Chinese compromises

China is enormous and important — culturally, economically  it is a place that can't be ignored. But there are lots of questions we need to ask about exactly how to engage with it. That is, how to be respectful and open-minded about another culture while still preserving our idea of universal western values. And I don't think our sense of history or of the world beyond our borders has prepared to understand these challenges.

I was thinking about this when I read the story in today's Times about how readily Western publishers censor works for publication in China.

Such compromises, almost unheard of just five years ago, are becoming increasingly common as American authors and their publishers are drawn to the Chinese market. With a highly literate population hungry for the works of foreign writers, China is an increasing source of revenue for American publishing houses; last year e-book earnings for American publishers from China grew by 56 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers. Chinese publishing companies bought more than 16,000 titles from abroad in 2012, up from 1,664 in 1995. [my italics]

Some people, who are trying to make a buck, have done the math and figured that this is the way to go. I'm not sure that I am convinced. But that this isn't a big conversation is a serious concern.

This is, in part, what I was writing about in my column about Xu Bing's "Phoenix." Americans have lost the ability to navigate international situations that aren't black and white.

Bloomsday comes but once a year

A statue of James Joyce at a cafe near where he worked in Pula, one of the many places where he lived and wrote. 

Having a little trouble getting into the spirit of Bloomsday this year. Mostly because it feels weird when it falls on a weekend. It also catches us at a moment when things are very busy, and we're going through a pretty big transition here. It was exactly a year ago that we abruptly scrapped our plans for a year in Moscow and settled on going to Budapest. And already we're preparing to go back. After such an eventful year, it's hard to fully celebrate the sublime joy and drama of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.


But I'll still head out for a celebratory Guinness or two this afternoon.

Life under the boot

There is a photo from my wife's family that haunts me in an unusual way. It shows my mother-in-law when she was still a small girl, standing on the balcony of the family apartment, being hugged by her father, my wife's grandfather. It is taken sometime in the late 1940s, and they are all smiling and laughing.

As a Western who has read and studied those years, something startled me. That during Stalin's reign -- when millions of people had already starved, perished in unimaginably horrible wars (which her father had just endured), vanished into gulags, and generally lived beneath a permanent dark cloud of arbitrary arrest -- people could laugh and hug one another seemed very strange. It had not crossed my mind in such horrible times, people would still behave like people.

I thought of that picture again this month when I on something of a whim read Martin Amis' 2002 book Koba the Dread, a sort of literary memoir to remind everyone that Stalin was awful. I was curious to read it to see what sort of animal this book was. I remember when it came out, how left field and strange it seemed that the guy who wrote London Fields and a treatise about arcade games felt obliged to abruptly join a sprawling, quintessential 20th century argument. I wanted to read it now just to see if there was any news on that conversation.

It didn't take long to realize there wasn't. Amis spends most of the time relitigating familiar arguments, and the text is mostly a synopsis of Robert Conquest's work, with memories of his father's journey from card-carrying Red to loudmouth Tory, and some gruesome, heartbreaking details from firsthand accounts by Nadezhda Mandelstam and other survivors.

He sifts through a lot of material gracefully, which might make it a useful first read for a "lay reader" who doesn't think regularly about Nikolai Yezhov's gruesome end, or the psychogeography of Kolyma. As Michiko Kakutani wrote at the time in the New York Times, "as flawed as Mr. Amis's book is, it does a credible job of conveying just how Stalin went about 'breaking the truth,' and it should send readers running to better, more scholarly books on this tragic period in history."

But ultimately, the first questions that arise when you hear of the book continue. Why did Amis, who by his own admission never really engaged very deeply in the politics of his times, suddenly feel he had to weigh in on all this?

I'm sensitive to this because of my current work. When I step away from my manuscript, I see that I'm basically trying to "explain" a group of people who for specific reasons bought into the Soviet scheme, and may or may not have had doubts about it along the way. I've been struggling to find the line between justifying what no sane person -- aware of all the facts -- could possibly endorse, and trying to explain how intelligent, well-meaning, and daresay decent people could have dedicated their lives, their work, and sacrificed their freedom for it. Seems to me someone has to think about these things on their own terms without rushing to judgment.

It is about seeing complexity, a skill not just useful when looking into the past. It is self-evidently ghastly to prosecute twelve-year olds for political crimes, but you'll never know why if you can't appreciate how at the same time loyal Party members in the state bureaucracy also loved their children.

Imagine you live in Germany in the 1930s, or in North Korea today. No matter how much you wish it to be true, the statistical reality is that you would not be a member of the underground helping save your Jewish neighbors, or standing at the side of a weep-athon for Kim Jong Il shaking your head. You would be trying to keep yourself and your family alive. You'd be hoping the Gestapo walks past your door and leaves you alone, you'd be on your knees making sure everyone could see you wailing for the departed Dear Leader.

Mob dynamics are terrifying, and easy to underestimate from a distance. And the best inoculation against their danger is an awareness of what human nature really is like. Our Founders understood this, and did everything they could to protect us from it while preserving democratic order.

And still... too many give in to the worst parts of our collective consciousness. There are too many today who howl with rage and delight when some hateful fool tells them we need to round up "illegal aliens," or deny rights to adults based on who they have consensual sex with, or rail about how elite liberal snobs use higher education to indoctrinate young adults (who, presumably, could think for themselves). The past isn't dead, as Faulkner warned, and it isn't even past.

My 2011 'list'

I love year-end "best of" lists -- most of us are too busy with everyday life to keep up with everything we would like to, and this is our one chance to catch up before the whole caravan moves on. Since we can't be a fanatic fanboy about everything we'd like, we have to accept we're all amateurs now. 

I'm at that point in life where I can't even keep up enough to offer a whole list of my favorite cultural production of the year. There are just a few things I want to rave about before the calendar flips...

MUSIC I think it is amazing that a serious, unflinching examination of the English experience of the First World War would be the year's only album that matters. PJ Harvey's Let England Shake doesn't compromise much, in its allusions, its poetry, or its assessment of the vast dangerous gulf between the language of valor and patriotism and the blood and terror of war. By wisely looking through the lens of a distant trauma -- the trenches and fields of a war a hundred years ago -- it meditates on the deep social costs of what we can politely call "conflict" in a way I can't remember anything else in recent memory has.

I've never been great at writing about music, so I can only fumble around for the right words about it. Much of the haunting, relentlessness appears to have something to do with the autoharp, and her particular singing style of late -- that choking, high shriek I believe she debuted on White Chalk that some of her long-time fans find grating. Her choice of samples ranges from the cliched -- that bugle in "The Glorious Land" -- to the inspired -- a new generation of listeners has now met Niney the Observer thanks to "Written on the Forehead." But one thing that is consistent is the way she can still make your skin crawl, as in "All & Everyone," which with little sentiment or irony imagines what it was like to die at Gallipoli.

But what's more interesting is how this album fits in Harvey's catalog. It seems crazy to say it about sometime whose first album I remember hearing in high school, but this album puts her in that exclusive company of artists like Dylan and Lou Reed and -- for some reason the analogy always springs to my mind -- Neil Young. These are all artists who came to sudden, youthful fame in a particular genre -- folkie, art rock, country rock, and the riot grrl whatever -- but were so talented and brave and devoted to their craft and vision that they had to grow and evolve with each subsequent album. Through the years, they've managed the unique task of growing up to become interesting adults, and you reach a point where the brand is so strong you pay attention to whatever they come up with. I can't wait to see what Polly Jean creates next.

MOVIESThere was a moment maybe halfway through Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life when I realized just how well conditioned we are as viewers these days. We expect every scene in a film to be busy, to be working. But there was one moment in Malick's film when one of the brothers is sitting at a table painting. As is Malick's meditative style, we linger around for a few beats longer than we expect. The scene is meaningless out of context, it only "advances" the story in the context of the dozens of other scenes around it.

Why, I would like to know, are filmmakers so terrified of taking their time? Why do they insist on assuming we have no memory, no patience, no attention span?

Actually, don't answer that. I saw a preview of Jack and Jill before I saw Tree of Life at the Mammut shopping mall near Moskva Ter, which managed to make me shrink into my seat in shame, even in a dark room where no one could know I was American.

And of course, it isn't hard to find the reasons that a movie like Malick's is a tough sell. As I left the theater, I heard two young women speaking -- in English, oddly -- about the movie. One was complaining about how she couldn't figure out what this and that "signified." This inability to handle the idea of a sweeping, non-linear, subtle movie has become part of this film's lore already. There is the story about the theater posting that it wouldn't be giving refunds if you asked for one because you couldn't figure it out. The quotes from Sean Penn about how he couldn't figure out what he was doing there (frankly, neither did I, his performance was rather statuesque).

I wanted to patiently tell her not to pull a muscle trying to figure it out. A movie isn't a math problem, for crying out loud.

Sometimes, you have to just buy the ticket and take the ride. That's the charm of film -- you give your time and your attention and you get taken someplace. It requires a great degree of trust, and Malick more than earned it. A few others have for me too. Stanley Kubrick, for example, is the same way for me.

The easy knock on these filmmakers is that they are pretentious, and self-absorbed and obtuse. But really, that's just ambition. And there's a reason I dropped my 1,200 forints to watch this instead of Jack and Jill.

There's nothing wrong with understanding that film can be poetry and it can be prose. And hell, it can be painting, and it can be music.

BOOKS

I like books. Quite a lot. And I feel I should have something clever to say about the year in literature. But still after all these years, I continue to to be aware that there were hundreds of years of great literature before 2011. I'm still catching up.

So, to borrow James Wolcott's appropriate phrase, I haven't spent much time this year "preparing Joan Didion's reliquary [or] fawning over the latest literary genius farted aloft from the borough of Brooklyn."

One more thing about 'Hitch'

I've been sufficiently creeped out by the fulsome celebration of all things "Hitch" that I'm compelled to write a little more. The turning point was reading Katie Roiphe, the hackiest of Slate's considerable stable of knee-jerk "contrarians" -- who regularly pulls off a trifecta of being wrong, thin-skinned, and boring -- describing how Hitchens offered personal encouragement in her career as a "provocateur."

Well, the man frequently suffered from terrible judgment, and I'm glad that my favorite writer younger than me, Alex Pareene at Salon, was there to settle the record. In particular, his refusal to excuse his hypocritical support for the war in Iraq:

"And so we had the world's self-appointed defender of Orwell's legacy happily joining an extended misinformation campaign designed to sell an incompetent right-wing government's war of choice. The man who carefully laid out the case for arresting Henry Kissinger for war crimes was now palling around with Paul fucking Wolfowitz."

The sting of this behavior is just how convincing his writing about Kissinger and that ilk is. I was shaken by his powerful reporting on the immorality of Agent Orange -- a toxin whose evil reaches across generations -- that I cannot understand how that writer and the Iraq War cheerleader are related (it's a little infuriating to say it now, but seriously, go read 'The Vietnam Syndrome' in VF). Strange, but I think that to be so right about one thing while at the same time being so wrong about another is a chronic condition of the 20th century.

There was a quote kicking around twitter in which Hitchens described how he always wrote to be read posthumously. That's an ambitious idea, and truly cuts both ways. Without the shambolic, chain-smoking, lovable curmudgeon we remember from the chat-show circuit, we only have his words. Many should be cherished for a good long time (see above), but I hope I don't live to see the day that his cheap, blood-thirsty, war-mongering is accepted as truth by reasonable people. 

If there is a fate worse than an eternity in hell, perhaps it has having your biggest mistakes laying in the sun without the opportunity to charm yourself into a state of grace where a mere man does not belong.

Hitchens

I'd long made it a habit to automatically read anything by Christopher Hitchens that came across my vision, and it has been an unpleasant feeling this past year of so to realize each time that this may be the last thing we'll have. It feels terrible that this long anticipated absence has finally arrived.

Others will say more precisely and more eloquently what they'll miss about his work. I'll miss the routine of engagement, the curiosity that comes trying to figure what he'd have about this or that. I can't think of any other writers who could make you applaud or hiss with such regularity. I'll never come around to his opinion about the Iraq War -- which I guess "ended" the same day he did (and don't read too many fawning eulogies without also reading John Cook's blisteringly honest breakdown of his biggest mistake). Also, I'll probably never think much more of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie than I do now, but those times when you agreed with him... boy, you felt there were legions with you.

Bless him for never letting an idea alone, for proving that "received wisdom" is a wholly bad idea. His insistence on looking hard and critically at Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger, the Clintons, Jimmy Carter (to name just my favorites) were great blows for truth and justice. I wish more people would be persuaded.

I think that his last great crusade, the "New Atheism" as it has been dubbed, is an important legacy. I was never wholly sold on it, mostly because I think protesting quite so much crosses the line into just being a jerk, but I'm incredibly glad he didn't shrink from the fight. This is a world in which born-again Christians continue to obnoxiously insist they are a persecuted minority, and I'm very grateful that he had the vision and courage to speak out on behalf of the real victims of oppression: the godless, and by extension those who wish to be free to explore their doubts.

If I was often impressed by the reasoning in his writing, I was often less fond of his style. They say he could churn out columns in 30 minutes, and it often showed. They often felt like hectoring emails. But great "writers" are a dime a dozen these days. His achievement was to keep the spirit of George Orwell alive for another generation. He proved that all wasn't lost to self-absorbed craftsmen and panicky careerists.

From his formative years in London in the 1970s right up to today, he wrote when the the sureties and pieties of the "short" 20th century were coming to a messy, confusing end. We have no idea what is being forged at the moment, but no doubt we'll need to be as curious, argumentative, and unintimidated as he was.

'Boynya nomer pyat'

I found another one of those things in the attic at the dacha that complicates my understanding of the life of the mind in the Soviet Union. Like many summer cottages, ours also serves as an off-site storage place, with a ton of musty old books and journals lying about. There are tons of science journals (my father-in-law is a physicist), books about chess (my wife's grandfather was a fanatic), and a little used complete collected works of V.I. Lenin (pages of which are frequently used as kindling when the family makes shashlik).

They  also have a large number of crinkled copies of the literary journal Novy Mir, which had a fascinating run in the 1960s. Every time I look into a random one, I find something surprising.

This time, I opened the issue from March 1970, and discovered a lengthy excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which had been published only the year before.

It is particularly poignant, because that book was one of the nine books banned by a New York school district and led to the landmark 1982 Supreme Court case Island Trees School District v. Pico, which found that the First Amendment applies to school libraries too.

And it is particularly ironic that the book remains to this day, in America, the source of controversy for being too dangerous for young minds. The school board in Republic, Missouri, just this summer decided to ban it.

At Play in the Fields of the Word

Perhaps best not to ask why, but I spent a little while this afternoon reading Rhoda Koenig's lengthy feature in New York magazine about the PEN conference Norman Mailer organized in January 1986. It was a bonfire of the vanities, with every big name in literature showing up to make a point, shake their head, or simply cut a dashing figure through the proceedings.

They argued about politics, oppression, the writer's duty. About sex and gender and alienation and censorship. There were public arguments, bitter recriminations, hurt feelings, frighteningly hilarious anecdotes about Albert Speer, Robert Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. John Updike makes a fool of himself, Saul Bellow confirms his reputation as a difficult person.

The observations along the way are fascinating -- Susan Sontag's tweed trousers, Isabel Allende's paisley shawl, Czeslaw Milosz's eyebrows, Danilo Kis' pointedly casual homophobia. All this plays out against the reliable baseline of Norman Mailer's more than ample ego. I'm convinced that time will be kind to Mailer's legacy, especially considering that his ample faults leave us something like this ("Mailer was laughing with a couple of reporters, saying that he got the bruise under his right eye 'sparring,' and telling one journalist not to ask him general questions. 'You should say, 'What do you think of Susan Sontag's remark that Norman Mailer is a mean-spirited dog?'")

At some point, some of the attendees complain that there was too much talk about politics and not enough about books and literature. But you know, I'd take that. What do we have today? Jonathan Franzen mooning over his new BlackBerry, that's what. 

Living with a novel

Yesterday I finally finished Norman Mailer's enormous historical novel about the CIA, Harlot's Ghost. I'm a good reader, so I'm ashamed about how long it took me to finish the thing. And now, I feel like I just threw out of my house an 80-year-old distant uncle who spent several weeks on my couch spouting dirty stories, conspiracy theories about Sam Giancana, and pseudo-Freudian nonsense. Glad he's gone, but kinda miss him already. 

'God's empty chair'

I can't be the only one who first heard about George Shearing, who died this week at 91, in Jack Kerouac's On the Road...

Dean and I went to see Shearing at Birdland in the midst of the long, mad weekend. The place was deserted, we were the first customers, ten o'clock. Shearing came out, blind, led by the hand to his keyboard. He was a distinguished-looking Englishman with a stiff white collar, slightly beefy, blond, with a delicate English-summer's-night air about him that came out in the first rippling sweet number he played as the bass-player leaned to him reverently and thrummed the beat. The drummer, Denzil Best, sat motionless except for his wrists snapping the brushes. And Shearing began to rock; a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat., his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat. The music picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that's all. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you'd think the man wouldn't have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to "Go!" Dean was sweating; the sweat poured down his collar. "There he is! That's him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!" And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean's gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn't see. "That's right!" Dean said. "Yes!" Shearing smiled; he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial. When he was gone Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. "God's empty chair," he said.

It's okay to say, 'this is it' right now

The main reason it is taking me so long to make progress on the historical novel I'm working on is that there are so many ways to trip up. Recreating the past is a minefield of anachronisms, missteps, and potential howlers that you have to carefully creep your way through.

For example, you can never tell which common phrases might not have been around during the time you are writing about. In the past few days, almost randomly, I've learned from both A.J. Liebling's Mollie and Other War Pieces and Paul Fussell's Wartime that using the phrase "This is it" in its modern usage (to signify the start of something dramatic or momentous) is an invention of American infantrymen during the early days of the Second World War.

I guess it one of those small points, but if historical novelists don't lose sleep about them, who will?

Person who died

I never really bothered to have a strong opinion about Jim Carroll, the poet, diarist, and rock star who died suddenly last Friday at the age of 60. He swam in the same current as many of my favorite writers and musicians, so I've long known and admired much of his work. But I've never felt much more than that. He was in all the right places, knew the right people, but it always felt like he was opportunely a few steps behind.


Take his cult classic, The Basketball Diaries, which never struck me as even a very good example of writing about drugs. Looking at it again recently, it seems to me it isn't much more than a disjointed collection of clever observations, with a certainly dated shock value, which all suggest raw talent that might lead to something solid with the right influences. But the book itself never gets too deeply into why this nice Catholic jock would go so far off the rails, nor about what any of these misadventures might have to tell a disinterested reader.


His poetry was, I guess, alright, but not really that distinctive from a lot of the kind of stuff happening around New York in the good old days. The Jim Carroll Band, his game effort at rock n' roll/poetic fusion, never went far enough (see the perfectly serviceable version of "Sweet Jane" below, which really doesn't give you any reason not to just listen to Lou's original version again).  


 The only thing he did that is truly timeless is the song "People Who Died," an unrelenting, upbeat, almost hypnotizing rocker that transcends the ghoulishness of its subject matter to become a very profound assertion of life in the face of impermanence. But even then, the song was just an adaptation of a poem by his friend and mentor, Ted Berrigan.


Carroll gave a reading at Penn when I was there, and I came away impressed. The thing that I remember most was his voice -- this incredible, authentic New-Yawk honk, which sounded incredibly strained and weary croaking out of his tall, frail body. There was something in the way he read that suggested a kind of humility. The kind of deep appreciation many recovering addicts possess, especially one that pissed away what many think could have been a really promising career in professional sports. There was something about him that made you want to root for him, a kind of everyman sense of wonder and awe.


Of course, there is another way to look at this -- Robert Christgau acidly described him as being a phony "who's been charming suckers ever since he ran away from home." (He then goes on to acknowledge that charming this successfully takes real talent. "He's got a great eye, a great memory, great connections. He knows how to put himself across.") I wouldn't be that uncharitable though. You have to imagine him as a fifteen year old kid with a lot on his plate -- one of the best young basketball players in the city, already turning tricks around Times Square to fuel a drug habit, and still finding the time to stalk Frank O'Hara as he walked home from work, just to see what he saw and maybe get an insight into what made his poetry tick. They really don't make them like that anymore -- poetry has become ossified and ridiculous, promising athletes are channeled into the game so thoroughly they barely develop personalities, and the great American stewing pot of New York is a pathetic shadow of itself. He swam in some amazing slipstreams.

Two ways of looking at a cruise ship

Most of the work I've read by David Foster Wallace, who killed himself last week, has been his journalism and nonfiction. I never read his fiction, but of course was quite aware of his singular place in American arts and letters, especially in the 1990s. I've had friends whose opinions I respect both slam and praise him, and I think that in itself is a sort of accomplishment. But there is one thing about him that has never set well with me. In one of my magazine writing classes at Columbia, we were assigned to read Wallace's impressive January 1996 folio "Shipping Out," a long essay about the cruise ship industry and the nature of vacation, relaxation and modern American life. It was a big hit in class, as it should be because it is really very insightful and well-written. At the same time, in another class, we read some James Agee, and I was impressed enough to check out of Butler Library a volume of his collected journalism pieces. Included was a feature for Fortune magazine from September 1937 entitled "Havana Cruise," a long essay about the then-fledgling cruise industry. In subject matter and approach, these two articles are very very similar. I've never been able to square how a writer as well-read and knowledgeable -- not to mention as obsessively enamored with footnotes of all shapes and sizes -- failed to include at least a passing mention of Agee's work. I'm not suggesting there is any wrongdoing of any sort, I just can't figure it out. That said, the two articles are really very interesting in presenting what I would call the modernist and postmodernist approach to narrative journalism. With a caveat that I haven't really sat down and read through them in nearly ten years, I remember Agee's story is earnest, serious, obsessed with "breaking news" and the idea of the new. Wallace's is a bit more fun, full of jokes and asides, and seems more interested in hashing out ideas and experiences in an effort to connect seemingly random and inconsequential themes into some kind of bigger coherence. What they both share is a bit of self-indulgence (Agee's sometimes pretentious verbiage [too much Joyce]; Wallace's distractions into pop culture ephemera and jumping into rabbit-holes of his own whim) and an overwhelming sense of dread (especially well done in Agee's piece. He had a much better sense of drama). Both are excellent reads.

Absurdistan

One of the books I bought on my trip to Washington and just got around to reading is Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan, which I found one sale at a bookshop in Georgetown. It's the story of Misha Vainberg, an obese son of a criminally rich man, who is eager to return to the multi-culti United States to be with his South Bronx love. But thanks to his father's line of work, Misha can't get an American visa, and so concocts a roundabout scheme involving a trip to a CIS nation on the Caspian Sea for a fraudulent EU passport. But he manages to get caught up in the murky world of post-Soviet politics.

As I read it, I felt a bit of deja vu: like his acclaimed debut, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan is in large part almost two completely different novels thrown together. In each case, one is very good, the other, not so much. Handbook is about the Russian-American immigrant experience -- full of of very sharp insights into about assimilation, America, Russia. But then goes wildly off the rails when the story relocates to Prague, or however Shteyngart specifically dubs its transparent stand-in. Absurdistan goes the same way, an opening in Russia that is full of close observation, followed by a meandering plot in some imaginary place.

I also have some concerns about his madcap quirkiness. This seems to be a common affliction among hot younger writers these days. I remember I first heard the word "Absurdistan" at a strangely under-publicized reading he gave at Barnard College years ago, right after Handbook came out. It was a very nice night, only about a dozen people showed up, and I was generally impressed. But when he mentioned he thought his next project would be called "Absurdistan," I thought, "uh-oh." But Shteyngart is writing about Russia, and having lived her for awhile, I see how that is actually probably the best key in which to work. For example, twice Misha Vainberg's cellphone doesn't work, and he gets an automated message that says, "Respected mobile phone user: your attempt to make a connection has failed. There is nothing more to be done. Please hang up." Sounds a little to quirky and cute, but that's actually what cellphones here say when they can't get a signal.

But what really sealed the book for me is the realization about what Shteyngart is really doing here. When I realized that I was starting to sympathize with a gluttonous, track-suit wearing, son of a murderous oligarch, through a lot of whining and some of the least appetizing sex scenes in all of fiction, I realized he's playing a pretty big game. He's taking a close hard look at the Russian Soul. He's trying to describe in lucid prose what, famously and aggravatingly, "can only be seen with the eyes of the soul." There are two scenes in particular that I think are laser-like in defining something important about Russia: the description of the way Misha and Alyosha-Bob become friends on a snowy night in college, and the brief speech Misha's servant Timofey delivers at a key moment late in the book. Never let it be said there are no writers anymore willing to tackle Big Themes.

Norman Mailer

It is very easy to make fun of Norman Mailer, and I think he was aware of that, and that’s what made him great. His death this weekend is sad enough – he never got that Nobel prize – and as mundane as it sounds, an era passes and I’m sad about what’s left.

I always took Mailer with a grain of salt, but he was such a figure that I realized I’d been thinking about him on two discreet occasions in just the past few days. First, I was wondering about what he thought about how rubbish the Village Voice has become. He was one of the founders in 1955, and I’ve always wondered if he ever bothered to check in with it in recent years. I’ve taken the paper’s collapse personally – in high school I would pay $2 for the thing at Lizotte’s newsstand in Northampton, and in college I had a subscription outright (this was before the Internet, and it feels like ages ago). I would read the things cover to cover, feeling my world open up as I read about the huge horizons of the big city, about bands and musicians and artists I hadn’t heard about yet. Within a few years though, it had collapsed into a dogmatic chaotic mush so predictable and bland that it wasn’t even worth its new cover price (free). Then a few years ago, those New Times twits bought it out, and brought their manner of sun-belt “alternative” writing to the grandfather of it all. Out went the stable of legendary – if somewhat lazy – writers, and in came a handful of underpaid kids. It is a shame, because I have always loved the idea of the alternative press, and I guess the future will be on the Internet somehow, sometime. And maybe it would take people like Mailer to ever get it working.

On a more broad level, I was thinking, as I often do, about how contemporary fiction and why I don’t give a damn about it. My latest round of thinking about it started when Nathan Englander’s much awaited second novel came out earlier this year, and as I read about it and heard the interviews, I became aware of an overwhelming feeling that there is nothing less I’d like to do than actually read the thing. I realized I read a lot of book reviews, and usually feel exactly the same way. There is nothing to get excited about, and Mailer was nothing if not exciting.

There is so much to like about his work. I remember reading The Naked and the Dead in college in giant hundred page chunks at a time. It was paced so well, and even though it was written just after the war ended and lay in plain sight for decades, it still shook and challenged everything I thought I knew about the war. I also greatly admire the manner in which he later turned to nonfiction. He was candid about how when he was young being a novelist was the most heroic thing you could do, but that in the 1960s nonfiction more and more took its place, and he brought something to that revolution. And later went back to fiction because it was important enough. He always had a way, even at his most obnoxious, to make you think. I saw him speak at Penn, and unfortunately all I can remember is that he spent a lot of time comprehensively attacking fluorescent lighting -- I agree with him, and to this day I think about that talk every time I’m in a quiet public room and hear that damn buzzing. I remember staying at a bed and breakfast in Maine with a ton of books on the shelves, including a host of Mailer’s works. I started flipping through a first edition of The Prisoner of Sex. I thought that I could detect in it the physical effect of writing on a typewriter. Something I can’t put my finger on about the fast pace of the writing, as fast as thought, mixed with a jangly and illusory confidence that comes from not thinking enough as the words hit the paper, and not thinking you have to rewrite as carefully as they should. There are a lot of things not to like about the man and his work. The egomania, the self-indulgent prose, the idea of the arts as a competitive sport, the attitudes toward women, the glorification of violence... But he was a man who was always looking for a fight or an argument, and always seemed willing to go out for a drink afterward. This honesty, friendliness, openness and risk-taking, are the best attributes of America. And it is something we are losing very fast.

Kerouac Day

For at least 16 of its 50 years On the Road has been a part of my life, and I’m glad of it, even as he has gone in and out of fashion. There has been a fair bit of hoopla about today’s 50th anniversary of the book’s publication – much of it has been pretty dismal, mawkish stuff about finding enlightenment on the great American road with a saxophone bleating in the background (a phenomenon discussed very well here and here).

When Olga was in New York last month I asked her to bring back a copy because I’d left my famous, weather-beaten copy in storage back home. I just reread it for the first time in a long while, and it was a very interesting experience. It is a work of art that stands the test of time better than I expected. Jack Kerouac has not been well-served by the critics who only saw a social phenomenon, nor by his passionate fans who could not separate the man and his life from his work.

A book like this becomes a sort of thermometer. When you are young and your life is stretched ahead of you the whole thing means something very different when you are no longer. So I found all kinds of surprising things as I read it. Somehow, when you are young, you read the sadness and loneliness that runs strongly through the book in a dismissive, romantic way. Now, I was surprised how a major theme of the book is really frustration and disappointment. All this talk about the novel being about “freedom” is either wishful thinking or rot.

And certainly, forget about Kerouac as the “voice of a generation,” whether for the beats or the hippies or slackers. Time and time again it has been proved that any critic who traffics in such nonsense is fit to be ignored. As a historical document, I think On the Road’s appeal is incredibly limited – it is not about a postwar generation struggling against conformity. That is merely the usual thoughtless stereotypes about the 1950s to which Baby Boomers cling to make dancing around in the mud at Woodstock like an idiot a matter of great historical necessity. And please forget about the book as a celebration of hedonism, the first foretaste of the Me Generation, an invitation to generations of slackers to shirk responsibility and hit the road. And spare me the clever asides about how a writer whose work is about “rebellion” against “conformity” has posthumously been used to sell Gap khakis.

Simply, it is indeed a celebration of America, and what it means to be American. It is about trying to tell a story in a new and bracing way. And it is about friendship, and how strange and exciting it is when you meet the right kind of person.

And there are a lot of important things that are completely forgotten in the Kerouac myth. At the heart of it all is a boy whose family originally hailed from Brittany and arrived in Lowell, Massachusetts by way of Riviere-de-Loup in Quebec. Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac grew up in a tight Quebec-American ghetto, and didn’t even begin to learn English until he was six and they introduced it at the parochial school he attended. He grew up speaking joual, the French patois spoken in Quebec that is what French would sound like without the grammarian glare of the Academie Francaise. So as an immigrant, he saw America as a newcomer would – as Saul Bellow would, for example – and as someone from an oral culture with a deep spoken word tradition, he had a very consciously artless, stream-of-consciousness approach to language (“Did you ever hear a guy telling a long wild tale to a bunch of men in a bar and all are listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, defray its rhythmic thought impact?” he asked in a 1968 Paris Review interview.)

Most writers, if they are being honest, just want to be liked. But the kind of big-time celebrity eludes most, and it is perhaps better that way. Devoted fans hobble your career and define you after you’ve died. When celebrities talk about what your work means to them, and teenagers carry around dog-eared copies of your work for a few years, and booksellers have to hide your book near the cash register to discourage shoplifters, you aren’t writing the narrative of your own life anymore. After the hipsters and the hippies got a hold of him, the myths became their own thing. It is infinitely more romantic to imagine him churning out On the Road in a coffee and benzedrine fugue on that famous 120-foot scroll now touring the country than to remember the subsequent revisions his editors put him through, or the countless drafts and sketches he had written before.

Kerouac broke under the pressure of fame, becoming something of a hermit, clinging to his mother, and in a few short years became little different than any other alcoholic from his old neighborhood in Lowell. Indeed, he was more Archie Bunker than Timothy Leary when he appeared on William F. Buckley’s television show in 1968 to explain in a drunken slur that the Vietnam War was actually conspiracy between the north and south Vietnamese – “who are cousins,” he helpfully noted – to get American Jeeps.

By then the myth had completely outstripped the man, and whether or not that will continue remains to be seen. The book can seem a bit mawkish, especially now when most prose is polished, and most dreams of literary stardom are more modest. For some, it is more an historical document rather than a work of art, especially after irony and sarcasm became the default position of hipsters everywhere.

And here is one more thing to keep in mind, that no matter how closely the life informed the work, they are really separate things. I personally think in my heart that Kerouac was a decent guy, and there is enough anecdotal evidence from friends and fellow-travelers to suggest that Kerouac was a plain decent guy. But when it comes to the work, it just doesn’t matter.

I think about Kerouac’s peculiar relationship with poet Frank O’Hara. They shared a number of close friends – Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers – and yet they did not get along. It is easy to see why considering their personalities. Kerouac was a painfully shy working class guy, insecure around well-educated people, and prone to getting dangerously drunk to offset his shyness, especially when he was in New York. O’Hara was the quintessential cosmopolitan, a complete creature of New York and its catty gossip and hierarchies, and likely to start an anecdote about what Jack said to Barney at Joan’s place in Southampton the other night and end with a quip about Darius Milhaud. Their relationship got off to all sorts of bad starts. Once a drunken Kerouac stumbled into one of O’Hara’s readings and, for whatever reason, began heckling him, shouting “you’re ruining American poetry, Frank.” To which Frank retorted, “that’s more than you ever did for it.”

But Frank had some good words for a few of Kerouac’s books. Not surprising, both were interested in finding a new way of spontaneously expressing observations and emotions, though in wildly different ways. Word got around their very small circle about what Frank had said, and one night, at the legendary Cedar Tavern on University Place in the Village Kerouac spotted Frank and went over. “What’s the matter Frank, I thought you didn’t like me?” Kerouac asked. “I don’t like you,” Frank replied. “I like your prose.” Kerouac was reportedly very happy with this response.

The Russian Jack London

Most Russian families of a certain background have many collections of the multivolume collected works of various authors. These were state approved authors and the editions were affordable. The translations were usually exceptional as well, because folks with a love of art and a knowledge of foreign languages often didn’t have anything else to do with their skill. So on the shelves of older, university educated Russians you will certainly find the collected works of Pushkin, probably Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. If they are particularly fond of the written word, you’ll find modern writers like Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Akhmataova. Among foreign writers, the list is more limited. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Stendahl, maybe some Hemingway. And quite common is Jack London.

Jack London. I know my way well around American literature, and I remember Jack London as the writer of Klondike adventure stories like Call of the Wild and White Fang that I read as a boy in junior high school. I was sufficiently impressed with his Russian reputation to look him up again and see what all the fuss is about.

It seems Americans have declined to remember that he was also a pioneer journalist – possibly one of the first ‘New Journalists’ perhaps – and a raging, unapologetic socialist, which accounts for his getting into print in the Soviet Union in the first place. It is pretty amazing that this quintessentially American writer has been best defined abroad, and his important place in American letters has been nearly forgotten.

In terms of the scale of his output, his comfort with prose and nonfiction, and his engaged public persona, he is a direct descendant of Mark Twain. They even share a sort of open-minded world view, though London is far less funny (though he had a definite streak of very black humor). He set the parameters of what it was to be a successful writer much the same way F. Scott Fitzgerald a generation later would. He made a fortune writing, enough to become a comfortable gentleman farmer in Sonoma Valley. His work defined masculinity for a generation, the same way Hemingway would in the later generation. His nonsense, do-or-die attitude to writing as a son of the working class was followed by Henry Miller. His writing as a wide-eyed optimist roving the American land in The Road would double back in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. His belief in the raw power of nonfiction as a genre would find an echo in Hunter S. Thompson. And he was a groundbreaking freelancer, a true pro. He allegedly asking other writers about what they were paid until at least 1913, when he was already the most successful freelancer in the country. (I could also add he wrote a collaborative epistolary novel, a tract against cruelty to animals, and a thriller about a plague that wipes out humanity).

And in terms of the ideas he tackled and tried out, he was quite farsighted. I just finished reading The Iron Heel, his completely forgotten dystopian novel from 1908 about a near future marred by a oligarchic ruling class that establishes a nasty police state that calls to mind 1984 – and was indeed read by creators of imaginary police states like George Orwell, as well as creators of actual police states like Leon Trotsky.

I will concede that it is not the most best written novel I’ve read lately. As a stylist, London leaves a lot to be desired when he veers away from spare adventure stories. He did not benefit from Modernism’s revolution in streamlined, straightforward prose – and alas, he did live at a time when you were paid by the word. So there is a tiresome wordiness in the book, especially when he steers from concrete plot points and into the world of ideas. The Iron Heel is beset by thoroughly unnecessary characters, and the entire first half is a bleak lecture on the basics of Marxist thought, that makes you ready to throw the thing aside before it starts getting good.

That accounts for part of why he fell away – his style simply fell out of fashion. But that happens to the best of them. Only a few of Henry James’ many novels are read today for the exact same reason. Another reason that I think most Americans would deny is simple Cold War politics. The irrational fear of communism drove reasonable Americans to insanity, and I believe that they threw away London in a fit of overzealous book burning. Today, when you think of a omnipresent police state you automatically, unconsciously turn to Orwell’s bleak vision of “Big Brother.” It is left-wing socialist thinking run amok. London’s vision of right wing capitalist thinking run amok has vanished.

I believe Jack London represents an important and lost thread in American literature. It is about the intimate interaction between fiction and non-fiction, and whose loss has been calamitous. As London put it in 1903: “Don’t loaf and invite inspiration: Light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it."

I am developing a half-baked Secret History about all this, and maybe I’ll post it when it gets to be about two-thirds baked.

Bloomsday!

And why is this day unlike every other? Here's an editorial I wrote for last year's Bloomsday.

Montaigne’s advice for new dads

I know very well that I have it pretty easy compared to what Olga has to do. I just cook, clean, and change lots of diapers. I’m loosing plenty of sleep though, which I have always handled very badly. Luckily Ol is a pro at all-nighters thanks to grad school and our domestic sanity is somewhat preserved. But overall for me, the experience of early fatherhood has been like going to the coolest, most amazing concert you can imagine, but getting stoned to just shy of incapacity right before in the parking lot. Day to day, I perform a lot of moral and support services, but in the broader sense feel somewhat superfluous. And while Motherhood is sublime, fatherhood is just complicated. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of thoughts on the subject for, roughly, the rest of my life. But I’ll start with one of the first places I turned to for advice.

The day before Mila was born was a cold and drizzly Saturday. We were waiting around the house, pretty certain something was up but not yet ready to go to the hospital, and I spent much of the day in Olya’s gliding rocker reading while she napped. I read some Chekhov stories, and some essays by Michel de Montaigne, one in particular that caught my eye was “Of the Affection of Fathers for their Children.”

Montaigne has a reputation as a particularly sympathetic figure not only to literal generations of readers, but to his contemporaries who regarded him as an accomplished statesman in a time of terrific religious and civic strife.

As the founder of the essay-genre, his personal jottings are loopy, honest, often funny, and usually insightful. On fatherhood, he begins by making plain his sternest his thoughts on children. “I cannot entertain that passion which makes people hug infants that are hardly born yet, having neither movement in the soul nor recognizable shape to the body by which they can make themselves lovable,” he writes. “And I have not willingly suffered them to be brought up near me.”

The foundation of the adult-child relationship clearly must be of stronger stuff:

“A true and well-regulated affection should be born and increase with the knowledge children give us of themselves; and then, if they are worthy of it, the natural propensity going along with reason, we should cherish them with a truly paternal love; and we should likewise pass judgment on them if they are otherwise, always submitting to reason, notwithstanding the force of nature. It is very often the reverse; and more commonly we feel more excited over the stamping, the games, and the infantile tricks of our children than we do later over their grown-up actions, as if we had loved them for our pastime, ‘like monkeys, not like men.’ “

Indeed, those were different times. There was probably an element of psychological self-preservation in all this, as for most of human history childbirth and childhood were incredibly dangerous times. Montaigne and his wife had five daughters, only one of whom survived past infancy.

And it is worth remembering that for about the same amount of time marriage and families were not actually about love and affection in any real way, but about property, kinship networks, and clan survival. Montaigne spends a lot of time considering how to handle inheritances and preserving your family’s good name.

The greatest reward that comes with reading Montaigne is seeing through the customs and the particular times into the mind of a person. His digressions and anecdotes are of his time and his place, but it is in the wandering that you discover what is great and eternal about being human. As when he wanders away from that initial severity.

He betrays himself at times as a soft touch as the essay progresses: in his position on corporal punishment (“I have seen no other effect of whips except to make souls more cowardly or more maliciously obstinate.”) and about being a miser (“A father prostrated by years and infirmities, deprived by his weakness and lack of health of the common society of men, wrongs himself and his family by uselessly brooding over a great heap of riches.”)

And he knows full well the limits of keeping too severe an attitude. He quotes the Marshal de Monluc, who lost a son and was full of regrets. “He had lost, he said, by that habit of paternal gravity and stiffness, the comfort of appreciating his son and knowing him well, and also of declaring to him the extreme affection that he bore him and the high opinion he had of his virtue.” Montaigne concludes “this lament was well taken and reasonable.”

As a new parent I’ve done my best to avoid anything but the most technical parenting advice from books, though I eagerly court advice from friends and well-wishers. I laughed to myself this afternoon while burping her – which I do dozens of times a day – when I realized that all this little creature does is yell, grunt, and stare at me, and I’m completely mad about her. We haven’t even gotten to the stamping, the games, and the infantile tricks yet.