Collected Miscellany

I am not sure why The New Republic chose to publish Alan Wolfe’s shameful “review” – ugly hit piece really – of a collection of essays by Russell Kirk. But they did and it is shameful. The immediate question seemed whether the best response to such an ignorant and distasteful piece of work would be disgusted silence or a full throated rebuttal.

Leaning toward the latter, I began working on a response – and I still plan on flushing out some of the nearly endless examples of ignorance – but today National Review Online stepped into the breach and provided some immediate ammunition for those appalled by Wolfe’s essay.

– They have a symposium of Kirk experts and admirers who provide brief responses to Wolfe.

– Jeffrey O. Nelson also provides a more lengthy response.

Good for NRO and shame on TNR.

Here are some links for your morning enjoyment:

– I am currently reading The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk by Gerald J. Russello and enjoying it immensely. Over at NRO John Miller talks with Mr. Russello about postmodernism, crunchy cons, and whether Kirk would have watched ESPN’s SportsCenter. A taste:

MILLER: When I hear the word “postmodern,” I think of graduate students who wear black turtlenecks, hang out in coffee bars, and wish they were French. How is Kirk’s imagination “postmodern,” as the title of your book has it?

RUSSELLO: Kirk’s conservatism is “postmodern” in the sense that it was never modern, and therefore is not burdened as liberalism is with the weaknesses of the Enlightenment worldview. Kirk’s emphasis on imagination, his concern for the imagery a society creates of what it admires or condemns, his treatment of tradition and history as not objective but one in which we participate and can change, and his devotion to what Burke called the “little platoons” of society all have parallels in postmodern thought. Moreover, Kirk himself saw this. In 1982, he wrote in National Review, that “the Post-Modern imagination stands ready to be captured. And the seemingly novel ideas and sentiments and modes may turn out, after all, to be received truths and institutions, well known to surviving conservatives.” With liberalism moribund, it “may be the conservative imagination which is to guide the Post-Modern Age.”

– Bruce Grossman is one step ahead of me when it comes to Megan Abbott, well probably on a lot of things actually, as he has read Queenpin and posted a review. He has also posted a review of A Nail Through the Heart which I am working on right now. Read his review and come back later for my take.

– At American.com Robert VerBruggen takes a look at Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t by John R. Lott, Jr. Freedomnomics is part of a sort of academic feud between Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, and Lott. And VerBruggen finds that is both good and bad:

What’s more, the book shares Freakonomics’s lack of focus. In part it’s a response to Levitt, but in other ways it’s a defense of the free market, even on topics Levitt didn’t touch. And some essays are neither anti-Levitt nor pro-market; Freedomnomics could more accurately have been called The Brief Book of Everything John R. Lott, Jr., has Ever Written About.

Nonetheless, most of what John R. Lott, Jr., has ever written about has been fascinating. He’s a great writer, especially for the general public, and the book renders lots of charts, graphs and statistical analysis into clear, uncomplicated conversation. In particular, those who haven’t followed Lott’s research and op-eds should read it.

Reading The Song Is You naturally involved thoughts about hardboiled and/or noir fiction. And whenever I have had a discussion about this particular genre someone always recommends Raymond Chandler. At some point in the past I picked up the beautiful Modern Library edition of The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely. Having read Abbott I thought it would be interesting to read one of her inspirations. Go back to a classic and see how it relates.

It proved to be interesting but a little disappointing. I am not sure why, perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood for that particular style, but The Big Sleep didn’t wow me as many had assured me it would. Intellectually I could see why people enjoyed it but emotionally I didn’t quite connect.

Orrin Judd notes that The Big Sleep is firmly in the genre camp but still great literature:

By the time Raymond Chandler wrote The Big Sleep, in 1939, the private detective story had already — thanks in large part to the template established in The Maltese Falcon — become genre fiction. The elements were all firmly in place: first person narration; more metaphors and similes than you can shake a stick at; a lone, hard drinking, tough guy detective; an ex-cop of some kind, frustrated by the corrupt system of justice; beset by a convoluted case set among the upper classes; femme fatales; temperamental gunsels; disappearing corpses; hostile police and prosecutors; and so on. But both Chandler and Ross MacDonald demonstrated that working within that genre it was possible to produce great literature–which The Big Sleep definitely is.

Orrin goes on to call Marlowe “our modern Don Quixote” a man who is “trying to hold back the tide of modernity by upholding an antiquated, but still compelling, code of honor.”

William Marling, Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, describes Marlowe as “the genre’s most influential series detective” and notes his unique role:

His wise-cracking style and capacity to endure punishment from his foes introduced a new kind of “performance” to hard-boiled fiction, in which victory was more often verbal than physical. Chandler’s ironic tone and extraordinary metaphors focused readers on individual scenes, which he excelled at writing. Many of these evoke Southern California in the late 1930s so vividly that the setting seems to become part of the plot. Most critics consider this book among the dozen greatest hard-boiled novels.

Reading reviews and history of the genre and the book, I can’t really argue with the critics. The quintessential character of Marlowe, the tone, the metaphors and similes, the evocation of Southern California, its all there. But in the end it just didn’t grab me. Was it enjoyable and entertaining? Sure, it wasn’t a painful read. I wasn’t tempted to put the book down or anything. But it also didn’t make such an impact on me that I immediately wanted to read more of Chandler (the next novel in the volume I was reading for example). Perhaps, I will read Farewell My Love when my mood and perspective is different I will enjoy it more.

Regardless, if you are interested in hardboiled fiction or the evolution of the detective story, or maybe just Southern California in the 1930’s, you will want to check out The Big Sleep. If only to better understand where the genre comes from and how it developed.

Ross Douthat does a fine job of pointing out the problems with John Updike’s review of Amity Shale’s new book on the Great Depression:

So far as I can tell from parsing this solipsistic flapdoodle, John Updike thinks the New Deal should be judged a great success because FDR was politically skillful enough to persuade Updike’s Dad to become a Democrat. Which is well and good so far as it goes: Political savvy is no small thing in a President, particularly at a moment of global disarray, and the perception of government activism in the face of the Great Depression was politically necessary even when economically undesirable. But one of the implications of Shlaes’ book, which Updike is supposed to be reviewing, is that FDR could have given us the fireside chats and the rhetoric of government action and yes, even the stronger safety net without the counterproductive attempts at centralized planning and the relentless scapegoating of business, both of which helped keep unemployment well above ten percent until World War II intervened. One can give Roosevelt the credit he deserves for the “inspirational feat” of keeping faith in American democracy alive among the men waiting in Studs Terkel’s soup lines, but it’s still worth addressing The Forgotten Man’s argument – which Updike doesn’t even touch, with all his florid talk of “the moot mathematics of economics,” the “merciless” quality of business, and government as “ultimately a human transaction” – that the men waiting in those soup lines might have benefited from an actual job as well, and that the New Deal’s role in stifling the growth that might have created such jobs (and shortened those soup lines) needs to be considered when assessing Roosevelt’s legacy. A Presidency that makes Americans “feel less alone” in the midst of a crisis is an admirable thing, but so is a five percent unemployment rate, and Updike leaves unrebutted Shlaes’ suggestion that a better, less-utopian New Deal might have given America both.

A while back I mentioned that The Columbus Dispatch was ramping up its online book coverage with a blog by book critic Bill Eichenberger and an online book club.

I have to say the blog is a bit lame so far. The irritating way the Dispatch blogs are embedded into the pages so that you have to scroll both the page and the blog is annoying. Eichenberger doesn’t post very often and when he does the posts rarely contain any particular insight let alone interesting information from a long time book critic. Frank Wilson he is not.

The book club is just getting started so we will have to see how it turns out. Today they had a chat for their first selection, Harlen Coben’s The Woods, which included discussion with Eichenberger and live chat with Coben.

Not sure what this all means in the grand scheme of things, but the Dispatch seems to be reaching out to book readers – may be not literary types, but readers.

Imagine: You’re at the airport and don’t have anything to read on the flight. You see two books at a kiosk. Six Principles of Effective Communication, a non-descript textbook, and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, a bright orange hardcover with what looks like duct tape on the cover. Which book would you buy?

The point of this imaginary scenario (I made the first book up) isn’t that you need a catchy title and cover to sell books, althought that may be true, but that how ideas are communicated is often as important as the ideas themselves.

Chip and Dan Heath have spent the last ten years studying this phenomenon – why some ideas “stick.” Chip as a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford and Dan as an educational entrepreneur and consultant. In Made to Stick, they share what they have learned.

“Stickiness” is used to describe ideas that stay with us, that become part of our mental furniture. In other words: effective communication. The brothers adopted the idea from Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 book The Tipping Point. But while Gladwell was studying the nature of social epidemics they wanted to understand the structure of effective communication – what makes ideas that stick tick.

Their answer? If you want to create an idea that sticks develop a Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story. This acronym (SUCCES) may be memorable, and a little corny, but what does it mean exactly? At the risk of oversimplifying, it means using what we know about how people think, act, react, and interact with ideas to craft effective communication.

From the introduction to the epilogue, and through chapters dealing with each of the six qualities, the authors model a basic structure for effective communication.

Step one is strip your idea to its core. When we try to communicate too much nothing sticks. But simple is not dumbing down, simple yes, but profound. Think proverbs not sound bites.

The remaining qualities take the next steps. If you want your idea to stick you need to make your audience: pay attention; understand and remember; agree/believe; care; and be able to act.

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