Category Archives: books

snakes may safely graze

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No spiel promised: A caller from the democratic congressional hoo-ha, just now, promised “no spiel,” then cozied up with a couple of comments designed to make me feel part of the in-group, I guess, and wound up by suggesting that I contribute $209 to the cause of keeping the congress Democratic. Myomy! I’d have been more inclined not to hang up if the leaders of my party, Pelosi, Reed, Feinstein, etc., would rein in their egos and get to work.

Rick Warren: Beating a horse that perhaps ought to be dead, I intend to listen very carefully to Rick Warren’s prayer on inauguration day. I don’t like Warren, don’t like religion hucksters generally–from Joyce Meyer to Deepak Chopra. And I think my guy could have chosen any number of better people to deliver the invocation before he, himself, delivers the most important speech of his career thusfar. Nor do I think the choice is clarified by the claim that we have to listen to folks with whom we disagree. But what the hell–this is America, God love us:

in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

No child left: Two interesting pieces in today’s Washington Post (here and here) tell an ironic tale about education in the land of the free. The Shrub of legacy-seeking touts his putative achievements in the realm of education reform whilst a political pressure group lobbies a DC area school system for lower grading standards, complaining that “students [are] at a disadvantage when they seek college admission or scholarships.” I’m remembering a Czech graduate student who worked for me back in the last century. She told me one day that she was grateful to have come to the United States for graduate school because education in her country consisted of “dictionary learning” only; whereas she found herself surrounded by intellectual stimulation and creativity at our large, public, provincial, American university. That’s what we stand to lose by the pursuit of education as measurement and measuring up, what Jill Ker Conway found at Harvard in the ’50s and details in her book, True North (1994). My guy got a very good education that also included Harvard. His education secretary-in-waiting notwithstanding, I very much hope he doesn’t sign on to the Nicklebee ideology.

All we like sheep: As part of my holiday reading binge, which is by no means done yet, I read last week a wonderful little book entitled Three Bags Full (2005), characterized by author Leonie Swann as “A Sheep Detective Story.” It reminded me that The Good Shepherd remains a powerful a myth of leadership, and rightly so. A classical evocation of the myth (designed to do honor to a secular prince and not to God as is sometimes thought) occurs in Bach’s hunt cantata, #208. Everyone knows the tune, but it isn’t every day one gets to hear it performed by authentic sheep. Read through the comment thread attached to this lovely performance of “Schafe können sicher weiden.”

ill winds

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Ben smith picked up this snippet today from First Read:

A polarized electorate: NBC/WSJ pollster Peter Hart (D) passes along this finding from a recent poll he conducted: 37% of McCain voters say they detest Obama and would have a hard time accepting him as president, while a similar number of Obama voters (36%) say the same thing of McCain.

Smith’s comment is “Whoever wins, doesn’t look like we’re in for a new era of good will.”

And speaking of ill will, I’ve been trying to sort out Leon Wieseltier’s antipathy for Louis Menand, most recently displayed in the current New Republic. Wieseltier takes Menand to task for several crimes against right thought (and Lionel Trilling) in this week’s column. Here’s a little of it:

what really rattles Menand is Trilling’s magnitude. In his conception of the intellectual life, Trilling was big. Menand is the professor of littleness. He is a man in flight from the seriousness of his own vocation.

It turns out that Wieseltier is using Menand’s recent New Yorker essay on Trilling as a reason for continuing an attack on Menand that goes back some years, at least to 2003 when Wieseltier accused Menand of impure thinking about George Orwell. Here’s a site that reviews some of this, though a few links are out of date.

So — the culture wars aren’t over. Whatever change we’re engaged in runs deep and generates powerful antipathies. I guess I’ve written a bit about that already, but it’s beginning to seem to me (even though there’s no longer a real academic debate about it) that vituperation like Wieseltier’s against a fellow humanist is maybe an index of something deeper than disagreement. I’m going to think about this and write some more after a bit.

political novels

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“You don’t get any fingerprints from Laura Bush.” It’s hard to know how to talk about writers when you know them. A new novel, American Wife, which may or may not evoke Laura Bush, has made Curtis Sittenfeld the subject of a column by Maureen Dowd. Good, Right? It has also caused Curtis to be held up to hysterical ridicule on a right wing blog. Not so good. The Blog is called euphemistically, Town Hall, but it’s a long way from any kind of civil discourse. One commentator alleges that all us democrats “really like trash.” Another hopes for divine vengeance on “people like . . . this loser.” Still another expresses embarrassment at being a “married relative.”

I’ve not read American Wife. It won’t be out until September. Maybe I can get a review copy. But whatever may eventuate about that, I’d like to report that Curtis is a fine writer, who deserves to be read by people who aren’t idiots. Dowd seems seems to be more fortunate than I and actually to have read the book. She writes sensitively and sympathetically of it without giving much away, like the Laura Bush she describes as guarded in interviews. “[T]he main vibe she gives off is an emphatic: ‘I am not going to show you anything.'” Dowd also suggests that “there is the air of a ‘Primary Colors’ stunt about this political roman à clef, which is timed to come out during the Republican convention.” I certainly hope so, for a host of reasons, and I hope it sells a billion copies. I’ve already ordered mine from Amazon.

Inspector Chen. Here’s more from the groupie department. Last Christmas I learned about the novels of Qiu Xiaolong, a Chinese expatriate writer who lives in St. Louis, has translated T. S. Eliot’s poetry into Chinese, has published a book of his own English poems as well as a dual language anthology of classical Chinese poetry, and writes elegant and complex mystery novels that feature a poet/detective. I read the five Inspector Chen novels currently out in English–a sixth novel is already out in French, or will be soon–and convinced the members of a book club, to which my beloved and I belong, to read the first of them for our June meeting. A member of our group who knew how to contact Dr. Qiu invited him and his wife, Lily, to our book club meeting. And they came.

Our meeting with Xiaolong and Lily was an absolute delight. Among the many things we learned is that there is now a tour of Inspector Chen’s Shanghai, conducted by a German travel agency. After our meeting we all had dinner together at a good Chinese Restaurant in University City. It was a fine time. I teased Xiaolong about having become an overseas Chinese, a category of human almost as complex as whatever category Inspector Chen belongs to. He laughed kindly, which led me to believe that I hadn’t committed a terrible faux pas. It was a wonderful afternoon. The books are wonderful books. Read them all.

Our book club is devoted mostly to political books, many of which have been novels but not all. Our next selection is “Wilentz’s” The Age of Reagan. It’s not unreasonable to speak of Qiu’s novels as political. Melanie Kilpatrick, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2006, listed Death of a Red Heroine as one of five best political novels of all time in a list that includes Darkness at Noon and All the King’s Men.

I’m thinking of doing some reviewing here, maybe of dredging up some old reviews as well. Perhaps because of that I’m reminded of a piece by Harold Jaffe I read not long ago in Armageddon Buffet. It’s called “The Writer in Wartime,” and it raises the question whether writers who seek aesthetic autonomy, usually understood as an a-political character, engage in what Hannah Arendt termed inner emigration or escape from responsible citizenship into fantasy or art or thought. My beloved has written a book about James Farrell’s desire to separate his literary work from his political work. For Farrell, ideology was the enemy of artistic integrity, of truth telling. But Farrell’s novels are political in the same deep way that the novels on Kilpatrick’s list are political, in the way that War and Peace and the Fixer and Reading Lolita in Tehran are political.

Qiu Xiaolong’s novels are as much about the political life of contemporary China as they are about food, psychology, family, crime and punishment, or any of the other themes that inhabit Inspector Chen’s universe. I’m looking forward to thinking about “what lies behind that placid facade of the first lady” as I read Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, which I expect to be a good deal more of a read than the “women’s book-club novel” Maureen Dowd describes. As Curtis wrote in a Salon piece in 2004, “I believe that George Bush’s policies are at best misguided and at worst evil. And yet I love Laura Bush. In fact, there is no public figure I admire more.” That’s got to be a pretty complicated character to put on. And the fact that American Wife and Death of a Red Heroine have been, or seek to be, popular successes, makes them no different from the plays of Shakespeare. It’s a curious modernist elitism that ascribes excellence to books with few readers.