Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Wallace's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, December 14th, 2006
3:46 pm	go me I didn't bother posting when I received admission to William & Mary, even though they offered me a nice fellowship package. But since I'm doing nothing but trumpeting my own good fortune, I'll congratulate myself on also being admitted to Stanford. Unless I'm also accepted to Yale, it will be hard to pass on Palo Alto. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 30th, 2006
4:13 pm	go blue devils Now I can say that, like Christian Laettner and Cherokee Parks, I've been admitted to Duke. Actually, I was able to say that before. This is the third time I've been admitted to Duke, and if I decide to go to a different law school, this will be the third time I've rejected them. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
10:19 pm	go bears Now I can proudly say that I have something in common with Lamond Murray and Phil Chenier. Like them, I have been admitted to Berkeley, albeit the law school. Unlike them, alas, I am unlikely to be selected in the first round of the NBA draft. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 6th, 2006
9:36 pm	application time I think I am now done applying to law school, having submitted far too many applications after being allured by various offers to waive my application fee. Still, if I were to apply to yet another school (for free), which of the following fine schools should I choose? * Georgetown * NYU (a recent addition) * Cardozo (which is at Yeshiva, apparently) * Alabama (which offers 5 free iTunes downloads if I apply!) * Saint Louis University (I already succumbed to the temptation of a free application to Wash U. St. Louis) * Connecticut * University of the Pacific (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 12th, 2006
4:28 pm	coming straight from the underground I don't even remember when I last posted in this crazy journal, but that new-fangled strip practically begging me to write something proved irresistible. Anyway, in the spirit of all the whacked-out libertarian blogs I spent last night reading, I will now post. So I was reading whacked-out libertarian blogs because they're what pop up when you do a Google search on "flying without ID." I was trying to learn about how one can go about flying without ID because my driver's license was confiscated by a cop last night. My driver's license was confiscated because I was pulled over, at 12:30 in the morning, at a deserted Hyde Park intersection, by a cop who claimed that I "failed to stop at a stop sign." In fact, I did pull to a stop, then immediately rolled forward because there was literally nobody around. But then the flashing lights came on (from about half a block away), I was pulled over, and after 15 minutes of waiting for the sluggish officer to fill out a ticket, I was licenseless. This was annoying for several reasons, such as: 1) I did, in fact, come to a stop at the stop sign. 2) I'm going to be taking a flight in a week, and I need my driver's license to get on the damn plane. (Or maybe I don't, if those aforementioned libertarian blogs are to be believed.) 3) Now I either have to pay an absurd $75 fine for doing something I didn't do, plus get points which for all I know will raise my insurance rates, or else I have to contest it and spend a day going to court, where for all I know I'll lose anyway (it'll just be my word against the cop's, if he shows up) and have to pay even more. If anyone is reading this, I present the following as discussion topics: 1. Is it actually legal for the cop to confiscate my license? After all, I haven't been found guilty of anything yet. In fact, the ticket specifically states that I can check off one of the compliance options "without admitting guilt." I understand why the police would have an interest in taking my license -- it certainly makes me unlikely to blow off the ticket -- but I don't get how they have the right to do so. 2. If you've even been in a comparable situation, what's your advice on the question of paying the fine vs. taking my case to court? (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 13th, 2004
9:11 pm	Today's show Today's show was longer than usual, because the DJ following me didn't show up. So I got an extra 20 minutes, which I filled with Vladimir Horowitz. J. S. Bach/Samuel Feinberg. I started with three piano transcriptions, by the early 20th-century Russian pianist, of Bach organ works. The first, of the largo from Bach's Sonata No. 5 In C Major (BWV 529), was spectacular. Then I played two chorale preludes, which if not precisely spectacular were at least interesting. Olivier Messiaen: I played "Les offrandes oubliées," or "The Forgotten Offerings." This is the piano version, by the composer, of his own orchestral suite. I hadn't heard it before, but it wasn't especially impressive: just standard-issue Messiaen. Domenico Cimarosa: I finally got around to playing one of the station's LPs, interrupting the steady diet of CDs I've been bringing in. It was an album of "early Italian harpsichord music" which included some Pergolesi and Galuppi I sadly didn't get around to playing. I did play five brief Cimarosa sonatas, which were quite good. Also, one of them was strangely familiar, though I don't think I have any Cimarosa CDs. Odd. Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck: Having played one LP, I immediately played another. Sweelinck was the foremost organist in Amsterdam at the end of the 16th/beginning of the 17th century. I found a Francis Chapelet record that included a number of Sweelinck's pieces, which proved enjoyable. Schubert: I picked up a set of late recordings by Vladimir Horowitz at the library, from which I played the Impromptu in A flat major, D. 899 no. 4. It's one of my favorite Schubert pieces, but while the Horowitz version had its moments, his rendition didn't quite work for me. Too slow in parts, perhaps. Liszt: I hadn't played any Liszt yet. I ended the drought with Jorge Bolet's interpretation of the Hungarian Rhapsody no. 12 in C sharp minor, which is really good. Bernardo Pasquini: I have no idea who Pasquini is -- aside from "some 18th-century Italian guy" -- but I picked up an LP of his work. It was a strange record. One side contained sonatas for two harpsichords; the other, sonatas for two organs. I played some of the latter, which weren't very interesting. Mozart: I was in bonus time by this point, so I just played more Horowitz. I started with his version of the piano sonata in C major, K. 330. I really like Horowitz's versions of Mozart; this one's superb. Scriabin: I finally ended with Horowitz's excellent rendition of the etude in D sharp minor, op. 8 no. 12. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 6th, 2004
4:37 pm	Today's show My show for the autumn is, in fact, on Wednesday afternoon from 1:30 to 3:00. At the inspiration of aliste, I named my show "The Ill-Tempered Clavier." I thought that was quite clever. When I arrived at the station today, though, the previous DJ informed me that it's also the name of a composition by "P. D. Q. Bach." I loathe P. D. Q. Bach. So I'll either have to grit my teeth and stick to my (independently-imagined) title, or come up with some alternative. Anyway, here's the playlist from this afternoon: Pachelbel, Chaconne in F minor. With the possible exception of a few things by Bach, this is my favorite composition for the organ. The recording I played (a Harmonia Mundi release) was made by John Butt at Berkeley's Hertz Hall. I think I used a bathroom in Hertz Hall last May, but I don't remember seeing any pipe organs. Ignaz Moscheles, Piano Concerto no. 7. This is perhaps the least-known of classical works nicknamed "Pathétique." Like most people nowadays, I haven't heard much Moscheles -- he isn't exactly in the standard repertoire -- but this turned out to be a rather interesting piece (dedicated to the composer's friend Meyerbeer, by the way). Brahms/Busoni, Six Chorale Preludes. This is from a superb Paul Jacobs recording of all sorts of Busoni pieces. I played Busoni's transcription of six of the eleven preludes for organ from Brahms's Op. 122. Really, really good. Scarlatti, Sonatas. I found a live recording of a recital Emil Gilels gave in Italy in 1984. It began with seven Scarlatti sonatas; I played the first four. Gilels is always worth listening to, but Scarlatti isn't really his strong suit (or else this recording, which I think was made shortly before his death, doesn't catch him at his best). Couperin, Suite in C major. In an attempt to break the piano hegemony, I played Gustav Leonhardt's recording of this suite for harpsichord. What can I say? It's good, but it sounds like everything else by Couperin. Germaine Tailleferre, Music for Two Pianos. I found a great CD devoted to Tailleferre's music for two pianos (who knew there'd be enough to fill up an entire disc?). I really wanted to play the piano version of her score for a Diaghilev ballet about 18th-century Tahiti (entitled The New Cythera, and based on the Voyages of Bougainville!). Unfortunately, it would have run over my time slot. Instead, I played a miscellany of shorter stuff: a toccata, the "Suite Burlesque," and two waltzes. Very listenable. Chopin, Scherzo no. 1 in B minor. I hadn't played any Chopin yet, so I remedied the situation. A solid Maurizio Pollini version of the piece. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 29th, 2004
8:42 pm	My radio debut So I had my first show this afternoon as a classical DJ on WHPK (88.5 FM, the pride of the South Side). I've often (or at least sometimes) thought that I would enjoy being on the radio, but it was only the impetus of wanting to have yet more things to do in lieu of my dissertation that prompted me to take action. Inasmuch as I didn't commit any major gaffes (playing the wrong thing, broadcasting dead air for minutes at a time) I think my initial outing would have to be counted a success. For those of you who weren't in the immediate vicinity of the University of Chicago today, here's what I played. I should mention that my show (if, or when, I have a show) will be devoted to keyboard music, or will be until I get bored of hearing the piano. Haydn: Piano Concerto no. 11 in D. A fun, sprightly piece. Also, when I played piano in high school I had one of my greatest, and few, successes with a performance of this concerto. Bach/Tausig: Toccata and Fugue in D minor. This is a transcription for piano, by the 19th-century piano virtuoso Karl Tausig, of Bach's famous piece for organ. I played Earl Wild's excellent live recording of it. Frederic Rzewski: Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues. This is the last of the Four North American Ballads by Rzewski, the contemporary American composer. They're all good. Unfortunately, I couldn't find my copy of the Paul Jacobs recording, or even the one by the composer, so I had to settle for a somewhat inferior version by one Kathleen Supové. Debussy: Suite Bergamasque. Nothing to say about it; just something calm and mellifluous after the Rzewski. Louis Moreau Gottschalk: Union. This is a goofy piece by the mid-19th-century American composer, a bombastic paraphrase of various patriotic melodies. I have a soft spot for Gottschalk, who when I was about 12 years old was one of my favorite composers, but I wouldn't inflict him too often on whoever listens to WHPK at 2 in the afternoon. Beethoven: Piano Sonata no. 32 in C minor, op. 111. I played a vintage recording by Artur Schnabel that I came across in the studio library. The first two movements were surprisingly awful -- lots of vague rhythm and flubbed notes -- but the long Arietta movement was superb. Charles-Valentin Alkan: Third Suite of Preludes, op. 31. One of my favorite works by the reclusive French composer. The only piece that is at all known from this collection is the "Song of the Mad Old Woman at the Seashore," which I didn't play. This suite does contain the "Prayer" which is, for my money, the finest thing Alkan ever wrote. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 12th, 2004
3:54 am	It's Miller Time I just got home from the worst shift ever at my job. A caterer took off without doing any of the cleaning he was contractually obliged to do, leaving me to deal with the aftermath of a wedding. On the other hand, another party had too much alcohol and didn't know what to do with the excess. The result: I'm now the proud owner of approximately 120 cans of Miller Lite and MGD. That's more cans of cheap beer than I could drink by myself in a month. Who's up for a Miller party? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 11th, 2004
12:10 am	Imperium in Imperio It is, I suppose, possible that Imperium in Imperio, the long-neglected and recently-revived book by Sutton Griggs, may not be the worst novel written in the United States in the nineteenth century. Still, it's hard to imagine how any work of fiction could be inferior to this sorry contrivance. I can conceive, barely, that there might be novels more overrun with clichés than this one. I can almost envision a book that would be even more dependent on threadbare fictional conventions. Having read Cooper, I can definitely picture a work that would be at least equally ludicrous in its infrequent ventures into original invention. What boggles the mind is the thought of another novel combining these elements as consistently as Griggs manages to combine them in this idiotic distillation of Southern romanticism and black nationalism. From start to finish, the novel is an aesthetic disaster. It moves in a narrow circle from banality to bathos to bombast and back again. All of Griggs's heroic characters are impossible paragons of strength, intelligence, courage, and oratory. Usually, they strike one of a hanfdul of poses which, by the time Griggs wrote, had long since been worn out by generations of American imitators of Scott. When Griggs aims for originality, however, things actually take a turn for the worse. I don't know which was more absurd: the strapping young black man who disguises himself as a nurse in order to spy on some white people, fooling everyone (including his wife) until an attempted rape leads to the discovery of his secret; the same character's escape from death, despite being hung and shot in the head, when he overpowers an anatomist who tries to dissect him; or that character not being lynched, despite having murdered a white man. Then again, the pinnacle of silliness may be the young woman who commits suicide rather than marry a mulatto, because she had once read a book which argued that miscegenation was detrimental to the black race. I'm not sure why I'm even bothering to pillory this piece of fluff. Griggs, I learn from the book's fawning introduction, abandoned novel-writing in favor of pamphleteering. A sound decision, on the evidence of this trifle. Maybe I was irked by the fact that so flimsy a contraption has been recently published, and published as a Modern LIbrary "Classic." (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 31st, 2004
12:41 pm	The Book of Daniel Now that I have a part-time job that seems to involve lots of sitting around in front of a computer, perhaps I'll start updating this journal a bit more frequently. This morning, while whiling away a few hours at "work," I finished Doctorow's fictional version of the Rosenberg trial. Actually, it's a book about life in the United States between World War II and the sixties, or more precisely about the lives of a few people -- mainly two characters based on the Rosenbergs, and their unfortunate children -- who endured that era. It's a good novel, though I'm not enamored of Doctorow's flirtation with "experimental" fiction. Here, the novel switches arbitrarily from one paragraph to the next between a first- and third-person narrator, for no discernible reason. Doctorow also indulges himself by including dreadful scraps of poetry, though mercifully we are spared the pages of doggerel that befoul Loon Lake. Subtract those feeble attempts to break from the constraints of "realism," and what remains is similar to, though not as good as, Philip Roth's superb I Married a Communist. It's a compelling portrait of a well-intentioned, over-idealistic, under-informed family. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 24th, 2004
5:03 pm	Soliciting free medical advice Since my most recent post, for all its minimalism of content, was greeted with such warmth, I feel moved to post again. Moreover, this will be a completely non-literary entry. When I was walking up the stairs at the library today, I suddenly experienced an odd pain in my right knee. I managed to hobble over to my usual seat in the stacks, but my knee still doesn't feel quite right. Now, when I'm playing basketball I sometimes get a disturbing sensation in my left knee, but that usually goes away after I stretch for a minute. Until today, I haven't had any problems with simple walking, and my right knee hasn't, as far as I know, ever been troublesome. My question, then, for those of my readers who know more about these things than I do: Is this nothing more than a standard minor affliction of the moderately active? Or should I be worried about my knees? And what, if anything, should I do about them? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 23rd, 2004
12:15 am	Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl I realize that I haven't updated this blog in months. Apparently, I've lost interest in posting instant assessments of whatever books I happen to be reading. But I'll take advantage of being online to mention that this novel, the last work of the contemporary German author Gert Hofmann, is superb. I don't have much to say about it, save that it's surprisingly similar, both in matter and manner, to one of my favorite novels: Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. If you're reading this, you should get off the computer, obtain both books, and treat yourself to two delightful literary experiences. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, June 11th, 2004
2:48 pm	Readings Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel Do people still find Rabelais engrossing? When I tried to read Gargantua and Pantagruel years ago, it was only a sense of duty to an alleged classic that impelled me to finish the first two books. I thought that perhaps the translation was at fault for my lack of interest, so I recently picked up Burton Raffel's version of the novel. Raffel's Rabelais, lively and colloquial, is clearly a superb Englishing of the text. Nonetheless, I found myself equally bored this time around, and only just finished the first book before giving up again. Rabelais is certainly exuberant, but his exuberance is unbearably monotonous. I don't find him silly or stupid, only tedious. In fact, taken as a moralist he seems rather impressive. What he hates, he hates with straightforward passion. What he loves, he loves with his entire heart. He neither dissembles nor temporizes. Pedantry, laziness, and all the other scholastic or monkish vices are dismissed without caveat. Humanism, real work, and whatever worldly delights appeal to the natural man are embraced without remorse. In a period when religious and philosophical abstractions drove most of Europe into a murderous frenzy, Rabelais must have afforded a welcome gust of sanity to those who had avoided the infection of faction. His worldview continues to appeal, but the trappings in which he invested his outlook are sadly outworn. One wants only to enjoy his healthy enthusiasms and contempts, but the manner of his fiction keeps getting in the way of one's admiration for the matter of his vision. Too many lists of proper nouns; too much exaggeration; excessive roistering. No doubt Rabelais was out to mock the conventions of the prose romance -- its catalogues, hyperbole, decorum -- but in the absence of that context it's hard to maintain interest in so much repetitive nonsense. Don Quixote is also weakened by the disappearance of the genre of fiction which it parodies and subsumes -- Cervantes evidently expects his reader to relish the severe beatings he endlessly inflicts on his main characters -- but that book survives by becoming something more interesting: the modern novel. Cervantes's masterpiece entirely dispenses with predecessors such as Amadis of Gaul; Gargantua and Pantagruel fails to escape the company of Huon of Bordeaux. James Hynes, Kings of Infinite Space Hynes, it appears, has found his voice. This book, his latest novel, is entirely in the vein of his last two works of fiction, which is not an objection. The trappings of Gothic fiction afford Hynes a sturdy framework within which to confect thoroughly enjoyable comic romances. In effect, Gothicism allows him to revitalize the tradition (which runs, roughly, from Kingsley Amis to David Lodge) in which the part of antihero is given to a pathetic, marginal, but scrappy academic. This book includes some overbearing feminist ideology, perhaps as a riposte to critics who found his earlier work to be tainted by masculine self-pity. Here, that self-pity is (somewhat heavy-handedly) excoriated, as we learn that women are less indolent, cruel, and creepy than men. Perhaps they are. Since the book is only an entertainment, Hynes's occasionally ponderous moralizing is hardly worth worrying. He doesn't really have anything to say, but he has a nice gift for keeping things moving at a sprightly pace, which made a lengthy flight to California relatively tolerable. George Cotkin, Existential America After reading Cotkin's William James, Public Philosopher, I probably should have known better than to have read this recent book on the reception of existentialist philosophy in the United States. Cotkin is a cultural historian, and his book on James evinced a not unsurprising lack of psychological insight. His argument in that book ran something like this: Lots of men in James's socioeconomic situation who failed to serve in the Civil War were guilty about not fighting. Because they were guilty, they became depressed. James was a man in James's socioeconomic situation who failed to serve in the Civil War. He was depressed. Ergo, he was depressed because he didn't join the army. First, this is in no way a decisive argument about James. It's a speculation, which makes a lot of sense if you believe that James was much like his duller coevals, and somewhat less sense if you suspect that he was not quite like his "peers." But even if you grant that this putative "guilt" was the cause of his depression, you haven't accomplished anything. Out of what may have been their despair and remorse over not going to war, James's contemporaries did nothing. Out of his despair, whatever its etiology, James produced a fascinating body of work. Whether his depression was caused by cultural guilt or somatic imbalances or a purely spiritual malaise, it only matters insofar as it led him to formulate a number of interesting ideas. So much for Cotkin on James. In this book, he sets himself to trace the impact of various "existentialist" thinkers on American writers. As it turns out, lots of Americans read Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus. Cotkin names their names, and summarizes their books. We also get biographical sketches of a number of American popularizers of European thinkers, from Walter Lowrie to Hazel Barnes and Walter Kaufmann. But that's it: Cotkin has no thesis, no argument, no insights. The whole book consists of concatenated synopses: "X read Kierkegaard, and wrote about him in these books; Y read Nietzsche, and discussed him here and here." A prime fault of the book is Cotkin's failure to define the term "existentialist." When he writes that "existential themes are, of necessity, present in all art and thought that aspires to greatness and depth," I conclude that he is using "existential" as a vague synonym for "serious." As Cotkin suggests in his useless opening chapter -- which, in an absurd sequence of exceedingly brief sections, shows that Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson and a bunch of other people were "existentialists" avant la lettre -- an American like William James did indeed take death and despair seriously. Nonetheless, it doesn't follow that James's thinking has anything in common with that of Sartre or Nietzsche. For that matter, the blanket term "existentialist" obscures the enormous differences between the thinking of Sartre and Nietzsche, or any other pair of thinkers yoked together by so vacuous a noun. If "existential" only means "one who takes seriously questions of life and death," it is perhaps useful as a weak negative term, distinguishing what someone like James and someone like Nietzsche have in common against the arid formality of analytic philosophy. But the word fails to pick out some essence that sets a sequence of thinkers from Kierkegaard to Camus apart from Heraclitus, Montaigne, or Schopenhauer. If "existential" just means "profound," what's the point of using the word? Cotkin's attempts to address this problem are, on my view, completely unimpressive. He accepts Kaufmann's definition of existentialism as characterized by "a heightened awareness of 'dread, despair, death, and dauntlessness.'" Of these four "essential" nouns, the first three mean more or less the same thing, while the fourth constitutes a non sequitur. After all, why should dread and despair lead to dauntlessness? Why not capitulate to nihilism? Cotkin follows Sartre and Camus (but not, I think, Nietzsche) in making an unjustified leap from the "is" of pessimism to the "ought" implied by his endorsement of "dauntlessness" as the proper attitude toward life. If one were to say "Yes, life does seem dreadful; and I choose to be daunted by despair, to spend the few years that remain to me in fear and trembling" it isn't clear that "existentialists" can offer much of a response. They produce a lot of trumpery rhetoric about being "authentic," about expressing one's "real" self. But even if one grants that there is such a thing as "authenticity," the question remains: Why should I be "authentic"? Prattling about "nothingness" and asserting the "necessity" of "freedom" are not persuasive. Nancy Mitford, Madame de Pompadour Having enjoyed Mitford's book on Voltaire, I decided to look up some of her other work. Apparently, she also wrote biographies of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great, which I may get around to reading at some point. As for the present text ... Well, I don't remember when I last read a book with so many illustrations. Fortunately, there's a lively and amusing portrait of life in eighteenth-century France to be found amid the photographs of van Loo paintings and Sèvres china that bestrew the text. Mitford doesn't offer her reader much of a depiction of the inner life of Madame de Pompadour, but then it isn't clear that she had much of an inner life to get a sense of. She was set from youth to become the king's mistress, and did exactly that. Oddly, this sympathetic biography of a wealthy and powerful courtesan has done more than any angry denunciation of the old regime to persuade me of the necessity of the French Revolution. Louis XV seems to have been a nice enough fellow, once you got to know him (he was rather shy). But he should never have been absolute monarch of the most powerful nation in Europe. Like any present-day university department, the French court was a hotbed of unwarranted arrogance and insane vanity. Instead of making a few questionable tenure decisions, Louis and his nobles fought ruinous wars, wasted vast sums of money, and displayed an awesome indifference to the fate of the people they were ostensibly governing. I'm aware that this isn't exactly news, but as I said, this book somehow brought home, more powerfully than censorious or scholarly works on the same period, the sheer folly of the system. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat As perhaps goes without saying, this recent novel -- Vargas Llosa's take on the Dominican Republic under Trujillo -- is superb. More precisely, Vargas Llosa uses Trujillo as an opportunity for taking a shot at a portrayal of the corrosive effects of absolute power, a theme which is understandably popular in Latin American fiction (Garcia Marquez, Asturias, etc.). The exposé of terror is somewhat predictable, but still effective. And Vargas Llosa does a nice job of presenting the dictator as a credible human being without whitewashing the brutality of his regime. On his rendering, Trujillo is at least sincere in believing himself to be a bringer of order and prosperity (which he was, to a certain extent). But he is indifferent to most forms of suffering, blindly committed to primitive notions of "honor," infatuated with his own power. He comes off, in fact, as an overgrown child, absolutely convinced that all his actions are correct, incredulous of the stupidity of those who fail to recognize his infallibility. His inner circle also appear as children, desperate to stay on the good side of the undisputed leader of their games. Reading this book in conjunction with Mitford's biography of Madame de Pompadour, I began to see Trujillo's Dominican Republic as a less civilized version of France under the Bourbons. When a courtier fell out of favor with Louis XV, he was banished from Versailles, exiled to the seclusion of his country estate. When a courtier fell out of favor with Trujillo, he would likely be tortured and killed, along with his family. Gore Vidal, Duluth In his criticism of contemporary fiction, Vidal is unsparing in his disdain for so-called "experimental" novels. Duluth is, I presume, meant as an extended expression of contempt for the likes of Pynchon, Barthelme, and Barth. "Not only are your ideas otiose and your sentences tedious, but the pretense that your books are hard to write is absurd. Behold how effortlessly a traditional novelist like myself can churn out this vapid nonsense." Actually, Vidal kills two of the birds he twits in his "bookchat" with this metafictional stone. The pretentions of the self-proclaimed avant-garde and the laziness of best-selling scribblers are subjected to equal derision, as Vidal cheekily suggests that the theoretical precepts of, say, Roland Barthes are perfectly embodied in the practice of compilers of worthless "popular" fiction. Of course, Barthes (as I recall) more or less says as much himself. But Vidal is out to demonstrate the vacuity of literature that does nothing but recycle stale conventions from earlier works, as if there really were nothing outside the text. By playing the game to perfection (and he does, in my view: this is certainly more interesting, in Barthelme's line, than most of Barthelme), Vidal would show us that the game isn't worth playing. George Eliot, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob Now that I've read these short stories, I'm running out of works by Eliot to encounter for the first time. I suspect I'll reread Middlemarch twice or thrice before I gird myself to peruse Romola or The Spanish Gypsy. In any event, these are interesting, if slight, tales. The second is a remarkable confection, written entirely in the delightfully pert narratorial voice that makes Eliot's satirical essays such a delight. I don't know of any other work in which she permits herself to place her tongue so firmly in her cheek for such an extended stretch of prose. The story itself is a mere trifle, but the style makes it a tour de force of trifling. The first tale is much more curious: a portrait of the artist as a morose clairvoyant, burdened by the clarity of his insight into the petty motivations of his fellow human beings. It's like a prose version of one of Tennyson's studies in morbid psychology. And, as in Tennyson, I felt uncertain whether the portrayal of a self-pitying, aesthetic, misunderstood protagonist is meant to be ironic. Tennyson, we are told, laughed hysterically when reciting "St. Simeon Stylites," but the contemporary reader doesn't quite get the joke. Part of the difficulty for us, I think, is that the modernists made a specialty of this kind of thing, honing to perfection the practice of ironizing the "artist as a young man" (Stephen Dedalus, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) while simultaneously insinuating that their awkward alter egos were the true heroes of modern life. The Victorians, by comparison, can't help but seem muddled. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 5th, 2004
9:36 am	Readings G. K. Chesterton, Twelve Types This is a collection of short essays on a variety of literary and historical figures. They are the quintessence of Chesterton: in each case, he takes a conventional opinion about a person and neatly shows that the exact opposite is in fact the "truth." Everyone says that Charles II was an indolent fool, but in fact he was a cunning despot and a "wholesome and systematic sceptic." Everyone says that Lord Byron was a pessimist, but he was really a great optimist, as his jaunty prosody reveals. Actually, Chesterton makes a habit of denying that authors he admires -- Stevenson, Carlyle -- are "pessimists." The reasoning, as far as I can make out, is as follows. No sensible person could possibly be a pessimist; anyone I admire must be a sensible person; I admire X; ergo, X is not a pessimist. The essay on Charles II includes a nice passage in which Chesterton remarks that "Scepticism both in its advantages and disadvantages is greatly misunderstood in our time. There is a curious idea abroad that scepticism has some connection with such theories as materialism and atheism and secularism. This is of course a mistake; the true sceptic has nothing to do with these theories simply because they are theories. The true sceptic is as much a spiritualist as he is a materialist. He thinks that the savage dancing round an African idol stands quite as good a chance of being right as Darwin. He thinks that mysticism is every bit as rational as rationalism." The last sentence in particular does more to make sense of William James than a number of books on him which I've been forcing myself to look through of late. Actually, once you accept that each essay will turn on a facile reversal of some snippet of putative conventional wisdom, there are any number of passing remarks that are genuinely insightful, though unfortunately overshadowed by the paradoxes Chesterton tediously insists on foregrounding. Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure I wanted to read Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, but couldn't find the library's copy. I settled for this little book instead, which proved to be a sort of rambling memoir and credo. At times, I was impressed by the writing; at other times, I was put off by what seemed to me lapses into inane rhetoric. (The "world," it appears, wants us to be only what we're "supposed" to be. Against this vague but awful pressure to conform, Allison adopts banal postures of defiance.) In general, I prefer introspection to sloganizing, unless the slogans are exceptionally well-worded. On the other hand, the last page of the book informs me that it was written for performance, so perhaps its simplicities shouldn't be held against the author. Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies My first thought, on finishing this book, was one of mild amazement. Was this really the best work of fiction published in the United States in 1999? I know that the Pulitzer Prize is something of a joke, but ... Now, I don't want to disparage Lahiri. Unlike most books of short stories, there are no real clunkers in this collection. Then again, neither are there any memorable gems. It's more than competent throughout, but far from spectacular. Lahiri presents more or less the same situation in each of her stories. Lonely people who are too befuddled to do anything about their situation drift passively through unsatisfactory lives. Sometimes events take a turn for the worse: a sputtering marriage finally breaks down; an affair staggers to a halt. Less frequently, fate deals a kinder hand: an awkward arranged marriage evolves into genuine companionship. I thought that I would at least get a peep at Indian life, but the cultural details never seemed to rise above the level of decoration. Lahiri's characters are essentially isolated and unhappy, and only accidentally of Indian origin. This is to say that her insights, such as they are, pertain to the psychology of loneliness in general, rather than to the Indian-American experience in particular. Nancy Mitford, Voltaire in Love This is one of the most delightful books I've read in some time. In effect, it's a joint biography of Voltaire and his longtime mistress, Madame du Châtelet. The latter, of whom I knew nothing prior to reading Mitford, was apparently a genius (while pregnant, she spent twelve hours a day completing her translation of Newton into French), a dynamo (she was also capable of spending twelve hours at cards, losing fantastic sums), and a strumpet (in addition to her husband and Voltaire, she enjoyed a string of lovers). Actually, on Mitford's remarkably engaging reconstruction of the period, members of the upper class of 18th-century France seem to have spent most of their time taking one lover after another, flitting from country house to court and back again, and (fortunately for the historian) preserving every scrap of gossip in letters and diaries. Mitford takes the sensible attitude that these people, for all their silliness and vanity, knew how to live. And her prose, breezy and droll, is perfectly suited to her subject matter. Sarashina Nikki, or As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams This is a diary written by a woman from Heian Japan. The narrative is as insubstantial as the sensibility, which is more or less summed up by the English title of the work. The nameless author was the daughter of a minor official. In her youth, she liked to read tales. Later, she came to prefer Buddhism to "idle" fiction, and went on a number of pilgrimages. In between, she spent some unhappy time as a timid lady-in-waiting, and memorialized her wistfulness in a number of poems to which translation does no justice. I can't think of anything else to say about a book I've just finished reading. (43 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 31st, 2004
12:46 am	Circles and Lines I've just finished John Demos's recently-published Massey Lectures, which deal with "the shape of life in early America." For whatever reason, I've read most of the volumes in this series of lectures. My favorite, it perhaps goes without saying, is Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country. The others were either rambling (E. L. Doctorow's autobiographical musings) or jejune (Andrew Delbanco's jeremiad against contemporary American values). Demos's book falls somewhere in between, far less forceful than Rorty's, but more worthwhile than the other two. The book tells a simple, and unoriginal, story. In the old days (which is to say: days in centuries prior to the nineteenth) life was cyclical. Everyday existence was pinned to a few clockwork regularities: sunrise and sunset, the course of the seasons. People did the same things their ancestors had done, and wanted to do nothing more. The words "new" and "innovation" were terms of opprobrium. Everyone was boring. Then, around the time of the American Revolution, things started to change. All of a sudden, novelty wasn't a bad thing. Existence ceased to be incessant repetition, becoming instead a linear progression. People started writing autobiographies, giving narrative thrust to their lives. Instead of merely filling an established role in a fixed society, individuals began inventing their own selves in a world whose boundaries had become fluid. This isn't a new interpretation, though Demos does a nice job of giving a nutshell version of it. He offers a compact overview of what has become a standard way of understanding the origins of "modernity," fleshed out with a few telling examples drawn from his discipline of social history. If you want a brief statement of what is, I suppose, the conventional wisdom among contemporary historians as to how modern individualism emerged in this country, this book seems as good a place as any in which to obtain it. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 30th, 2004
9:45 pm	Roger Zelazny I've become increasingly derelict about maintaining this journal, partly because I've been doing other things (e.g. spending a week ambling through Berkeley), partly due to a larger lethargy. So it goes. To jump back into the swing of commentary: I've spent a substantial portion of the last three days reading the ten volumes of Roger Zelazny's Amber novels. These are, I guess, works of fantasy, a genre of fiction I never read. But between the ages of 10 and 12, they were perhaps my favorite books in the world. When I came upon a collection of them at a book sale on Friday, I couldn't resist picking it up and revisiting my youth. It's hard for me to offer any kind of serious opinion about these books. I found them enormously interesting, but I can't tell how much of this was an intense experience of déjà lu -- as I worked my way through the 1200+ pages, I found myself remembering all the characters, plot twists, even a surprising number of individual sentences -- and how much was a mature appreciation of the work itself. The first few chapters of the first book, to my sorrow, are a feeble imitation of Raymond Chandler's The High Window. But the prose gains in strength, and the noir influence (the protagonist is a charming, unsentimental tough guy who can't trust anyone as he pursues his quest) diminishes after the first two books. Presumably Zelazny realized that he could do something more interesting than juxtapose Chandler's moral vision with Tolkien's resuscitation of the prose romance. The last half of the series seems to me quite good; even if I hadn't been besotted with the stuff at an impressionable age, I might well have found it worth reading. I certainly found it more compelling and intelligent than the novel I read previous to submerging myself in Zelazny, Robert Musil's The Confusions of Young Torless. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 19th, 2004
10:13 pm	Two Bad Nineteenth-Century American Novels To tell the truth, most nineteenth-century American novels aren't very good. With the exception of maybe a dozen great writers, the men and women who produced fiction in this country between 1800 and 1900 were not blessed with an overabundance of talent. One such minor figure, as I've recently found for myself, was Edward Eggleston. The Hoosier School-Master isn't a complete waste of time, but neither is it any good. It is frequently the case that the first few chapters of bad novels are, if not enjoyable, at least tolerable. Before the panicky author succumbs to the lure of conventional plots and pious sentiments, he often manages to hit off a few decent scenes. In the opening pages of his book, Eggleston does a nice job conveying the horror of being a newly-appointed teacher in a miserable little town, doomed to ride herd over a pack of illiterate ruffians who only want to humiliate their taskmaster. There's also an interesting bit of local color: it appears that spelling bees were a popular entertainment in small-town Indiana before the Civil War. The rest is nonsense, trivial melodrama and treacly Christian sentiment. More disappointing, because I expected more of it, was John W. De Forest's Honest John Vane. I read his best-known novel, Miss Ravenel's Conversion, years ago, and found it to be as interesting a book as Edmund Wilson had made it out to be. This novel, though, is just weird. It's a satire on Gilded Age political corruption, like Henry Adams's Democracy, written in the manner of Pilgrim's Progress. I don't know what De Forest thought he was doing. Showing that sin is still with us? Trying to impress the simple people of a Christian nation with the evils of their overlords? De Forest's moral is sound enough: "This great Republic which brags so of its freedom, is tyrannized over by a few thousand capitalists and jobbers." So long as votes can be bought by lobbyists, De Forest suggests, democracy is a joke; and so long as legislators are ordinary people, indecisive and greedy, their votes will be available for purchase. No doubt De Forest is right, but the novel in which he makes the point is impossibly flimsy. A couple of broadly-drawn characters engage in unsurprising behavior against a handful of undescribed backdrops. In other words, a typical American novel, c. 1875. Of course, it's only by reading a number of such books that one can realize the superiority of a Howells. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 18th, 2004
11:56 pm	Norman Rush, again After expressing my contempt for Richard Powers's latest lifeless offering, it's a pleasure to pay tribute to a novelist who is competent to create representations of lifelike human beings. Having enjoyed Rush's most recent novel, Mortals, I read the rest of his corpus, which comprises all of two books: Whites, a collection of early stories, and Mating, the National Book Award-winner. The stories are mere sketches, tune-ups for his later work. Reading them, I realized that the strength of Rush's fiction is in its handling of ideas and its intricate tracing of the minutiae of interpersonal relations. Without these -- and the stories are, alas, without them -- he's just another storyteller, producing more or less uninteresting scenes from ordinary life, albeit in Botswana. Mating, on the other hand, is superb. It's much like Mortals, though the hyper-reflective, witty, intimacy-obsessed narrator is a marginal female academic (a floundering grad student in anthropology) rather than a marginal male academic (a minor Miltonist). Not only do the novels share the same concerns and style, but Rush even recycles trivial details. Each of his protagonists mentions a depressed friend who once recounted to him/her the entirety of The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens in order to avoid venturing into a conversational abyss. In a lesser novelist, such repetition and homogeneity would be deadly, but I find Rush so delightful that I only long for even more of the same. In a word, he is preoccupied by two questions: How shall we live together, as members in common of the human race? and How shall we live together, as members of frangible relationships? Rush is one of the few contemporary novelists I know who is credibly intelligent in his responses to both of these questions. Though his politics are standard-issue leftism (corporate capitalism and Western greed are ruining the planet), his discussions are always nuanced and interesting. And he's even better with personal life, as he displays a formidable gift for tender and plausible evocations of the "permanent intimate comedy" that is, in his opinion, the essence of life with another person. (Comment on this)
11:18 pm	Two Stupid Novels It appears that I've allowed several weeks to lapse since I last updated this journal. Not that anyone necessarily cares, but I've been reading James; reading Emerson; preparing what my advisors tell me will be the last minor revisions before they approve my proposal. But this veritable maelstrom of activity -- by my minimal standards -- hasn't prevented me from reading a number of other books. That being the case, I might as well take a moment to comment on a few of them. I'll start with the most irritating books I've read in the last two weeks. First on the list: Richard Powers's most recent novel, The Time of Our Singing. I don't know what kind of reviews this book received, but I seem to recall that it was a National Book Award finalist. Having enjoyed a few of Powers's previous novels, I was looking forward to it. Also, in the days prior to beginning it I had drifted into one of my periodic spasms of novel-grazing, in which I read the first few chapters of one book after another without sticking to any. The only way to deal with such episodes, I find, is to make a firm resolution to finish the next novel I commence, no matter how unspectacular it may seem. Thus, it's usually a good idea to select a work that I'm looking forward to reading when I undertake this commitment. And thus, I read 600+ pages of a book I quickly came to loathe. Powers is clearly bidding for greatness by tackling Big Themes: race, identity, America, the meaning of life. Unfortunately, the book he has produced is a lame (but oh so earnest) credo. Racism Is Horrible, Powers blares. Music Is Wonderful. Family Matters. There are numerous finely-wrought passages in which Powers proves that his heart is in the right place by depicting the horrors wrought by racial prejudice; there are equally numerous, equally finely-wrought passages in which Powers waxes ecstatic about the power of sound. These passages all sound alike -- Powers, I realize, only has one register of "fine writing" -- and say nothing beyond the platitudes I have already enunciated. The pretty sentences fail to disguise Powers's complete inability to create living human beings. All his characters are thin and predictable: absent-minded, socially-inept Jewish scientists; hearty, soulful, determined black folk. Having populated his book with non-entities, Powers proceeds to dote on each and every one of his darling creations. They are all brilliant and kind and generous and gifted with amazing musical talents. One wonders why all these remarkable prodigies can't just get along, until one realizes that they are only stereotypes, whose under-motivated discords are required so the creaky gears of the plot can continue to make their insufferably slow revolutions. In the end, the book reminded me of nothing so much as a made-for-TV movie, if such things were written by conscientious wordsmiths. Many of the sentences have a pleasant ring, but the people are stale absurdities, their problems are tedious, and the Issues they exemplify are all-too-blatant. While flaunting his sensitivity to the deplorable history of race relations in this country, Powers demonstrates a lamentable ignorance of psychology, or at least proves himself incapable of evoking anything resembling a complex inner life. If one could write a great novel by gluing together a large quantity of sweet-sounding sentences, Powers would be our Tolstoy. If a novel, unlike a song, must do more than colorfully restate banalities, Powers has produced a piece of sonorous rubbish. I'll take a shorter way with my other stupid novel, which is actually a collection of three inane novellas by Joseph Roth. A British publisher has been flooding the market, of late, with new translations of Roth's (apparently sizable) oeuvre. I've glanced at a few of these, without finding that any caught my eye. At last, I decided to sit down with a book entitled Three Novellas. The last of these, "The Legend of the Holy Drinker," is a buoyant if slight work which I can almost recommend; the other two were immediately forgettable, like every other bit of Roth I've tried to enjoy. Roth appears to be a cult figure; I appear to be immune to his charms, whatever they may be. (Comment on this)