Collected Miscellany

The excellent book review site, The Complete Review, has been listed as one of this year’s 50 coolest websites by Time Magazine. Bravo!

Maybe it should be Art as the Book. This exhibit at The Israel Museum offers many works in the theme, “Beauty and the Book.”

Book-lovers know that a considerable part of the experience of reading has to do with the liberation of the imagination. Holding a book in one’s hand, one can soar towards unfamiliar lands, or plunge into the labyrinth of the hero’s very soul.

[by way of the Literary Saloon] I like the statue of the woman reading, but some of the other stuff?

Yesterday, Edward Klein’s “comprehensive biography” on Hillary Clinton was released by Penguin’s new imprint, Sentinel. The Truth About Hillary : What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President is stirring up a bit of dust, even to point, I’m told, that newspapers and major media are questioning the point of books like this. Let me repeat a question I heard elsewhere: does the media defend any politician from hard examination other than the Clintons? Even John Kerry didn’t get this much defense.

National Review interviewed Klein on Monday, and there’s too much there to summarize, but I’ll stab at it a bit anyway. Klein points to his record as a serious journalist to back up the book’s credibility. He says, “My previous book, The Kennedy Curse, was also the object of disparagement and vilification, and it has since become clear that everything I wrote was true.”

NRO asks why the book has to dealt with sexual matters, and Klein responds, “The Clintons themselves made sex an integral part of our national political discourse at the turn of the century. There’s no way of getting around sex when it comes to the Clintons.”

Now, here’s the Q&A I thought most interesting:

NRO: How is HRC like Nixon?

Klein: Like Nixon, Hillary is paranoid and has an enemies list.

Like Nixon, Hillary has used FBI files against her enemies.

Like Nixon, Hillary believes that the ends justify the means.

Like Nixon, Hillary has a penchant for doing illegal things.

I am off to a conference, in Little Rock of all places, so posting might be light for a few days (like it is real heavy otherwise right?). Let me leave you with a few interesting links.

– Thought provoking article in Slate about Young Adult fiction in schools:

We’ve all heard kids complain that they loved, say, To Kill a Mockingbird until their teacher took it apart in class, but the trouble here isn’t that such textual analysis isn’t “fun.” It’s that with formulaic fare, the exercise is critically counterproductive. A book like The Buffalo Tree can’t really bear more than reductive analysis, which reveals it to be a studiously packaged pedagogical lesson, a contrived vehicle for an ultimately upbeat psychosocial message that is at odds with the supposedly realistic setting (“At the end of the novel, Sura … has returned home with his spirit and his sanity intact”). But this is just the sort of saccharine simplicity that high-school kids, newly alert to life’s ambiguities, are beginning to pride themselves on seeing through. It’s hard to imagine an exercise more effectively designed to leave kids with the impression that fiction—in class and out, classic or not—is unlikely to be either very entertaining or enlightening.

I might have more to say about this later, but no time now I am afraid.

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Inspired by Phil’s suggestion, we have decided to enter into the murky arena of short story contests. I should note before I go any further that this is not a cash prize and is not likely to confer a particularly high level of prestige on the eventual winners in what you might call “the real world.” What we hope to do is give away a free book and highlight some good writing.

In honor of our focus on Michelle Herman, and her new book Dog, we are asking for submissions of a short story (800 words or less) that centers on a dog or dogs. The distinguished panel of judges (me, Phil, and whoever else we can rope into this convince to join us) will pick the winner and any honorable mentions. The winner will receive a free autographed copy of Dog and have their story published here (and hopefully linked to by the literary blogosphere thus insuring Internet immortality). Those honorable mentions picked by the judges can also have their entries posted here if they so choose.

Here are the details:
– Only one entry per person please.
– Please submit the story in the body of an email to contest[at]collectedmiscellany.com and include your mailing address so we can ship the book to you if you win.
– The story must be an original unpublished work but the author retains all the rights, etc.
– The deadline is midnight Monday July 4 (Just in case you want to spend your holiday weekend writing an “award winning” short story).

So there you have it. A chance for fame and fortune – well at least a few minutes of passing notice – and literary achievement. I know it isn’t much time but it is only 800 words after all. So get writing and send in your entries.

There has been some interesting debate about Human Events’ Ten Most Harmful Books List (mentioned earlier this month by Phil). Apparently it threatened Jonathan Chait’s “efforts at ideological toleration” among other things.

I am not here to defend the list per se, as any list of this nature is rather subjective and unserious to a degree. But what I do find interesting is that so many people can’t seem to get past the fact that books can be dangerous; that they can even have unintended negative consequences. Many of the books listed are in this category (see here for more).

This is an issue that Jonah Goldberg takes up in NRO’s The Corner. Responding to a reader’s email Jonah has this to say:

This reader wants me to buy into the notion that books — i.e. ideas — can never be dangerous. Alas, I think that’s bunk. Of course books can be dangerous. Everything important, everything with the power to change mens’ minds can be dangerous. How you can believe a book — or a movie or a play — can make the world a better place but that it can never make the world a worse place is beyond me. Any medium which can uplift can confuse. Does the reader really think the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is only dangerous when thrown?

The notion that “art” can only be enlightening is a carbunkle of a cliché. The relevant question is, Therefore what? Since most people think censorship is the greatest evil known to man (a belief I’ve disputed many, many times), I certainly think criticizing ideas is not only fine, but sometimes necessary. Pragmatically, I admit this can backfire (calling a book “dangerous” increases its appeal). But I don’t see why, as a matter of principle, we can’t say some books made this world better and some books made this world worse.

This is an important issue. People fly into a tizzy any time someone so much as hints that a book shouldn’t be read or made available to everyone. Censorship! Everyone cries, as if that settles the point. But this is actually a much more difficult issue and not one in which all conservatives agree by the way (William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk – two giants of American conservatism – disagreed about the issue).

So let me throw this out to the peanut gallery (if there is one). Can books be dangerous? Should certain books and ideas be discouraged or kept from those unprepared to handle them? Or should the battle of ideas be left alone; with assuring a level playing field our only goal?