much about my own surroundings as these authors knew about their exotic subjects.
The truth is that writing isn’t like that. Since my starting point here is Russ Parsons’s book about food, let me use that as a metaphor: if you want to make and sell a food product in the USA, there’s an established bureaucracy you have to deal with. There are standards, there are rules. If you’re selling lettuce that gives people salmonella, there are investigators that will track you down. When it comes to writing, the situation is different. Certainly, your work will be judged. If you want to get published, there are standards you have to meet. But the bureaucracy your dealing with is one far more mysterious.
I think every creative person at some point becomes familiar with the idea of the “inner critic.” The inner critic is a part of your brain that moves quickly to put a kibosh on any inspiration that we’re capable of coming up with. The inner critic is infuriatingly dynamic. Every day he sits in his little mental office and gathers new examples of why you aren’t qualified to do what you want to do. If you read a good book, the critic will tell you that your work will never be that good. If you read a crummy piece of work, the critic will tell you that it bears remarkable and damning similarities to your own work. The inner critic is ingenious and sadistically cunning. One of his specialties is to take what nourishes you and turn it into something that poisons you. Take advice for instance: there’s all sorts of advice for writers floating around out there. “Show, don’t tell.” “Write the truest sentence you can.” “Avoid adverbs.” “Write what you know.”
This last bit of advice in particular can be an extremely potent medicine and can quickly turn into a potent poison. It can be amazingly liberating, a personal emancipation proclamation when you suddenly realize that you’re able to use your own experience and forget all about emulating the style of Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett or Thomas Hardy as you’ve fruitlessly been doing for the last few years. All of a sudden, it seems like you have a new treasure trove of subject matter. For a while, the inner critic is caught off guard. But he’s nothing if not adaptive. He begins to realize the restrictive potential of this maxim. “Write what you know.” That’s as much as saying “Don’t dare write what you don’t know. Don’t dare speculate. Don’t dare imagine.” Soon the inner critic has the statement crocheted and hung upon his office wall.
It’s easy to get caught up in the despair over how much or how little you know. Some authors can come away from a dinner party with every conversation stored verbatim in their memories. Some draw on their experiences of coming from one culture to another. Some have gone to the best possible schools, trained at the feet of the brightest possible geniuses. And here you are with apparently nothing to work with. It doesn’t seem fair. It’s not fair.
But that’s part of the truth you need to write about, the fact that nothing in this world is fair. None of us knows quite enough to get by, and none of us has quite the social skills to seek the complimentary knowledge from those who surround us. The truth is that I know that I’m inspired by chemistry, and I’m inspired by politics and world history, and I’m inspired by economics and I’ll never be authoritative enough in any of these subjects to write the sort of Pulitzer-Prize winning work that I’d like to, and that doesn’t matter. If I’d wanted, I could have taken a year after my nursing school and immersed myself in chemistry in the hopes that the study would have made me into an expert, would have given me an arsenal of expertise I could draw on for the rest of my adult life as a writer. I could write a book about the lives of chemists and physicists at the turn of the 19th century. All my facts would be correct. I would describe the ways in which methyl groups freewheel at the end of carbohydrate chains; I would describe the way that scientists like JJ Thompson used every day materials to set up brilliant experiments. I would describe the incomparable feeling of being present at the moment of a revolution in human knowledge. But probably the end result would be that I would always feel I had just one more text to read before I was prepared to start writing.
Recently I heard poet Kay Ryan speaking on the radio. She said that the best way to write about something is when you know almost nothing about it. I think this is especially useful information in our current culture, which values realism, polish and an appearance of expertise. Expertise is fascinating, certainly, but if you want to be creative, you need to rely on imagination rather than expertise. Imagination is not the rational irrigation system that supplies the rational fields of expertise—it’s the swamp water that gathers in the wetlands of ignorance.
What does this have to do with the book How to Read a French Fry? Not much, I’m afraid, except to say that this odd little hybrid of a book, not quite a cookbook but not quite a science text, is emblematic of the sort of hybrid knowledge I’m talking about. You won’t come away from it an expert in either chemistry or cuisine, but it may provide you with just the sort of disorienting intellectual spin you need to get yourself back into the dizzy state you need in order to get inspired.

Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales

Chosen and Edited by Gordon Jarvie. Illustrated by Barbara Brown. (1992/1997) Published by Penguin Popular Classics. 199 pages.

I’ve been to Scotland a couple of times, once to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival. When I was there I was especially impressed by the simple beauty of some of the street names, like “Bread,” and “Home.”
I read this book several months ago. It took me two days to read. Just recently I sat down and gave myself the daunting task of writing a full-length play. As with any creative writing endeavor, this meant pitting myself against the worst, most closed-minded, most pessimistic parts of my own psyche. There’s a part of the brain that was determined to tell me, no, do NOT continue this project, you’ve chosen the wrong subject; you’re taking the wrong path.
For some reason, the memory of this book was especially helpful to me in conjuring up whatever magic spell I needed to keep the inspiration flowing.
We all know that there are epics. There’s a pantheon of Greek Gods out there, armed with complex arsenals of symbolism, laden down with overweening vanity and ambition which send mere mortals off to launch ten thousand stanzas of carefully metered verse to delineate the rise and falls of entire empires.
It’s important to remember that the mighty Zeus doesn’t have a monopoly on magic. There are kelpies and brownies, magic walking sticks and lonely giants out there. They come out of the dark shadows of the woods and interfere in the lives of the simplest of people. To me, fairy tales like these serve as reminders to never take magic for granted. Magic is whatever leads you off the path to grandma’s house and into the woods. If you’re a writer, don’t worry too much about whether the voice that’s beckoning to you from the shadows belongs to the mighty Apollo or a humble Milk-White Doo. If it’s an invitation to get you off the well-trodden path, take it.

Wellen

by Eduard von Keyserling (1911) Published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. 173 pages.

My favorite passage of the book is the one where Lolo, a young woman who has discovered that her fiancé, Hilmar, doesn’t love her anymore, steps out into the Baltic sea one night and nearly drowns. At the beginning of the passage, we’re told that Lolo wants to make a sacrifice, and she sacrifices herself to the waves. There’s a religious connotation to the word “sacrifice” here (in German, Opfer)—but if the waves hold a religious function in this book, it’s as the centerpiece of a religion of default. The book centers not around a pilgrimage, but rather a rather routine summer vacation to the Baltic Sea, in which a passel of well-to-do folk visit, or perhaps invade, the world of taciturn Baltic fishermen. The goal of the vacation is a secular one of relaxation. People are gathering energy for the future. Generälin von Palikow is getting her family ready for her granddaughter Lolo’s wedding. The painter Hans Grill is taking a moment to relax and paint the waves before taking a new phase in his career—he’s not sure what he plans, but he wants to make his art more marketable, more commercially successful. In the meantime, he’s happy to spend some loose time with his new bride, Doralice, enjoying the treasure of freedom
Hans had devoted his life to freedom. At every turn he extols freedom. He seems to be in the process of developing an informal artistic treatise on the virtues of freedom, an ongoing discourse that serves as a compliment to his paintings. It was with his fiery talk of freedom that he seduced the beautiful Doralice away from her decrepit husband, count Köhne-Jasky. And now that Doralice is his, he bores her with the incessant talk of freedom. And as readers, we get the sense that Hans himself isn’t anywhere near ready for the actual challenges of being free. He desperately needs his wife Doralice. Now that he has her, he wants to settle down, to construct a nice, quiet, suburban life around her. And he’s afraid of her because he senses that she’s the one who’s actually free; he’s the philosopher of freedom. As an artist in pre-WWI Germany, he has an accepted role of being a little bit eccentric, a little bit visionary, a little bit crazed. But its his wife, with her beauty that distorts society by drawing all men toward her, who actually has the gift of freedom, the gift of always choosing a new path. Doralice has already broken out of one marriage, and now she’s approached by Hilmar, the young soldier, and she has the chance to break out of another one, and after that . . . who knows what suitor will come next?
Hans says that he now has only two subjects for his paintings, his wife Doralice and the waves. If the eccentric Hans plays the role of a shaman in this secular society, then he has defined a spirituality based on two idols, one a subject and the other a background. The subject is highly concentrated—a single life, a single life story, a point of focus, a concentration point for attention, an attainable object of conquest, infinitely desirable. The background is diffuse, eternal, indifferent to human struggle.
Like Count Köhne-Jasky, like Hans Grill, like Hilmar, Lolo is also infatuated by Doralice. And when the crowd of those who adores the subject becomes too much, she plunges herself into the background, goes into the water on a cold night and swims out as far as she humanly can, in a moment of unreasoning thought where free-will doesn’t seem to play a role. She’s abandoning human society because human society is unfair, because it arranges itself into games of favor and feverish devotion and there’s no reward for those like Lolo who are left out.
And after Lolo is recued and her family leaves the Baltic in high dudgeon, Generälin von Palikow, outraged, scolds Doralice for having gone too far. It’s okay to break society’s rules. Society’s rules are stupid. Doralice was right in escaping her first marriage, but she can’t go on infinitely breaking out of marriage after marriage after marriage. It’s a surprising moment. Up until this point, von Palikow had seemed to represent the most conservative element character in the book. It’s surprising to learn that her vision of life is much more subtle and wise, that she’s capable of stepping back from society and forming a vision that seems bold and pragmatic, a vision that society itself is something wavelike, that troughs of convention and restriction must be followed by peaks of rebellion, and that these peaks of rebellion themselves must come to an end.
After Palikow’s family leaves the beach and summer wanes, Doralice and her husband Hans are stuck together, and Doralice has little to do but wait for the moment when Hans will forgive her. Life seems limited to her now, broken. One day it seems he’s on the verge of giving her the resolution she craves. And then he goes out to sea in a shabby boat helmed by a drunken sailor, and the two get swallowed by the waves, and Doralice is abandoned with her poor conscience. As the book ends, we see that she’s taken up a strange, platonic relationship with a hunchback, Knospelius, who haunts the beach. Her days of romantic adventure seem to be behind her. The subject fades into the background.

Tender is the Night

by F Scott Fitzgerald

Take a look at the beginning of this book about a love triangle. We have a young woman arriving at a beach, an out-of-the way French resort. We learn that the woman, Rosemary, is a movie starlet, fresh out of her first picture, Daddy’s Girl, a huge success. Her mother has brought her up ready to face a ruthless modern world where morality is something quaint and tragedies can be taken over.
We enter this novel, in a sense, at Rosemary’s side, walking beside her. If we’re capable of suspending our disbelief in the right way, we’re able to be her, to enjoy the story as if it’s ours. It’s a device for drawing the reader into the story. We stand in the shoes of a young girl who’s ready to be seduced, and the figure who seduces her is a man named Dick Diver.
Diver is a psychiatrist, a man whose job is to profile people, to understand their souls. His wife, Nicole, is in a sense, his patient. She’s a schizophrenic; her mind is deranged because her father raped her once, when she was a child. Somehow, the presence of Diver in her life proves therapeutic, and because of that Nicole’s family, the Warren family, which happens to be one of the wealthiest families in the United States, has seen fit to choose Dick Diver, to invest money in his career, to sponsor a sanatorium in Geneva in order to lend him an air of professional gravity.
Imagine this metaphor: Dick Diver is the author, the young novelist, and the beautiful young girl, Rosemary, is the reader, not so much any particular reader, but the ideal reader that any author imagines, a reader with a healthy, open, young mind that is waiting to be given a chord, a theme, a myth to live by. Rosemary meets Dick when he’s at the height of his prosperity. She falls in love with him, thinks the world of him . . . and because of Nicole’s wealth, Dick Diver is able to show Rosemary an enchanting world, a world of revelry punctuated by little fits of seamy intrigue. Dick gives Rosemary an adventure, the perfect adventure, an adventure that takes her right into the unique gaiety of the post-WWI era she’s growing up in. And she wants as much as she can get out of it. She wants Dick’s soul. She wants to seduce him away from his wife. And she almost does.
And then the rest of the story we see not from Rosemary’s perspective, but from Dick’s. Years have passed. His life has become dreary and professional. His wife’s recurring bouts of mental illness drain his energy. He sees Rosemary again, sleeps with her, but he can’t be the same man he was with her when he first met her.
Let me expand the metaphor again: Dick Diver is the author, Rosemary is the reader . . . and Nicole? Nicole is the subject, the story, a story that the author has chosen to marry himself to, a story that will change itself over time, just as real people change, but that will always remain thematically the same at its core.
I’m not trying to tell you that this is the secret meaning of Tender is the Night, that this is what F Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he actually wrote the book. To tell you the truth, this interpretation of the book just came to me as I was sitting here with my laptop trying to figure out what to write about this book. What I’m trying to do is to show you how I like to read books, to show you a way of engaging your imagination that has worked for me. Read Tender is the Night and try to use the artist-reader-subject metaphor as a skeleton key to open up its core meaning. There will be times when the skeleton key works for you, when it will seem brilliant. I guarantee, it will open up meanings that I didn’t notice when I read the book. And then there are times when the metaphor is a key that doesn’t fit into any lock at all. Don’t let that discourage you. Look for new explanations, see if you can develop your own imaginative key to unlocking the mysteries of the book. And look for those moments when the book needs no explanation, no symbolic code, when just the experience of reading it is pleasurable enough to sustain itself.

Top Headline: World Still Reels After Unexpected Death of Karl Malden, Dubbed "King of Televised Travelers' Check Ads."

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Palestine—The Special Edition

Palestine—The Special Edition by Joe Sacco (originally serialized 1993-1995. This edition published 2007) Fantagraphic Books. 285 pages.

I can’t read poetry or fiction without trying to see it from the author’s perspective. I like the way that Joe Sacco puts himself into his comic book story about Palestine. He puts himself into the story in a wonderfully unselfish way. As an artist, he moves from gross caricatures at the start of the book to realistic portraiture at the end of the book, but all along the depiction of himself remains the same—a caricature of a bespectacled man who’s in way over his head, who’s busy gathering notes for an unorthodox comic book documentary about one of the grimmest political situations in the world. The caricature of Joe Sacco keeps falling into dreams of making it big, of winning Pulitzer Prizes and changing the world through comic books, only to be reminded moments later of his own weaknesses.
I remember recently overhearing a discussion. Someone I knew had recently returned from Israel and was holding forth about his own experiences. His story rambled a lot, but he kept coming back to the assertion that “the Israeli Arabs are smart.” As opposed to the Palestinians, who, presumably, he believes are stupid. It reminded me of a friend of my grandmothers, an old guy who used to run textile factories, and who would have conversations about how amazed he was at the intelligence and articulateness of “African blacks,” as opposed to African Americans. “You can have a conversation with the ones from Africa. The blacks in America, you can’t talk to them.” That was years ago, at a dinner party at my parents’ house, and I flew off the handle about it, castigated the guy for being a racist creep, and then in turn was scolded by the rest of my family for being rude to a guest. Not that the rest of my family really supported the guy; I don’t think that they were listening to him. Basically, there was just an unspoken rule that everyone else regarded him as an old, crotchety fool in these situations, and that he was to be allowed to drone on and on.
It’s an important memory in my life, so I’ll go into it a little bit more:
I told the old droner to “shut up.” Not a comment that I really premeditated at length, but it came from the heart.
And the old guy took offense, said that I was infringing on his right of free speech. He resumed the conversation with a change of subject: now he was talking not about race, but about his own personal history. Like my own family, he used to live in the Russian settlements in China that existed before the advent of Chinese communism and Chairman Mao. In retrospect, he felt that the Russian settlements had been a haven for liberties that had never existed in Russia either under Czarist or under Communist rule.
“We enjoyed free speech there,” he said, and then paused. “Unlike at this table.”
What did I learn in that conversation? I don’t want to draw a conclusion yet. Maybe not ever. Conclusions can be a wrecking ball to a story. I haven’t changed my opinion of the guy: he was a racist and a jerk, at least a lot of the time. But I also am very careful to avoid people to shut up. I become sphinx-like. I let people express their own views. Which sometimes means allowing them to give themselves enough rope to hang themselves.
The guy who was talking about his trip to Israel was a physician I sometimes work with. A little while later in the conversation someone asked him his opinions about torture. “Waterboarding’s not torture,” he said. “Waterboarding’s a walk in the park.”
There are a lot of testimonials in Palestine from the point of view of Palestinians who’ve been tortured. It’s easy to read (because it’s a comic) and hard to digest. I have a natural tendency to sympathize with the Palestinians, as with anyone who winds up the underdog. I also have a deep love for Judaic culture and history and even for a lot of the early Zionist thinkers, whose essays I studied in Bruce Thompson’s Jewish Studies course at UCSC.
Ten years ago I told a dinner guest to shut up about his racist views. He didn’t shut up, and my outrage has done little to curb racism on a global scale. My outrage about the oppression of the Palestinians is not going to make a decisive change in the course of history. There will be no Onion-like headline saying “Local man has strong opinion regarding Middle East.” Even if the situation in Israel were to resolve itself into a peaceful two-state solution by the end of 2009, it won’t mean an end to oppression and repression as a part of US history.
Read Palestine, is my recommendation. Read Palestine and come away conflicted. A state of internal conflict is a great condition for a creative mind.

A Note About the Blog

One thing I’ve learned is that writing straightforward book reviews is getting boring for me, and it’s distracting from my work as a writer. This summer I went to the Last Frontier Theater Conference in Valdez, AK. I presented a couple of my plays there, did some acting, and met a lot of incredible creative people. I thought a lot about the creative process. I discovered a couple of things about my own style and method. Improvisation seems to me an integral part of writing. A lot of my favorite books (Gravity’s Rainbow, Beautiful Losers) bear clear traces of having been improvised; other favorites of mine (Shipping News, for instance, or Mating) come off as much more polished, beautifully planned and researched books where the form seems well under control.
If there’s a grand unification theory of my own creative process, it’s that I have to overpower my own intellect in order to make good use of my own imagination. I’m at my best when there’s a level of uncertainty at play in my writing, when I’m not completely sure where I’m going, or I think I know, but there’s always the threat that the creative part of my mind is going to jump the tracks and go off in some odd direction.
I don’t think I have a lot more to contribute in the sense of traditional-style book reviews of the sort that you’d read in the New Yorker or hear from Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air. I love this sort of review, where you get a beautiful, essential synopsis of the book and then the reviewer segues seamlessly into an op-ed about the book’s faults and merits. But I am more in love with reading itself, and with the odd and paradoxical ways in which it feeds my own creativity.
I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to go with this blog, but it’s going to veer more toward stream-of-consciousness. I’m still going to use the books I’m reading or have read as the backbone, the departure point, but the meat of the essays I write will have much more to do with my mental associations as I read the books or after I read them than it will summarizing the book and giving it a tumbs-up or thumbs-down. I’ll write with the assumption that my reader is already familiar with the book in question, or is resourceful enough to track down a summary of the book down and read it.
Basically, what I’m saying here is that I’m going to start doing something that may produce utter crap from now on, but it’s more interesting to me than what I’ve been doing. Enjoy.

Unaccustomed Earth

by Jhumpa Lahiri (2008) Published by Alfred A Knopf. 333 pages.

Reviewers of this book of short stories all seem to agree in praising Jhumpa Lahiri for her meticulous detail. To me the painstaking detail sometimes comes across as cold and angular, which is good insofar as it reflects the cold and angular thinking of many of the characters in the book. This is a cast made up largely of successful professionals: biochemists, cardiac physicians, freelance photographers, scholars of Tuscan history. But among these affluent characters there’s no sense of the sort of frivolous, jaded high living that you’d expect from, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald. A grim mindset pervades the book, that of people who come from a culture of Bengali immigrants that prizes ambition and achievement.
The most emotionally moving of these stories was Only Goodness, in which a promising young man, Rahul, succumbs to alcoholism while his loving sister begins to surpass him in achieving the sorts of successes he seemed destined for. The internal conflict faced by Rahul’s elder sister, Sudha, is genuine and worth studying—she has a sincere, childlike interest in helping him along, getting him past the worst of his addiction; and yet she also has a stake in his failure, because it’s made room for her.
Sometimes Lampiri goes too far out of her way to bring her plots to a resolution, as in the story Nobody’s Business, where the character Paul is secretly in love with his roommate Sang. Paul is a student of literature, unready for love, living too much in his head even to imagine how he might court the lovely Sang. But his constant attention to her do allow him to figure out that Sang’s boyfriend is a no-good two-timer. The reason the story doesn’t work, though, is that the boyfriend, Farouk, is such an obvious sleazeball that the story inspires pity rather than sympathy for the characters—pity for Sang that she’s so thick not to notice, and pity for Paul for going to such great lengths to prove what’s already more or less out in the open.
The stories Heaven-Hell and A Choice of Accommodations work the best of all the stories. Heaven-Hell is told from the point of view of a girl who witnesses her mother’s unrequited love for a young bachelor who needs help adapting to America. And A Choice of Accomodations is about a man who’s planned career as a doctor never worked out, and now he’s afraid that the passion in his marriage will fizzle in the same way.
The Bengali institution of arranged marriage weaves its way through the book, and comes to symbolize the systematic life that each of the families in the stories has to push aside, each in their own way. They’re entering a culture—(not American culture so much as a modern, globalized one)—that offers more freedom on the surface. But in Lampiri’s stories the freedom of choice itself seems like a demanding, unfamiliar and often hostile taskmaster to these characters who, while unflaggingly intelligent, seem to have a hard time getting to know themselves.

The Essence of Art Nouveau

by Paul Greenhalgh. (2000) Published by Harry N Abrams, Inc.

This is a straightforward, enjoyable little treatise about one of my favorite art movements. It wasn’t quite what I was looking for; a better title would be Art Nouveau and Its Sources. Greenhalgh gives a thumbnail overview of the history of Art Nouveau and then gives us glimpses into the various influences that came together to form the style. The images are lovely: my favorite is the plate from Ernst Haeckel’s 1898 biology text Kunstform der Natur showing delicate, curvilinear patterns in aquatic siphonophorae that are clearly reflected in the work of Art Nouveau designers.
This is a very good book for the reader who would rather spend more time looking at art than thinking too deeply about the theory behind it.

Barefoot Gen

Barefoot Gen by Nakazawa Keiji, translated by staff of Project Gen (1987) Published by New Society Publishers, 285 pages.

I like this book because it’s strange in so many ways. It’s a Japanese comic book that was written in the 1970s and translated at the end of the 1980s into various languages by a group of academics and antinuclear activists who saw in this story of a family living in Hiroshima at the end of World War II. The Japan of this autobiographical story has become exceedingly militant—Japanese civilians have been so entrained to believe American soldiers are marauding devils that they commit suicide en mass in Okinawa rather than face surrender; military cadets who can’t handle basic training are hounded to the point of committing suicide—and yet one father, a humble farmer and artisan, is convinced that the war is a stupid idea, and is not afraid to say so publicly, even though it means that his whole family—including the two youngest boys, Gen and Shinji—will be ostracized.
Even for someone well versed in both Western and Japanese comic books, the conventions of this story are unsettling and a little creepy. Any time the characters are upset, huge rivulets of tears stream from their eyes. When Gen and Shinji are happy they do the same weird dance. And whenever anyone is angry, they start slapping and punching each other. Parents punch children, children punch their teachers, the leaders of a work camp sticks at the children they look after. In the first part of the book, young Gen bites off part of the finger of a young boy who antagonizes him. For a book so prized by pacifists, this is immensely violent. Even the most heartwarming parts of the book (such as the story of Gen saving a poor glass merchant who can’t pay his debts) are punctuated by acts of sadism and brutality.
This story is filled with shadows cast by the light of the atomic bomb that’s dropped at the end of the book. It’s a story of childhood memories that can never be clearly recovered because they’ll always be seen through the filter of a mushroom cloud. Even the illustration style in which Nakazawa renders city scenes, wheat fields, train engines and bombing raids gives you a sense of unnaturally acute lighting, a world being recreated in painstaking detail only with the knowledge that at the end all of it will be ripped apart. The early scenes of flowing tears are weirdly conjured up again at the end of the story when we see the horrifying images of Hiroshima’s citizens wandering about zombie-like with the flesh melting from their faces. I’m not sure that any of this was intentional on the author’s part, but perhaps intention doesn’t matter that much, as he’s told a story about people in situations so extreme as to challenge even the strongest of human wills.

Time Immemorial

A production created and performed by Jack Dalton and Allison Warden; directed by Pincess Lucaj; produced at Cyrano’s Theater

More people HAVE to see this play. It’s a supurb trip through the history of Alaska from the point of view of two Alaska Natives, Tulu and Miti, who are present at the beginning of time, alone together in the midst of infinite darkness with a single glowing ember of light between them, which the bumbling Tulu keeps trying to steal. As the play unfolds, Tulu and Miti pass through eight different relationships: brothers; husband and wife; elder and child; mother and son; sisters; brother and sister; father and daughter; grandmother and grandson. They tell stories together of Alaska Native history—for instance, the husband and wife argue about the coming of white missionaries. “Their God only asks us for one day out of seven,” the husband says, arguing that things can’t be that bad. But of course, they are. The play is wonderfully rich in well-researched historical detail. As an audience, we bear witness to the way that Alaska Native families have been torn apart by plagues and assimilationist boarding schools, by oil company contracts and alcohol. The material is often gut wrenching, but the warm, effervescent, and masterful performances of Dalton and Warden keep the audience engaged and laughing. The only weak point is a prolonged final scene where Tulu and Miti meet again in the void where they began. I got a feeling that two performer–authors kept drawing the scene out because they weren’t quite ready to let go of the rich and meaningful piece of theater they’d created. They can’t be blamed for wanting to dwell a little longer in the light they’ve shone on history in all its tragic glory, but the stronger choice would be to end things a little sooner and leave the audience to deal on its own with the magnitude of the work presented.

Everything is Illuminated

By Jonathan Safran Foer (2002) Published by Perennial, 276.

This is the best book I’ve read so far this year. It starts out with some truly funny passages written by Alex, a young Ukranian man who’s paid to give a tour to an equally young Jewish American (named Johnathan Safran Foer) who’s come to Ukraine in search of a woman he believes rescued his father from the Holocaust. Alex’s narrative is filled with hilarious thesaurial blunders: he uses the word “rigid” for “difficult”, “flaccid” for “easy”, “manufacture Z’s” for “get some sleep.”
In between sections told by Alex we have stories of the shtetl of Trachimbrod where once a baby girl appeared in the river among an enigmatic cloud of floating detritus: string, clothes, maps, books. The official story is that a wagon crashed into the river, jettisoning the baby and the odd items, but the wagon is never found, and as we watch the baby mature into the beautiful and ingenious Brod we are left to wonder if perhaps her origins are more magical than we were first led to believe: was her coming somehow an omen of the future destruction of the shtetl at the hand of the Nazis exactly 151 years later.
A huge cast of characters is brought into play, the narrative breaks off and starts again at various stages of history, and the story is told at turns through rabbinical diaries of a communities dreams, through songs and wedding invitations, through encyclopedia entries and stage directions, but all of it is a beautiful accretion of mythic speculations built around the sand kernel of a man searching for the lost origins of his family.
It’s interesting: at the start of the book the sections told from the point of view of Alex are by far the strongest, whereas the sections that take place in Trachimbrod read like shoddy ripoffs of Sholem Aleichem. But the novel starts plunging into new depths as soon as the author begins to focus on the recurrent dreams that plague the residents of Trachimbrod, and it just never stops. By the end of the novel Trachimbrod has become as rich, grotesque and weirdly sad as Garbriel Márquez’s Macondo or the post-war Zone of occupied Germany in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
I get a sense that Foer set out to write a rather silly novel and found himself writing something magnificently more profound. While overall the results are incredible. The only big flub, I think, is that as Foer grows as a writer he begins to take the character of Alex a little too seriously, allowing him to morph from a good natured clown into a troubled existential antihero in a way that doesn’t quite ring true. I really liked the choice to add depth to the character: over the course of the book Alex, like the other characters, is confronted with the horrors of the history of the Nazi invasion, the Holocaust, and the possibilities of a godless and meaningless world—it’s natural that the character should change and grow in response to this, but the fact that his joyous, manic temperament disappears altogether is just about the only graceless touch to this otherwise supremely elegant story.

Fallen

A theatrical production created by the cast and Aerial Angels and directed by Allison Williams and Zay Weaver

This is a show going on for one more weekend at University of Alaska Anchorage, and it really knocked me off my feet. The show draws from several Bible stories, all of them troublesome because of their depiction of women: The Garden of Eden, the stories of Samson and Delilah, Esther, Jezebel and Lot’s Wife. The dialogues and monologues leave something to be desired; clearly this is a play that was written by committee. But the devices used to showcase the stories are often display the sort of brilliance that can come only from a well-tooled ensemble that enjoys working together. The story of Samson and Delilah begins with a gossipy choral telling set in a hair salon, and progresses to an absolutely stunning trapeze routine carried out by Anthony Oliva and Rachael Donaldson at some frightening altitudes. The death-defying (or at least concussion-defying) nature of their work made me feel I was witnessing a primal and carnal liaison of mythic proportions. Later on Kelli Brown and Elizabeth Daniel face each other on either side of a hoop suspended from the catwalks above the stage that serves as a mirror through which Jezebel contemplates the reflection in the moments just prior to her death. The ensuing trapeze routine where the queen and the reflection she worships balance together on their mirror is a subdued and elegant moment, one of the most beautiful in the whole show.
Great kudos have to go out to the whole cast as well as to the Aerial Angels, a touring ensemble of circus-skill performers who have come through Anchorage several times now and who have done a great service to our community by passing on their skills to some of the talented up-and-comers studying at University of Alaska Anchorage.

Ruminator III—This Time It's Personal

Review of author Denis Bostock's work in progress

It’s now been about two weeks since I finished my close reading of the manuscript of Ruminator III, and I can honestly say that the delightful and anarchic world created by author (and my friend) Denis Bostock continues to shimmer in my mind for several reasons: Bostock’s amazing ability to riff comically on simple absurdities of life and language; the loveable ensemble of characters; and the freewheeling storyline, which satirizes the conventions of social fiction and epic war, while at the same time profiting from the dramatic tensions vital to these spheres of fiction. All this is quite an achievement, especially considering that this is a novel told entirely from the perspective of a band of revolutionary dairy cows who decide one day to throw off the mantle of oppression and stand up—as it were—on their own four hooves.
Bostock’s comic style is readily apparent in the first section of book, which is probably an unrivaled compendium of bovine jokes and puns in the history of western literature. Bostock’s rare and splendid ability to play with words shows itself in the delightful coining of such phrases as “workcowship” for “workmanship,” “bovinity,” for “divinity,” and the phrase, “I felt as if I had butterflies in my stomachs.” At times, the author seems to be channeling the cartoony and conceptual humor of Eddie Izzard, such as when a cow pauses in her conversation to consider the light bulb that has just appeared above her head as an indication that she’s just had an idea. At other times, Bostock’s comedy is like that of Dave Barry during the prime of his Miami Herald humor column: the jokes are unrelenting and shamelessly silly, and half the fun comes from watching the author continue to outdo himself in search of mischievous nonsense.
But for all this silliness, the humor also serves the important purpose of giving the reader a welcome into the story of the dairy farm revolution. The message to the reader is, “I know this is ludicrous, and you know it’s ludicrous, so let’s sit down together and have as much fun as we can with it.” Again and again, we’re invited to laugh as the cows—guided by their leader Daisy a.k.a. Moo See Dung—are torn when forced to choose between overthrowing the unjust power structure of the ruling regime or just eating some grass and taking a nap. The wit and playfulness grows as thick and dense as grass in the first section of the book, and as a reader I was having so much fun a part of me wanted to stay forever in the meadow of absurdity and postpone the action of the plot indefinitely.
But the action does commence. Shortly after taking over the dairy farm, the farmhouse catches fire, and Moo See Dung has to rally her troops to action in a section that gives evidence to Bostock is able to weave humor into a fast-paced scene where a lot is going on. The cows are just barely able to avert the fire, but it still proves to be a pretty simple adversary compared to the problem of their mounting social and sexual frustration. You see, there’s only one bull in their pasture, Angus, and he happens to be a self-absorbed, useless oaf who throws all his energy into perfecting his James Bond impersonation and grooming himself as the world’s first bovine gangster rap star. Driven to despair, the cows send out a single scout, the impetuous Doris, into the world to search for more recruits to their band, and especially for bulls of a higher caliber.
This second section of the book centers on the family history of Moo See Dung née Daisy, her mother Florence, and her daughter Doris. As with any family drama, issues of character take center stage. We see all sorts of little subplots developing, romances between the cows and bulls who are brought in to visit, constant bickering between Moo See Dung and her mother, and Doris’ discovery of her long lost grandfather.
This section of the book ends with the great big wedding festival of Florence and her long lost love, who (a little confusingly) is also named Angus—Angus Senior. The story of the wedding festivities are enjoyable because by the time they occur I felt as a reader that I’d been drawn into the community on the dairy farm, that I cared about who they were and what happened to them. I would very much like to see this aspect of the book fleshed out even more: I’d like get a better idea of the differences between the cows, see more subplots, and be treated to more of the sort of idiosyncratic, slice-of-life humor that is at the heart of all romantic comedy from Jane Austen’s Emma to Forgetting Sarah Marshall. There’s already a lot there: we see the cows worrying about whether they look fat; we see the delight of the sexually frustrated cows when they discover that the washing machine can function as a huge vibrator. I think that Bostock has made a good start here, but has not quite realized the incredible comedic blank check he has written himself in the form of the first great bovine wedding comedy.
Still, by the time that the world of the dairy farm is threatened from the outside, we have a sense that there really is something at stake. The threat comes from the expansionist and imperialist despotism of the pig Bonaparte, a sort of update of Orwell’s despotic swine Napoleon from Animal Farm. Like the cows, Bonaparte has led a barnyard revolution, but he has turned his farm into a massive military-agricultural complex. He is surrounded by a tight coterie of animals, all of whom are not-so-subtle caricatures of despotic figures ranging from Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe to George W Bush and Tony Blair. Bonaparte and his gang has cast a covetous colonial eye on the rich (vegetable) oil reserves owned by Moo See Dung’s revolutionary collective. We’re introduced to Bonaparte’s farm by way of the intrepid cow Buttercup, who volunteers to infiltrate the encampment on the eve of Bonaparte’s impending invasion.
The narrative of Buttercup’s reconnaissance mission is probably the best piece of descriptive prose in the book. The innocent Buttercup is initiated into a nasty and brutish barnyard Gitmo where torture and wanton execution is the order of the day. Buttercup’s horror at what she sees helps to raise the stakes in preparation for the climactic battle scene wherein Bonaparte’s pigs bombard Moo See Dung’s dairy farm with rocks, bullets, flaming catapults and the corpses of conservative British politicians. The story of the battle is told at a fast clip that held my attention, and there are quite a few surprises, especially the transformation of Angus Junior from a useless wanker into a sort of bovine Achilles, putting his life on the line at the height of this barnyard Armageddon.
The story of Bonaparte’s invasion is clearly modeled on the 2003 invasion of Iraq and George W Bush’s “War on Terror,” and so it’s unfortunate that Bostock cheats himself of a fair bit of satiric sting by making the figures of George the bush kangaroo and Tony the toad relatively minor characters in Bonaparte’s army.
But the most important thing is that Bostock has presented in this manuscript the main ingredients of a story that, from start to finish, only he could create. The three main elements of conceptual comedy, ensemble family drama and satiric war epic all fit together in a novel and satisfying way. I think Bostock still needs to do some revision, blend the elements together a little more gracefully—for instance, there’s very little foreshadowing of the pigs’ invasion until the final third of the book—but he’s reached the crucial stage where the roadmap to such revision lies mostly in exploring and augmenting the strengths of the manuscript he’s already developed. I wish him luck in this endeavor, and very much look forward to seeing how the novel develops.

Grendel

by John Gardner (1971) Published by Vintage. 174 pages.


Reviewed 18 January 2009

John Gardner’s Grendel is a monster who could only live in books. He goes on rampages and midnight raids, he howls at the moon and sneaks up on his enemies, drinks their blood and rapes their wives and does all sorts of other things that could be fodder for movies, but the main thing this Grendel does is to listen. He’s always keeping an eye on the goings on in the little community of Dark Age Danish warrior-folk that he preys upon, and whenever something significant happens he sneaks into the shadows and gets near the action, listens to the secret conferences of those in power, catches onto their petty resentments and feuds, feels glee at their defeats and laughs at their vanity.
John Gardner has taken the character of Grendel from the story of Beowulf, king of the Geats, a heroic figure who slays first Grendel, then Grendel’s mother, and finally kills a dragon. I haven’t read the story of Beowulf yet, but I do know that it’s sort of one of the root stories of English literature, one of the most ancient texts we have in English of any sort, probably one of the oldest poems. And so I understand what it symbolizes for a modern author to go back and revisit this story: by taking his subject from this ancient text, John Gardner is taking a look at the foundation of our culture, trying to track down some of the mysteries of how we came to be who we are. Some of my favorite and least favorite books work along these principles: Derek Walcott’s Omeros uses themes from the Iliad and Odyssey to wonderful effect; Ahab’s Wife, on the other hand, tries to explore the origins of American fiction and just winds up making an ugly mess of the whole thing.
The story of Beowulf is a template for sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and would seem to be a poor source of material for a contemplative book about humankind, but John Gardner makes the matter interesting by exploring the issue of why Grendel has such hatred of the humans that he terrorizes.
Grendel narrates the book in the first person. He’s a creature of monstrous form but with considerable intelligence. His mother is a huge, brutish creature who has nothing to offer him in terms of intellectual stimulation. Although he learns from watching the animals that move about in the wilderness where he lives, he recognizes that they are beneath him. Eventually, Grendel does come into contact with the Dragon, a creature who borders on omniscience. Try as he might, Grendel cannot penetrate the abstract philosophy that occupies the Dragon’s brilliant mind. His intelligence is comparable only to that of the humans who live near him, but because of his form Grendel knows he will never be accepted by them.
It isn’t just loneliness, though, that makes Grendel hate his human adversaries. The thing that really hurts him is the dishonesty that seems to lie at the heart of their society. Growing up, Grendel watches the battles for territory that are carried out as the Danes fight one another. Eventually one Danish warlord, Hrothgar, gains supremacy in the region. Shortly after reaching this pinnacle of power, Hrothgar’s meadhall is visited by a blind bard who has come to seek Hrothgar’s favor. The bard, called the Shaper by Grendel, sings a song that glorifies Hrothgar, praising his rise to power not as a story of pillage and victory of brute force, but as a tale of the triumph of civilization and virtue over “barbarianism.” Grendel is outraged to see that the Shaper’s song casts a spell over the people of Hrothgar’s kingdom, that even though they know the story to be false, they now believe themselves to be the heroic and noble warriors that the Shaper sings about.
In a sense, then, all of Grendel’s ravages against Hrothgar’s people can been seen as the rebellion of true human nature against the lies that we tell ourselves about our own special place in the universe. That’s a little bit too simple an interpretation, but it will serve to demonstrate one of the many wonderful possibilities that arise from this brief but fascinating little tale Gardner has written.