Collected Miscellany

I am sure many of you have friends and realatives who are constantly bombarding you with bad jokes, silly stories, and urban legends via email. I try to keep this to a minimum but some always sneaks through. Today, however, I bring you important infromation that I recevied via email. It should especially concern regular readers of this site:

SELF-TEST FOR LITERATURE ABUSERS
How many of these apply to you?
1. I have read fiction when I was depressed or to cheer myself up.
2. I have gone on reading binges of an entire book or more in a day.
3. I read rapidly, often “gulping” chapters.
4. I have sometimes read early in the morning or before work.
5. I have hidden books in different places to sneak a chapter without being seen.
6. Sometimes I avoid friends or family obligations in order to read novels.
7. Sometimes I rewrite film or television dialog as the characters speak.
8. I am unable to enjoy myself with others unless there is a book nearby.
9. At a party, I will often slip off unnoticed to read.
10. Reading has made me seek haunts and companions that I would otherwise avoid.
11. I have neglected personal hygiene or household chores until
I have finished a novel.
12. I have spent money meant for necessities on books instead.
13. I have attempted to check out more library books than permitted.
14. Most of my friends are heavy fiction readers.
15. I have sometimes passed out from a night of heavy reading.
16. I have suffered blackouts or memory loss from a bout of reading.
17. I have wept or become angry or irrational because of something I read.
18. I have sometimes wished I did not read so much.
19. Sometimes I think my reading is out of control.

If you answered yes to three or more of these questions, you may be a literature abuser. An affirmative response to five or more indicates a serious problem. Once a relatively rare disorder, Literature Abuse, or LA, has risen to new levels due to the accessibility of higher education and increased college enrollment since the end of the Second World War. The number of literature abusers is currently at record levels.

SOCIAL COSTS OF LITERARY ABUSE: Abusers become withdrawn, uninterested in society or normal relationships. They fantasize, creating alternative worlds to occupy, to the neglect of friends and family. In severe cases they develop bad posture from reading in awkward positions or carrying heavy book bags. In the worst instances, they become cranky reference librarians in small towns. Excessive reading during pregnancy is perhaps the number one cause of moral deformity among the children of English professors and teachers of English and creative writing. Known as Fetal Fiction Syndrome, this disease also leaves its victims prone to a lifetime of nearsightedness, daydreaming, and emotional instability.

HEREDITY: Recent Harvard studies have established that heredity plays a considerable role in determining whether a person will become an abuser of literature. Most abusers have at least one parent who abused literature, often beginning at an early age and progressing into adulthood. Many spouses of an abuser become abusers themselves.

OTHER PREDISPOSING FACTORS: Fathers or mothers who are English teachers, professors, or heavy fiction readers; parents who do not encourage children to play games, participate in healthy sports, or watch television in the evening.

PREVENTION: Premarital screening and counseling, referral to adoption agencies in order to break the chain of abuse. English teachers in particular should seek partners active in other fields.
Children should be encouraged to seek physical activity and to avoid isolation and morbid introspection.

DECLINE AND FALL ~ THE ENGLISH MAJOR: Within the sordid world of literature abuse, the lowest circle belongs to those sufferers who have thrown their lives and hopes away to study literature in our colleges. Parents should look for signs that their children are taking the wrong path. Don’t expect your teenager to approach you and say, “I can’t stop reading Spenser.” By the time you visit her dorm room and find the secret stash of the Paris Review, it may already be too late.

I feel some what foolish. Someone alerted me to teh fact that Christopher Hitchens had a review of Koba the Dread in the new issue of The Atlantic. I do not subscibe and it wasn’t online so I went to a bookstore – no luck the old issue was still sitting on the shelf. Today, I passed a bookstore, saw the new issue, and bought it. It turns out they had posted to the web site afterall!

Well, I will save you all that trouble. Here is Hitchens’ review: Lightness at Midnight.

In it, Hitchens begins with some kind remarks and begins to point out the strengths of Amis’ work and career. However, Hitchens soon gets ire up and ends with an rather brutal and eviserating critique of Koba:

With infinitely more distress I have to add that Amis’s newly acquired zeal forbids him to see a joke even when (as Bertie Wooster puts it) it is handed to him on a skewer with béarnaise sauce. . . The questions are so plainly wife-beating questions, and the answers so clearly intended to pacify the aggressor by offering a mocking agreement, that I have to set down a judgment I would once have thought unutterable. Amis’s want of wit here, even about a feeble joke, compromises his seriousness. . . I do not mean these to sound like commissar questions, or wife-beating questions either. On the first and perhaps most important one posed by Amis, for example, I find that I never quite know what I think myself about this moral equivalence. Nor did I quite know when I was still a member of a Marxist/post-Trotskyist group, when such matters were debated from dawn until dusk, often with furious or thuggish Communists. However, I do know from that experience, which was both liberating and confining, that the crucial questions about the gulag were being asked by left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat written out of history (they expected far worse than that, and often received it), but I can’t bring myself to write as if they never existed, or to forgive anyone who slights them. If they seem too Marxist in tendency, one might also mention the more heterodox work of John Dewey, Sidney Hook, David Rousset, or Max Shachtman in exposing “Koba’s” hideous visage. The “Nobody” at the beginning of Amis’s sentences above is an insult, pure and simple, and an insult to history, too.

I think both Hitchens and Amis have too much personal history and intellectual baggage involved to deal with this issue “straight.” But Hitchen’s scores some points simply because Amis can’t get beyond his own life and mind. Hitchens has his own bliders but is more practiced at the art of literature as polticial warfare.

Well worth a read in any case. I promise not to post anymore on this book (unless aboslutlely neccesary). OK? OK.

UPDATE: Anne Applebaum covers the above fracas and adds her intelligent two cents to the issue:

Few things are more amusing than the sight of fashionable literati insulting one another in print. Yet one finishes the review feeling that Hitchens isn’t trying very hard. Of course Christopher Hitchens, a man who has publicly attacked Mother Teresa, can bat away a book that contains sentences like “I didn’t read The Great Terror [Robert Conquest’s classic account of the purge years] in 1968 … but I spent an hour with it” without blinking an eye. More to the point—and contrary to the reviews—Koba the Dread is not, in fact, a competent account of Stalin’s reign but rather a muddled misrendering of both Soviet and Western intellectual history. For that reason, the deeper points Amis seems to have been trying to make about the Western relationship to Soviet terror are lost on Hitchens and will probably be lost on everyone else as well.

She offers a much harsher critique then me:

In the end, one puts down Koba the Dread and wonders why it was written. Yes, indeed, Martin Amis appears to be very angry about something. Perhaps he is very angry about his father’s death. Perhaps he is very angry about being a fiftysomething novelist who has run out of things to write about. Yet by inexplicably funneling his displaced anger into a poorly conceived, improbably hysterical diatribe against Stalinism, he has neither revealed anything new, nor retold old stories in an interesting way, nor done any victims any favors. Amis poses, at the start of the book, a legitimate question: Why do we think it is OK to make jokes about Stalinism, to laugh at a political system that killed millions of people? By the end of the book, we no longer want to know the answer.

Washington insider Ben Domenech brings us Karl Rove’s recommended reading list:

*Conceptual Blockbusting, A Guide to Better Ideasby James L. Adams
*Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky
*Storming the Gates by Dan Balz and Ron Brownstein
*Our Country by Michael Barone
*The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
*The Classic Guide to Better Writing by Rudolf Flesch and A. H. Lass
*How to Write, Speak and Think More Effectively
by Rudolf Flesch and Salvatore Raimondo
*Why Johnny Can’t Read: and What You Can Do About It by Rudolf Flesch
*The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
*The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
*The Dream and the Nightmare by Myron Magnet
*Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
*Marketing Warfare by Al Ries and Jack Trout
*Plunkitt of Tammany Hall by William L. Riordon
*The Responsive Chord by Tony Schwartz
*The Art of War by Sun-Tzu
*Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits by Robert Townsend
*The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte

Interesting article on Russian reactions to Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread (if you don’t know what that is, just read a few posts down): | ‘Haughty’ Amis faces the wrath of Russia.

Sample:

In Koba the Dread, Amis asks why history is not as – if not more – sombre about Stalin’s Terror, which claimed many more lives than the Holocaust. He concludes: ‘There’s something in Bolshevism that is painfully, unshirkably comic.’ Russians have reacted hostilely because of Amis’s detached style, in which he searches for the right ‘literary genre’ for the genocidal regime – a black farce. Petrov said: ‘Soviet history can be represented as a funny anecdote, but I don’t think that it is productive because there were serious things in Soviet history.’

This “random book” (see below)turned up a winner. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

As I understand it, this is actually the middle of a “Canadian Trilogy” by the author. The books are set in Canada but they do not share characters. The Museum Guard is set in Halifax in the awkward and tension filled pre-WWII 1930’s. The story centers on the Glace Museum and the characters whose lives center around it. The narrator is DeFoe Russet a guard at the Glace (hence the title). DeFoe’s parents died in a Zeppelin crash and his uncle Edward, who helps him get his guard job, raised him. The tension grows out of DeFoe’s unique relationship to Imogen Linny and her unique relationship with reality. It all centers around a Dutch painting: Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam. . The plot takes a few interesting twists and turns as tensions mount and relationships are strained to the breaking point. I won’t give anymore away because among other things it is a bit of a mystery; wondering what will happen is part of the intrigue.

The beauty of DeFoe’s narrative is how true and real his “voice” seems; how he pulls you into his life and the life of the community simply by relating events. The prose is sparse and taunt and even a little dark or drab. It weighs heavy on you, the tension and hardness of his life. This continues until late in the book when his pent up emotions and tensions finally explode. This tension and somber tone reflects the mood of the late inter-war period. I am certainly no expert on 1930’s Nova Scotia but I would bet he has captured the mood. The foreboding and growing presence of Hitler is a constant backdrop to the interpersonal tensions in the novel. The characters seemed trapped in their lives and yet they can feel the changes happening in the world and they know sooner or later those events will collide with their world. The tautness of the feelings are a reflection of the inability to prevent the tragedies that seem destined to overtake their daily lives. They want to escape their lives and control their own destinies but when they finally do so, there actions have serious consequences.

The Museum Guard was a fascinating and enjoyable read, a meditation on identity and self-knowledge. It is, however, sparse and subtle not fast paced and choke full of thick description. It reflects its setting: the cold but bracing weather of the north rather than the hot and sultry south or the sunny and easy pace of the west. If that style, that atmosphere, intrigues you then you might enjoy The Museum Guard. I certainly did.

This “random book” (see below)turned up a winner. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

As I understand it, this is actually the middle of a “Canadian Trilogy” by the author. The books are set in Canada but they do not share characters. The Museum Guard is set in Halifax in the awkward and tension filled pre-WWII 1930’s. The story centers on the Glace Museum and the characters whose lives center around it. The narrator is DeFoe Russet a guard at the Glace (hence the title). DeFoe’s parents died in a Zeppelin crash and his uncle Edward, who helps him get his guard job, raised him. The tension grows out of DeFoe’s unique relationship to Imogen Linny and her unique relationship with reality. It all centers around a Dutch painting: Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam. . The plot takes a few interesting twists and turns as tensions mount and relationships are strained to the breaking point. I won’t give anymore away because among other things it is a bit of a mystery; wondering what will happen is part of the intrigue.

The beauty of DeFoe’s narrative is how true and real his “voice” seems; how he pulls you into his life and the life of the community simply by relating events. The prose is sparse and taunt and even a little dark or drab. It weighs heavy on you, the tension and hardness of his life. This continues until late in the book when his pent up emotions and tensions finally explode. This tension and somber tone reflects the mood of the late inter-war period. I am certainly no expert on 1930’s Nova Scotia but I would bet he has captured the mood. The foreboding and growing presence of Hitler is a constant backdrop to the interpersonal tensions in the novel. The characters seemed trapped in their lives and yet they can feel the changes happening in the world and they know sooner or later those events will collide with their world. The tautness of the feelings are a reflection of the inability to prevent the tragedies that seem destined to overtake their daily lives. They want to escape their lives and control their own destinies but when they finally do so, there actions have serious consequences.

The Museum Guard was a fascinating and enjoyable read, a meditation on identity and self-knowledge. It is, however, sparse and subtle not fast paced and choke full of thick description. It reflects its setting: the cold but bracing weather of the north rather than the hot and sultry south or the sunny and easy pace of the west. If that style, that atmosphere, intrigues you then you might enjoy The Museum Guard. I certainly did.