Blips:

Kicking off LARB’s Didion week, here’s the author herself on Teresa Schiavo: “Yet even if we had managed to convince ourselves that this case involved the right to die, a problem remained. No one even casually exposed to religious teaching believes any such right exists.”

Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 reviewed by David Ulin: “Here’s an unorthodox suggestion: Try to read Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 in as close to a single sitting as you can.”

An interview with Julian Barnes by Susha Guppy: “In Britain I’m sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence. But if you try that line in Europe, especially in France, they say, Oh, no! You’re so English! I think I’m probably anchored somewhere in the Channel.”

Zach Baron chases Hunter S. Thompson: “In late July, I flew to Las Vegas with a woman I will call Fleur, in service of a story idea so doomed and ill-conceived I hesitate to even tell you what it was. You will have your suspicions. Writers only go to Las Vegas for one reason, really. It is our World Series of Poker, except more pretentious.”

”E. O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything” by Howard W. French: “Wilson’s head was cocked sharply downward as he walked, as if he suffered a neck condition. (Later he would tell me this habit grew from a lifetime of scanning the ground for insect life.) In his right hand, he carried a flowing white net, like what Vladimir Nabokov might have used to pursue butterflies by Lake Geneva.”

“Science Publishing: The Problem with Retractions” by Richard Van Noorden: “This week, some 27,000 freshly published research articles will pour into the Web of Science, Thomson Reuters’ vast online database of scientific publications. Almost all of these papers will stay there forever, a fixed contribution to the research literature. But 200 or so will eventually be flagged with a note of alteration such as a correction. And a handful — maybe five or six — will one day receive science’s ultimate post-publication punishment: retraction…”

“Just Kids” - Evan Hughes on Jeffrey Eugenides and friends: “The crowd was overwhelmingly male, very close in age, largely from the Midwest, and engaged in a kind of generational struggle to make sense of the postmodern literary legacy — of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and others — that they found both consuming and unsatisfactory, especially as a guide to writing about the new, weird America of the eighties and nineties.”

Michelle Dean on “A Supposedly True Thing Jonathan Franzen Said About David Foster Wallace”: “There’s really no delicate way to put this: at this year’s New Yorker Festival, Jonathan Franzen said that David Foster Wallace fabricated at least part of—and potentially a large part of—his nonfiction pieces.”

In the print or otherwise unobtainable for free online category:

“American Juggalo” by Kent Russell in n+1 Number Twelve (available for purchase as a Kindle single).

MATTHEW SPECKTOR

on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.

Joan Didion © Ed Wexler

The Los Angeles Review of Books  gives its pages this week to discussions of Joan Didion on the occasion of her latest book, Blue Nights. Didion, an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life, wrote in 1976 that “[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.” That attention to style, structure, perspective, and meaning animates these essays by Meghan Daum, Susan Straight, Amy Wilentz, Richard Rayner, Amy Ephron, and today, Matthew Specktor, who grew up around the corner when Didion lived in Brentwood.

¤
Joan Didion
Blue Nights
Alfred A. Knopf, November 2011. 208 pp.

Joan Didion is, as we know, a cool customer. Long before The Year of Magical Thinking, in which a social worker calls her just that, we understood Didion to be cool in every sense of the word. Whatever was happening behind those bug-eyed sunglasses, within that frail frame, the author’s relentless arrangement of information — the research, the reshuffling — kept hot feeling in line. This was true in Play It As It Lays, where the institutionalized Maria Wyeth’s separation from her young daughter exists mostly between parentheses, and it was true in The Year of Magical Thinking, where the immediacy of loss is often cut with diagnostic material: W.H. Auden, observations about grief, and observations about those observations (“the question of self-pity”) interceding before anyone gets wet. There is a moment in Blue Nights, in one sense The Year of Magical Thinking’s logical extension but in another sense unlike any book in Didion’s corpus, that seems to me specifically revealing: leaving a physical therapy session where she’s been working out alongside members of the New York Yankees (!), Didion remarks upon her declining capacities. “My cognitive confidence seems to have vanished altogether,” she writes. “Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp.”

“The correct stance?” It seems an odd thing to be fretting about in the midst of a meditation on aging and grief, but, in a way, Didion’s entire body of work has been about this positioning: “the attitude, the tone.” These things have always been primary in Didion — the words themselves have never been permitted to violate or distress the stance too much — which is frankly why a good portion of it doesn’t interest me much. It’s also why Blue Nights is so forceful. On the one hand, her cognitive confidence — or at least her cognitive capacity — is as powerful as it ever was. The book’s surpassing lucidity (its title, seemingly generic, is in fact perfectly chosen, referring as it does to a specific set of latitudinal conditions in which “the actual light … becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres”) owes much to the tension between that cognitive strength and the cracking, at last, of the writer’s attitudes. Neither nakedly confessional nor coldly composed, Blue Nights is startling in its effect, and remarkable even within the context of Didion’s impressive shelf. (Just because the work doesn’t interest me doesn’t mean I haven’t read a lot of it, or that I don’t think it’s any good.) Blue Nights is heartbreaking, in a word, and if it isn’t among her most exacting performances — in fact it contains a few moments of unusual clumsiness — it may yet be among her finest.

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MAGDALENA EDWARDS

on Norman Rush’s domestic disturbances.

(Norman Rush will read from the work in progress discussed and excerpted below and will be in conversation with Mona Simpson at the Hammer Museum in Westwood this Tuesday, the 25th, at 7:00. Details here.)

Snow © Alexander Colville 1969

Norman Rush was born in San Francisco in 1933 and didn’t publish his first book, Whites, until 1986, when he was 53. That collection of short stories was followed five years later by his National Book Award-winning novel Mating. In 2003 he published Mortals, his second novel. All three books are set in and around Botswana, where Rush and his wife, muse, and faithful editor, Elsa, were co-country directors for the Peace Corps from 1978-1983.

Ann Close, Rush’s editor at Knopf, told me she met the Rushes at a dinner hosted by the late poet and science fiction writer Tom Disch. When she got home that evening, she dug through her stack of New Yorker magazines and found his recently published story “Bruns,” told in the distinctive voice of a lapsed anthropologist, a white woman in Botswana, a story which appeared in the April 4, 1983 issue and opens Whites. Close calls “Bruns” a perfect short story, and her enthusiasm for the author’s work led her to broker a two-book deal with his agent, Andrew Wylie. She considers reading Mating, in which the narrator of “Bruns” reappears, one of the best experiences of her life.

Rush began to write full-time in 1984, but until then he supported himself and his family as a teacher and rare books dealer. In a 1995 essay, he speaks of his commitment to writing “serious fiction,” fiction where “we are able to enter disarmed and to open ourselves to the healthy subversions produced by the truth told excessively and beautifully and from vantage points different from our own and different from one another.” He counts among his influences Rabelais, Balzac, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Lawrence, and Joyce. While Rush’s politics are left-leaning (he spent nine months in prison in the fifties for conscientious objection to the Korean War), his writing cannot be reduced to ideology or a specific message, political or otherwise. His work is replete with acrobatic language, high comedy, characters navigating complex interior and exterior worlds, and plots that encompass the political and the personal.

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Image: Strata © Stanford Kay

The third installment of SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS’s regular column.

This week, Mary Romero, Mary Clearman Blew,
André Aciman, and Jonnie Hughes.

Mary Romero
The Maid’s Daughter: Living Inside and Outside the American Dream
NYU Press, September 2011. 288 pp.

Just as Ann Crittenden brought us deep into the economic realities of child-rearing in The Price of Motherhood, Mary Romero’s quiet, revolutionary book Maid in America forced readers to really look inside the lives of domestic workers in this country. In her new book, The Maid’s Daughter, Romero is again the perfect scholar — respectful, curious, honest about her own orientation. She’s a listener, allowing the women she talks with to guide the way in which their stories are revealed. In 1986, then a professor in Texas (she now teaches at Yale), Romero met Olivia Maria Gomez Salazar, a 23-year-old Chicana student who approached Romero after hearing her speak on a panel on domestic workers. Over the next several years, Olivia told Romero her story. Olivia’s mother was a maid in Los Angeles. Olivia and her mother lived in the maid’s quarters of the house, located in a gated community. Olivia’s mother cleaned the house and cared for the family’s four children. From the age of 3 to 18, Olivia heard the phrase “just like one of the family.” By the end of The Maid’s Daughter, a reader realizes just how hypocritical, divisive, and thoughtless this common phrase can be. Romero looks at Olivia’s upbringing from many angles: the self-esteem issues, the guilt, the economic disparities, the hard labor, the question of who raises the maid’s child when the maid is raising her employer’s children, the sense of homelessness created by a lifetime in someone else’s home. After decades, when Romero calls Olivia’s mother so that she can finally meet her, she is struck by the fact that she is known only by her first name. She is also struck by the sadness and guilt Olivia’s mother feels, in spite of the conviction that she did what she had to do to give her daughter a future. It’s very moving work; thoughtful, sensitive, the best possible use of scholarship to open our eyes.

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SARA MARCUS

Sara Marcus

Monday, October 17: It is 12:30 AM on the dot. The live video feed from Zuccotti Park has just frozen, as it does from time to time. At last there is silence in my apartment, and I can begin to write.

I keep the video window open despite the interruption, but some apparently do not: The odometer at the bottom of the frame, measuring the number of real-time viewers, cascades downward, spinning like a dying slot machine. Livestream viewers are an impatient bunch, it seems. When the plummet slows, though, it turns out that only a hundred or so have left, of over a thousand people. The rest of us would rather watch a blank screen, waiting for the stream to return, than give up hope.

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All photos: C.P. Heiser

MIKE DAVIS

Sorry Your World Domination is Over © Erika Rothenberg, 2008
From the “Greeting Card” series. Courtesy of the artist.

Who could have envisioned Occupy Wall Street and its sudden wildflower-like profusion in cities large and small?

John Carpenter could have, and did. Almost a quarter of a century ago (1988), the master of date-night terror (Halloween, The Thing), wrote and directed They Live, depicting the Age of Reagan as a catastrophic alien invasion. In one of the film’s brilliant early scenes, a huge third-world shantytown is reflected across the Hollywood Freeway in the sinister mirror-glass of Bunker Hill’s corporate skyscrapers.

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ED SKOOG

Money is horrible, a bandage where
there should be a hand, and heart’s engine
runs beat to daybreak. Money
and hands call to each other like
children at a pool; like this money
gathering noon into meadow.

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SESSHU FOSTER

Saturday, that perfect day — an intersection downtown as a crowd spilled down Fourth Street streaming toward me on the corner at Broadway, for the first time ever, I snapped a photo with my cell phone — OPTIONS: EMAIL. This image of all these people, this surging crowd, blew away in the air like a calendar leaf into the cyber-nothing slipstream of microwave ether, the fragrance of your life wafting like cinnamon.

Judges are in the bankers pockets

Corporate greed must go

Stop depositing your soul in the Lake of Fire

We are not overthrowing a democracy
We are restoring one

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TODD GITLIN

Occupy, Marshall Ganz asked: Is it a moment and a movement? Either way, it’s the fastest growing phenomenon on the left in decades. If we add that its thrust — not its tactics, necessarily, but its slogan “We are the 99 percent,” which was a nifty way to formulate opposition to the prevailing plutocracy — almost instantly garnered supermajority support throughout the country, then there may not have been anything like Occupy since the late 19th century movements against the robber barons. In the course of a month of human events, Occupy has whipped up an incandescent compound of joy, anger, hope, and resolve that shows no signs of fading and many signs of spreading. Emotions are not a movement, but they are its absolute prerequisite. Emotions have come out in the open. As in the sign above, from Foley Square in lower Manhattan, October 5.

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Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Friday, October 21^st: Join Wanda Coleman for an evening of music, poetry, and songs featuring musician David Zasloff, poets Bill Mohr, Cecilia Woloch, Pam Ward, and Austin Straus at Beyond Baroque beginning at 7:30 pm.

Michael Ondaatje discusses and signs The Cat’s Table at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00 pm.

Saturday, October 22^nd: The Poetic Research Bureau presents Daniel Borzutzky and Tisa Bryant at the Public School beginning at 7:30 pm.

Oliver Stone discusses and signs On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation at Book Soup beginning at 5:00 pm.

Sunday, October 23^rd: LARB editor Tom Lutz discusses the future of book reviewing at the Crawford Family Forum with John Rabe, Julie Eakin, and Patrick Brown.

Kate Beaton discusses and signs her comics collection Hark! A Vagrant at Skylight Books beginning at 5:00 pm.

Tuesday, October 25^th: LARB’s YA Editor Cecil Castellucci reads and signs her new young adult novel First Day on Earth at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Some Favorite Writers presents Norman Rush in conversation with Mona Simpson at the Hammer Museum beginning at 7:00 pm. Come have a glass of wine and mingle at the Hammer Cafe at 6:00.

Wednesday, October 26^th: Free Arts Tune-Up for Visual Artists at the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock beginning at 10:00 am.

Colson Whitehead and David Kipen discuss the 21^st Century zombie at Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Thursday, October 27^th: Return of the late legendary horror filmmaker William Castle with a reading by Terry Castle at Stories Books & Café beginning at 7:30 pm.

Thursday, November 3^rd: Live Talks LA and KCET present Adam Gopnik in conversation with Ed Zwick, to benefit the Los Angeles Review of Books. DON’T MISS THIS ONE! At Track 16, Bergamot Station, 8:00 pm (reception 6:30 pm.)

BRIAN SHOLIS

on Bruce Hainley’s experimental art criticism.

Untitled © Vincent Fecteau 2010

Bruce Hainley
Pep Talk 5: Bruce Hainley
Pep Talk, June 2011. 111 pp.

I became aware of Bruce Hainley’s writing on art a little more than a decade ago, while I was in college. Amid the monotony of a magazine’s review section, coming across his description of an exhibition by Ingrid Calame at Karyn Lovegrove’s Los Angeles gallery was like encountering a snake in a field. The review’s venom was poisonous and worked quickly: “The gimmick behind the project … was flimsy enough to begin with, and by now it’s just fatuous.” On the explanation of her onomatopoeic titles: “Yeah, right.” I was in Boston, hundreds of miles from an art-world center and frustrated by persistent critical obfuscation. The clarity of Hainley’s indictment was thrilling.

Thereafter, on the lookout for this Los Angeles critic’s byline, I learned quickly that the takedown was not his principal trade. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that in ensuing years I got to know Hainley a little; but more on this later.) Hainley’s occasional lashings are needles meant to puncture consensus, to deflate an overinflated reputation, and their rarity adds to their power. The majority of his reviews and essays instead grapple with the work of complex and often misunderstood artists, whether young or established. In the tradition of the great poet-critics whose work he relishes, Hainley’s mind follows his eyes. As he noted a decade ago, “I am a promiscuous looker. I will look at anything.” And once he decides that he likes looking at something, he keeps looking: Many of the artists he wrote about in the late 1990s and early 2000s are the artists he is writing about, and talking with, today. This isn’t slavish devotion to a particular style. There is little, beside Hainley’s ardor, that unites pastoral painter Maureen Gallace, abstract sculptor Vincent Fecteau, conceptual provocateur Trisha Donnelly, and object philosopher Elaine Sturtevant. It’s not what they make that appeals to him, but how they see. “I don’t mean, Oh, every person sees the world in his or her own special way!” he states in an interview. “No. I mean that, for example, Vince is one of the most visually intelligent people I’ve ever been around: he notices forms that are almost always out of sync with what a dominant mode of seeing wishes to exist.”

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MIKEL DUNHAM

on Roberto Bolaño, the consummate literary exile.

Roberto Bolano © Mathieu Bourgois courtesy of New Directions Publishing

Roberto Bolaño
Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003
New Directions, May 2011. 352 pp.

Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses, his latest book to be translated into English, is a collection of essays, speeches, and nonfiction curiosities written between 1998 and 2003. These were the years just after the publication of The Savage Detectives, the book which propelled Bolaño from regional obscurity to international renown. It was also the period when the Chilean novelist was writing his posthumously published masterpiece, 2666. (He died of liver failure at the age of 50 in 2003.)

Between Parentheses is the closest Bolaño came to writing an autobiography, although he loathed the genre:

I’ve always thought autobiographies were odious. What a waste of time trying to pass a cat off as a rabbit, when what a real writer should do is snare dragons and dress them up as rabbits. I take it for granted that in literature a cat is never a cat, as Lewis Carroll made clear once and for all.

However Bolaño may have distrusted self-revelation, Between Parentheses is an intriguing time capsule of the novelist’s thought in his final years, just as international fame knocked on his door and he recognized that his life was almost over. The writer’s ill health colors his ruminations and a personal map appears, not unlike the wayward maps followed by the characters in his novels: crumpled, illuminated with a vagabond’s cigarette lighter, better consulted on a park bench than a sofa, and at times purposefully deceptive.

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With the massive collaborative project “Pacific Standard Time” just getting underway here in L.A., LARB Art Section Editor Sharon Mizota reports back from Japan, where Yokohama’s multi-institutional exhibition “Our Magic Hour: How Much of the World Can We Know?” wraps up on November 7th.

Ishida Tetsuya, “Rooftop Refugee,” 1996

In her 2002 autobiography, available for the first time in English in January, venerable Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama writes with pride about the first Yokohama Triennale, held in 2001. For her, the ambitious, international exhibition represented Japan’s long overdue entry into the international contemporary art world. That initial effort was called “Mega Wave — Towards a New Synthesis,” a title that, looking back, feels uncomfortably prescient.

Even with the devastation triggered by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, this year’s Triennale, the fourth, bears a more playful title: “Our Magic Hour: How Much of the World Can We Know?” It’s a statement of unabashed wonder and in a way, humility, while also expressing an unqualified confidence and optimism. The subtitle, however, is double-sided: in asking a question it expresses doubt, suggesting that we cannot possibly know it all, but it’s also an eager challenge—how much can we learn?

The exhibition currently underway in Yokohama fills two venues — the Yokohama Museum of Art and alternative art space BankArt Studio NYK — and also includes performances and projects in a number of satellite spaces. This year’s Triennale is smaller than in past years, but this constriction — due to the recent reorganization of government funding priorities — is probably a boon. Unlike more sprawling art festivals, “Our Magic Hour” is remarkably focused and skillfully curated, showcasing works that emphasize mystery, wonder, and possibility. It is a fitting tribute to a nation whose resolve, community spirit and perseverance have been severely tested in the past months.

Tobias Rehberger, “Anderer,” 2002

A few pieces deal explicitly with disaster: Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s video installation presents footage of people running along paths he plotted throughout the city of Yokohama. Seen from above, the paths form the shape of a sakura tree, a lovely vision of collective activity that gives aesthetic as well as symbolic meaning to the notion of the charitable run. Elsewhere, Susan Norrie’s video “Transit” juxtaposes images of rockets and airplanes with natural disaster footage, evoking simultaneously our power to overcome nature and nature’s ability to turn the tables.

The show also offers a historical, cross-cultural investigation. Similar to the inclusion of works by Mannerist painter Tintoretto in the Venice Biennale this year, “Our Magic Hour” includes a section on Surrealism that integrates works by Magritte, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Paul Delvaux (from the permanent collection of the Yokohama Museum of Art) with contemporary works in a Surrealist vein by Japanese artists Yokoo Tadanori, Ishida Tetsuya, Sato Ataru, and others. The section suggests a little-explored connection between European Surrealism and dream-like Japanese illustrative traditions that can be traced from woodblock prints to anime. (The exhibition also includes works by ukiyo-e master Utagawa Kuniyoshi, as well as posters, toys, and other items from the Yumoto Koichi collection of monster-related popular ephemera.)

Humor and play are also found in abundance. Taro Izumi’s three-channel video of monkey-masked figures manipulating different household objects in accordance with instructions that only pertain to one of them is a hilarious play on “monkey see, monkey do.” Yagi Lyota’s pottery, thrown on an LP turntable, is a wry fusion of the mechanics of art, design, and music. And Rivane Neuenschwander’s video of a single bubble’s journey through a home interior conveys both whimsical buoyancy and a constant sense of peril.

Yagi Lyota, “Portamento,” 2006-2011

Effervescence, shininess and sparkle constitute another significant visual theme. James Lee Byars’ darkened room houses five over-sized, spotlighted “diamonds,” while Wilfredo Prieto includes one real diamond among a large, spreading pile of fakes. Tomii Motohiro combines Minimalist discourse with the art of the everyday, creating a shimmering golden rectangle out of rows and rows of pushpins. And Tobias Rehberger has filled the ceiling of one room with gorgeous dangling pendant lamps of translucent blue glass. Each light is linked to a child in an undisclosed location, who may turn them on and off at any time.

Tomii Motohiro, “Gold Finger,” 2011

Detail of Motohiro’s “Gold Finger”

If serendipity, lightness, and surprise are often considered the purview of art in general, then “Our Magic Hour” functions as a call to appreciate them anew. However, it also touches on the darker side of such ethereal mysteries. Araki Nobuyoshi’s tender series of photographs devoted to his cat, Chiro, turns suddenly from the vagaries of “cuteness” to a meditation on aging, death, and the rituals of mourning. We see Chiro growing thinner, but aren’t quite prepared for the sight of her lying dead, in a box surrounded by flowers, or for the photo of her skull. Self-consciously titled “Sentimental Journey, Spring Journey,” the series honors what once was, and expresses a bittersweet fascination with what is yet unknown.

All photographs © Sharon Mizota

TOD GOLDBERG

on the long-awaited arrival of the great Angeleno novel.

Arcadia (Empty Pool) © Allison Maletz

Héctor Tobar
The Barbarian Nurseries
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2011. 422 pp.

Whenever the question comes up as to why there hasn’t been a quintessential novel about Los Angeles, the notion that the place is just too diffuse is bandied about, as if writers are incapable of writing a novel which can address a territory larger than, say, the island of Manhattan. Certainly there are novels that lay claim to parts of L.A., be they classics, like Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust or Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?, or contemporary works, like Janet Fitch’s Paint it Black or Eric Puchner’s Model Home (to say nothing of the city’s rich tradition of noir and crime fiction). But none has ever seemed to capture the paradox-ridden profundity of the grit and the glamour, the farm worker and the starlet, the 405 North and the 5 South, the 10 West and the 60 East, the Pacific Coast Highway, and the tracks filled with empty Metrolink trains. There is the Los Angeles on the maps; the Los Angeles that is actually Orange County; the sprawling, urban Los Angeles that only stops when you hit the Salton Sea; the Los Angeles that exists on television screens in other states, where the surf comes right up to your front yard.

Diffuse? Certainly. Impossible to represent in its fullness? Certainly not, as Héctor Tobar proves with his astonishing second novel, The Barbarian Nurseries. Tobar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times, has crafted a novel that examines the smallest people — both literally and figuratively — who populate our shared landscape, while casting a wide view on the culture created behind the walls of gated communities, within the vast inland sea of interracial bedroom communities, and on the lost streets beneath the highways, where entire lives play out in the shadows of passing SUVs.

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Cops and a Cube cc Spencer McCormick

By Jeremy Kessler
In “Percentages, Politics, and the Police,” published last Saturday on the Los Angeles Review of Books website, Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Annie McClanahan offer a critique of my n+1 piece, “The Police and the 99 Percent.” It is an honor to engage with writers and activists of their caliber, and I thank the Los Angeles Review of Books for hosting my reply.

Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan recognize that the question of the relationship between the police and the occupiers “is at the center of the occupation movement’s politics, and its fate,” but they find my answer to that question both practically foolish and ideologically suspect. Indeed, the authors explain that my piece is “a compendium of fallacies, apologetics, wishful thinking, and historical misprisions assembled to defend the strategy of police compliance.” Surprisingly, though the authors affirm the importance of the question and tax my (putative) answer for a lack of realism, they themselves offer no concrete answer to the question of how the protesters at Zuccotti Park and other occupied sites should relate to the police.

They do insist that the Occupation will have to “resort to the old strategies of the strike, the blockade, sabotage and — one hopes — the occupation and expropriation of private property.” This is bold strategic talk; but it is not an answer to the tactical question about what the Occupation should do, right now, about the police. The closest Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan come is a teasing allusion to the organized violence directed at Egyptian police during the Tahrir Square uprising. Ethically, I am opposed to the killing of police personnel. That being said, even if the authors were to label my ethical concern a piece of “capitalist realism” and honestly and openly call for such violence, their call would be terribly unrealistic – a descent into romantic nihilism and not a recipe for effective praxis.

That the authors and I both view each other’s contributions to the debate as pieces of fantasy points toward the nature of our disagreement. Ours is not so much an ideological disagreement as a factual one – concerning conditions on the ground. While Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan call my vision for a broad-based Occupation a program for political quietism, they do not explain how they plan to raise the revolutionary army that will engage in the strikes, blockades, sabotage, and street violence necessary to accomplish their ends. What drives my piece, and all of my writing on the Occupation, is the worry that currently in America there is insufficient political will to achieve serious left-wing ends – whether those ends might be debt cancellation or increased redistribution through parliamentary means or the expropriation of property through extra-legal means. I see the Occupation as a means to generate – gradually, given time – the political will for such left-wing ends.

Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan speak approvingly of a protester’s sign that read “It’s Class Warfare and We’re Losing.” To wage class-warfare successfully, however, requires class-consciousness. I see the Occupation as an attempt to construct class-consciousness in a country where it is sorely lacking. For instance, in my response to a different critique (by Reihan Salam), “On the Occupation and Vanguardism,” I wrote that “if the Occupation persists, it will alter the national conversation by creating precisely what Reihan calls ‘a new kind of polarization,’ based upon an increasing consciousness of shared suffering. This consciousness could provide the foundations of inter-class solidarity, revealing the overlapping interests of, say, older unskilled workers and younger, relatively low-paid tech workers.”

It is not clear to me at present what the winning form of contemporary class-consciousness – the form that can lead to substantive left-wing victories – might be. Given this obscurity, it seems a bit precipitous for Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan to exclude organized labor from the revolution. Perhaps my use of the phrase “middle-class” in defining a broad-based Occupation has become a distraction. What I meant by middle-class was simply wage-earners above the federal poverty line – this will include nearly all members of unions, as well as millions of people considerably less bourgeois than me and my interlocutors. True, the winning form of class solidarity might not include support from this massive group, but “[a] serious reading of history” will find few revolutions which lacked initial support from the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie. If Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan are aware of a class-conscious proletariat in America ready to seize the means of production, I wish they would tell me where it’s hiding. I do not think it was present at the 2009 occupation of UC Davis.

In the end, while the authors find utopian my hope that violent confrontation with the police on a mass scale might be deferred as long as possible, I think their enthusiasm for immediate revolutionary violence is far more naïve. They seem to suggest that a month of Occupation has established the conditions for successful revolution in America. I am much less optimistic. As I see it, the Occupation is, in fits and starts, laying groundwork.

My position does not depend on a commitment to absolute nonviolence. It depends on a commitment to the sensitive interpretation of revolutionary change. For now, what is essential is that the Occupation, as a vehicle for consciousness-raising, persists. It is out of this assumption that my thoughts on police-protester relations arose. If fighting the police will only undermine the Occupation, then those who call for violence risk using the Occupation for poetry, not for politics.

¤

All that being said, let’s turn to the question of what to do about the police right now, and the authors’s criticisms of my original, limited proposal. They incorrectly state that my piece advocated a strategy of “police compliance.” It did not. Rather, I spoke to a very specific question: to what extent should the Occupation – circa early October – actively seek to escalate police violence. I argued that the Occupation should not seek to escalate police violence at the present time for two reasons.

First, I worried that premature escalation would jeopardize the very existence of the Occupation, nipping it in the bud. Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan suggest that my worry has already been contravened by events: that early police violence near Union Square and on Brooklyn Bridge swelled the numbers of the protest, not diminished them. But I began my piece by noting that it was these events that brought attention to the Occupation. My worry was, instead, that there is not a simple linear relationship between increasing police violence and the increasing size of the Occupation. Just because a little violence led to a crucial increase in the strength of the Occupation early on does not mean that a lot of violence will lead to an even larger increase later. My worry was, and remains, that a quick flurry of violence and arrest could end the Occupation before it is sufficiently strong to resist, both physically and rhetorically. I am willing to be – I want to be – corrected on this score, but “Percentages, Politics, and the Police” has not provided correction, only enthusiasm.

Second, I argued that the Occupation should not seek to escalate police violence because police violence would frustrate the populist premise of the Occupation. It would do so in two ways: first, by discouraging more middle-class participation in the Occupation; second, by drawing a sharp and bloody divide between the protesters and the police that would damage the rhetoric of unity that drove the Occupation to begin with and that continues to make it attractive to many of its supporters.

For all of these reasons, when given the options of aggressively antagonizing the police or appealing to them in a positive manner, I supported the latter. I did so because I saw no tactical advantage in aggressively antagonizing the police.

My stance against antagonism did not and does not entail a strategy of “police compliance.” The only passage in my piece that raised the issue of obedience reported on a discussion between protesters who proposed saying to the police “We can’t promise to obey all your orders. But let’s communicate,” and talking with police personnel during marches the better to understand their plans and protocols. These protesters did not support compliance but communication. Continued, outright defiance — the kind of defiance on display at Zuccotti Park everyday —follows happily from their minimal proposals and mine.

Putting aside their mischaracterization of my position on police compliance, Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan are more on point when they describe as historically naïve my hope to convert some of the police to the Occupation’s cause. “Police,” they write, “are charged with disciplining populations. Were they to take the side of the population, they would be without a trade. Any serious reading of history suggests that the police everywhere maintain their fidelity to the task of performing as bodyguards for money, property, and power.”

I don’t disagree with the general point, my hortatory rhetoric to one side. I am not, and have never been, terribly optimistic that direct appeals to the police will lead to mass conversion; I, in fact, noted that a police strike was incredibly unlikely. The gambit of my piece was that a management, rather than a stoking, of tensions would allow the Occupation to grow its base of support. If there were ever a chance of actual police cooperation it would, I noted, come only after a “significant radicalization of the social and political atmosphere.”

At the end of the day, I agree with Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan that such police cooperation is more than likely not in the cards. But our partial knowledge of the future must be tempered by our more complete knowledge of the present. The question remains what behavior toward the currently uncooperative police might actually help to sustain and expand the Occupation. At the Occupy Philadelphia protest, we have recently seen how calls for violence by an ill-positioned minority retard rather than energize the movement. When I wrote “The Police and the 99 Percent,” I did not think that such purposeful antagonism would help the Occupation last or enlarge its base of support. Neither the subsequent critiques nor current events have presented any evidence to the contrary. Actively escalating police violence will not be a viable strategy until the size of the Occupation is such that a high rate of casualties due to injury, demoralization, and arrest can be sustained. Without numbers, the bitterness present in the authors’ prose is a useless ornament.

To be sure, I recognize and embrace the fact that resisting police violence has been and continues to be the essential work of the Occupation. What that means, as it has meant from the beginning of the Occupation, is holding space. Such action on the part of the occupiers is a far cry from “playing by the rules” or “refrain[ing] from doing anything that disrupts the smooth reproduction of the status quo.”

The primacy of holding space in a relatively nonviolent manner, however, does not appeal to Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan. But I don’t really understand how their alternative is supposed to work. If the 5,000 people who marched on Times Square yesterday had charged the police, they would not have secured a left-wing political consensus. The police force which ruthlessly pushed a group of protesters down 46th Street, their pathetic captain barking curses into a megaphone, deserves to be suppressed. Grown men should be ashamed to put on armor and push teenagers, children, and the elderly through midtown Manhattan. But, apparently, they are not; nor, apparently, are there sufficient numbers of protesters willing and capable of holding new ground against the New York Police Department. Here is where realism is most important, and where I find the authors’ purported realism sorely lacking.

The crucial question is not what rules to break but how much space the Occupation can hold and for how long? The answers so far have been decidedly mixed. On Saturday night, a group of protesters — 500 or 600 — met in Washington Square Park to occupy it. After an hour of discussion, it became clear that the group was not adequately prepared to hold the Park. Fourteen people stayed to be arrested. To do any of the things that Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan want the Occupation to do – provide for themselves on a mass scale, expropriate property, and so on – the occupiers need to be able to resist arrest successfully. To prevent arrest either through nonviolent or violent action, you need a sufficient number of bodies. If the authors think that vanguard action will conjure those bodies, I’m willing to listen.

But Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan don’t quite have the courage to call for specific vanguard action. Should the protesters burn a police car, break into a bank, kill a cop? I would wager that they don’t demand such concrete action because they know it would be fruitless and immoral – even according to their own revolutionary calculus. As for the actions they do explicitly call for – strike, blockade, sabotage – I’m all for them (depending on what they’re planning to sabotage). But where, when, and with what forces?

Revolutionary violence is appropriate – if ever – when the conditions for revolutionary change are extant. An economic crisis does not alone provide those conditions. A sustained consciousness of crisis and the consequent solidarity among the vast number of those affected are also necessary. Theorists of the Occupation should address their debates to how such consciousness can be generated. Perhaps through a program of concrete demands (as some on both the old Left and the center-left insist), perhaps through increasingly aggressive direct action (as more anarchists and radical socialists insist). But calls for the Occupation to be something other than what it is deprive the Occupation of its signal virtue: that it exists.

We’re very excited about LARB ePubs launching today — available for download at Amazon.com or the LARB Online Store, and featuring book reviews and cultural essays from our archive. They are compatible with the Kindle, iPad and other eReader devices. Issue 1 of LARB ePubs includes:

• David Shields on the line between life and art.
• Ben Ehrenreich on “the death of the book.”
• Geoff Nicholson on Buster Keaton.
• Joshua Clover on the financial crisis.
• Louise Steinman on Jacob Glatstein’s The Glatstein Chronicles.
• Lisa Jane Persky on literary tattoos.
• Laurie Winer on the novels of Glenn Beck.
• An extended interview by Jean Stein with the late Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern on Hustler’s Larry Flynt.
  

Future issues scheduled for release will feature Michael Tolkin, Sven Birkerts, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mark McGurl, Kathryn Schulz, Marjorie Perloff, Tom Lutz, and others.

Want still more information? You can read our press release here.

BRIAN COLLINS

on Yanis Varoufakis’s new theory of the global financial crisis.

We Need A Revolution © Dan Tague

Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi, and Nicholas Theocaraki
Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World
Routledge, July 2011. 552 pp.

Yanis Varoufakis
The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
Zed Books, October 2011. 170 pp.

I found a flaw… . a flaw in the model.
                   —Alan Greenspan, October 2008

It’s almost three years since the bubble burst. If understanding really does abhor a vacuum, something about why it happened ought to have been learned. Much has been written on the subject, to be sure, lots of it terrifically trenchant. Journalists like Matt Taibbi (in his superb Rolling Stone screeds) and Andrew Ross Sorkin (Too Big Too Fail) establish incontrovertibly that there was colossal greed at work on Wall Street. (The bankers, one can’t help noting, admit as much. It’s only the criminal charges they’re a little defensive about.)

But moral narratives alone will never suffice; what’s being reckoned with here, recall, is arguably the greatest systemic failure of all time. The bankers cannot have been the only ones responsible. A more circumspect explanation is to be found in what might be called the “regulatory capture” version of the moral tale, found in books Simon Johnson’s 13 Bankers or Joseph Stiglitz’s Freefall. In this version of the crisis, self-interested elected officials and the regulators they appointed are (quite rightly) seen to have stood aside for the banks.

Such finger-pointing accounts are even less satisfying in view of our situation today: The global financial system still teeters on the brink of collapse, and virtually nothing has been done to avert another disaster. One would have to be pretty cynical to accept that only greed and personal political ambition are to blame for such thoroughgoing paralysis. In view of the spectacle of “extend and pretend” presently unfolding in power centers from Washington to Frankfurt, what needs explaining is why even the well-informed and quite high-minded remain committed to so unpromising a status quo.

At long last there is progress in this area: Two new books, conjoined twins of a kind but each of them quite extraordinary in their own way, from a trio of economists fronted by Yanis Varoufakis, who teaches at the University of Athens and writes with great command of the European debt crisis on his blog. The first is Modern Political Economy: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World, co-authored by Joseph Halevi and Nicholas Theocarakis, an astonishing tour de force of math, metaphysics, and political economy in the grand tradition, all unfolded in fugal counterpoint. The second, just out from Zed Books, is The Global Minotaur, Varoufakis’ short course for a more general reader, Modern Political Economy minus the more abstruse material. According to both, the 2008 financial crisis was the result of two more or less mutually reinforcing conditions: First, a major reorganization of the global economic order in the late twentieth century; and, second, the inherent limits of what economics can say about the outcome of such shifts. The great insight here is that, along with whatever reckless self-interest was at work, the crisis occurred and persists because an alternative was and is mostly unthinkable.

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Photo: Chris Daley

Today on the Los Angeles Review of Books website, we feature essays on Occupy L.A. and the nationwide Occupy movement by Ben Ehrenreich and Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Annie McClanahan.

For more from Clover and an open letter re: Occupy L.A. (and much else besides), see the Occupy Everything website.

For Jeremy Kessler’s “The Police and the 99 Percent,” to which Bernes, Clover, and McClanahan’s piece responds, and other essays relating to the occupations in New York and elsewhere, see the n+1 website. They’ve since added “An Open Letter to the New York City Police Department” by Kessler.

For another response to Kessler’s essay, from a moderate conservative perspective, see Reihan Salam’s The Agenda.

A petition signed by hundreds of writers (including several LARB contributors and contributing editors) in support of the Occupy movement.

For some amazing pictures from occupations around the country, see Alan Taylor’s “In Focus” column at The Atlantic.

If you’re participating in the protests in Los Angeles and would like to write something about it for us, please contact info@lareviewofbooks.org.

Finally, for information on the events in Los Angeles, see the Occupy L.A. website; for others nationwide, Occupy Together.

BEN EHRENREICH on Occupy Los Angeles

and JASPER BERNES, JOSHUA CLOVER, and ANNIE McCLANAHAN
on percentages, politics, and the police.

Woman Detained cc Paul Weiskel

BEN EHRENREICH

Uprising
They are occupying Riverside! They’re occupying Oakland and Omaha and Iowa City and Sacramento and Denver and Miami and Kalamazoo and and Hartford and Philadelphia and Buffalo and Austin and San Antonio and Fort Wayne, Indiana! On Tuesday morning, police in Boston arrested 141 protesters. This week cops made mass arrests in Des Moines, grabbing 30 in one swoop, plus 25 in Chicago, 11 in San Francisco, six in DC, another 21 in Seattle last week, and those 700 on the Brooklyn Bridge. Torrance is under occupation!

What a difference a month can make. Until September 17, 2011, I was buzzing along in my usual slow, steady state of localized political despair. In Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain, people had been risking and losing their lives, demanding to play a role in the construction of their own societies. And it was clear enough, if you paid attention, that they were rising up not just against particular dictatorships but against the local manifestations of a global economic system that had for decades been concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands, privatizing all public goods, tossing everything into the market and dicing it up into speculation-ready bits. The Greeks took to the streets, too — and the Chileans, the Italians, the Spanish, the French, the Irish, the British, the Icelanders. The forty-years-and-running neoliberal transfer of public wealth to private coffers was everywhere becoming too brutal and too brazen to ignore. While mouthing the now nearly universal rhetoric of “shared sacrifice,” governments were feeding billions directly to the banks. And people across the planet were showing them exactly what they were willing to sacrifice — their freedom, their lives — to stop the looting.

Everywhere but here. In the U.S., it seemed that Milton Friedman’s jolly acolytes had colonized (occupied, even) not only the halls of power but our very imaginations, locking us into solitary suffering, cutting off all possibility of even envisioning some collective response. Politics was for politicians — and for those who could afford to buy one. Even the fleeting, expiatory pleasures of a good riot seemed beyond us. We were pissed, surely and righteously, but beyond voting-booth fetishism, online griping, and The Secret, what options did we have? The jackals in Congress wouldn’t listen anyway. They had their orders. Better to stay home, avoid the mailman while there still was one to avoid, and pray that the Law of Attraction kept functioning long enough to keep the cable and the Internet on.

It took the Canadians, in the end, to snap us out of it. I didn’t know Adbusters was still around, but a few people did, and they began to gather in a tiny park in lower Manhattan near a certain street with a famous name, a name that spoke, appropriately, of exclusion, fortification, enclosure. There were not many people out there at first, but there were enough, apparently, to make certain other people nervous. People of the exclusive, enclosed and well-fortified variety. For the next two weeks, the mainstream press kept a studious silence while Mayor Bloomberg and the New York Police Department did everything they could to turn an isolated protest into a rapidly growing movement. Every blast of pepper spray, every baton blow to the gut, every protester beaten and dragged away on YouTube made it clear what the stakes were, and who was on what side. While the slogan of the moment — “We are the 99 percent” — can be faulted for eliding enormous differences of class, race and privilege among us masses of non-billionaires, billy clubs and zip-tie cuffs have a funny way of forging solidarity. The fallen and falling middle class is swiftly learning what the poor have known for too long: that the rich protect their wealth with violence and the state exists to help them do it. Like the picket signs say: “Screw us and we multiply.”

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NEAL POLLACK on a 23-volume RICHARD STARK reprint series

and JOHN SHANNON on the greatest Vietnam War novel ever written.

Smith Corona cc Haris Awang

Richard Stark
The Hunter (1962)
The Man with the Getaway Face (1963)
The Outfit (1963)
Deadly Edge (1971)
Slayground (1971)
Butcher’s Moon (1974)
Comeback (1997)
Firebreak (2001)

And 15 other titles. Reprints University of Chicago Press, 2008-2012.

NEAL POLLACK
Artistic Pulp Sleaziness
I got the email in early May. “Dear Mr. Pollack,” it went, way too formally, as though the editor were informing me that I’d been late in making my credit card payment. Then I read the pitch: “Would you be willing to review or write something on the occasion of U. of Chicago’s reprints of Richard Stark’s Parker novels?”

This “occasion” had slipped my purview, as had, I’ll admit, Richard Stark’s Parker novels themselves. I was only barely aware, if aware at all, of their existence and probably wouldn’t have been able to say for sure that Stark was a pseudonym of the legendary crime writer Donald Westlake. This isn’t something I’m proud to announce, particularly since I’ve spent many years trumpeting myself as a lover of all things “noir.” But hey, there are lots of writers in the world, and I’ve got a kid to feed and TV to watch. Still, this email offered me something I couldn’t refuse. Free books, in a genre I like. I would come to the Parker novels with fresh, innocent eyes, like a newborn fawn staring at the world for the first time, or at a pair of headlights.

A couple of weeks later, a big box arrived from Chicago. It contained 10 nifty, sleek paperbacks, with appropriately muted coloring and silhouettes of snubnosed guns on their covers. Some of them also featured backlit dames or guys with hats, and, depending on the book, a truck, a serrated knife, or a carnival midway. I’d entered noir country. That night, I flossed and put in my night guard and started some easy reading about a very tough character.

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Image by Tim Biskup. Event on Friday, Oct. 14th

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Thursday, October 13^th: Jeffrey Eugenides reads and signs his novel The Marriage Plot at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Friday, October 14^th: Opening reception for Tim Biskup’s new exhibit Former State at THIS los angeles beginning at 7:00 pm.

Diana Arterian, Stephen van Dyck, and Lisa Teasley will read at the new incarnation of the Featherless Reading Series at Stories Books & Café beginning at 8:00 pm.

Sam Durant, Marquis Lewis, and Jeffrey Deitch discuss Street Art in the first night of the West Hollywood Lecture Series beginning at 7:00 pm.

Sunday, October 16^th: Authors Jack Halberstam, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Maggie Nelson discuss “Ugly Feelings” at Redcat beginning at 7:00 pm.

Ben Ehrenreich reads and signs his novel Ether at Skylight Books beginning at 5:00 pm.

Tuesday, October 18^th: Red Hen Press group event featuring Marcos Villatoro, Josh Pryor, and Genevieve Kaplan at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 6:30 pm.

Nile Rodgers discusses and signs Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny in conversation with director Brett Ratner at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

Arthur Phillips reads and signs his novel The Tragedy of Arthur at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Thursday, October 20^th: Eric Olsen, Glenn Schaeffer, and Michelle Huneven discuss and sign We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm. 

 Sunday, October 23rd:  LARB editor Tom Lutz at the Crawford Family Forum with John Rabe, Julie Eakin, and Patrick Brown on the future of book reviewing.

Tuesday, October 25^th:  Norman Rush in conversation with Mona Simpson at UCLA Hammer Museum, 7:00 pm.

 Thursday, November 3^rd: Live Talks LA and KCET present Adam Gopnik in conversation with Ed Zwick, to benefit Los Angeles Review of Books.  DON’T MISS THIS ONE! At Track 16, Bergamont Station, 8:00 pm (reception 6:30 pm.)

ED SKOOG on California poet Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s Metropole

and ADAM J. FITZGERALD talks to O’Brien about his work.

Metropole (Jazz Café) Anonymous

ED SKOOG
Geoffrey G. O’Brien
Metropole
University of California Press, March 2011. 112 pp.

Seen from a bird’s-eye view on Google Maps, the Bohemian Grove (20601 Bohemian Ave., Monte Rio, Sonoma, California 95462 — you can even see the street view to a certain point) doesn’t seem all that forbidding: A lush valley of timber with occasional clearings through which we can glimpse cottages and outbuildings, there’s nothing behemoth, though surrounding areas have opulent estates, formal gardens, and shapely pools. It looks dull. It probably is. The Grove — site of the “Mid-Summer Encampment” of the exclusive Bohemian Club, where the wealthy and powerful put on skits and cavort and cross-dress and give rise to conspiracy theories — provides both a central image for Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s third collection of poems, Metropole, and a literal cover image (a sepia-toned pastoral snapshot, taken, I hope, without permission). “To be fit / for the world one must periodically leave it, / affectionately,” O’Brien says. His poem reads like a Zagat guide to the Grove, seemingly gleaned from reports both official and infiltrative:

Grab our missing spears and begin
to think the Bohemian Grove, trees,
theatricals, songs that hold exquisite
filtering of sunlight down to the boys
were women there in the powerful glades,
in the 20s, there’s nothing like it, to have
loins for the first time running around
in leaves, in the 70s I sang a song of we
became ourselves again as women, specifically
houris, the “leaves of love” falling
by chopper and could see the security cordon…

— from “Bohemian Grove”

Who shall be allowed to participate in language, in naming and noting, in this world made of words? The book’s title raises the question too, with its attendant issues of center and periphery, capital and province, power and powerlessness. In the mysterious center of power, O’Brien reminds us that, even at play, in secret, naked or in drag, in fantasy and kink, the powerful are never not economic agents, warmongering, destructive.

O’Brien is unlikely to gain membership to the Bohemian Club by virtue of this book, although geographically he should be eligible, as a resident of Berkeley, where he is a professor at the University of California. Newspapermen founded San Francisco’s all-male Bohemian Club in 1872, with a charter that promoted alcohol, argument, and “good-fellowship among journalists,” but by the turn of the century its summer encampment at Bohemian Grove had become a nexus of wealth and power and The Arts. Their motto is “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here,” which supposedly is a reminder not to talk business, but mostly is just spooky. (Whose motto is about spiders?) They do, of course, talk business, and some of that business has been the establishment of the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atom bomb.

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KATE MERKEL-HESS on two new histories of rural China

and MAURA ELIZABETH CUNNINGHAM on Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions

Empty Stools of Rural Village Life in China (Xinhua) from All-China Women’s Federation http://bit.ly/nF7Ack

KATE MERKEL-HESS
Gail Hershatter
The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past
University of California Press, August 2011. 472 pp.

Jacob Eyferth
Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920-2000
Harvard University Asia Center, 2009. 335 pp.

Until recently, “China” brought to mind for most Americans farms, farmers, and the rural countryside, not the factories and mass industrialization we think of today. This view of a more rural China is what also once dominated the most widely read books about the country, from the hardworking impoverished villagers of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, to the rural rebels of journalist Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China. It’s easy to forget about the rural facets of this populous nation in the midst of its freeways and fast trains, skyscrapers and construction sites. This isn’t surprising, since China has more urban centers of a million-plus residents than any other country on earth and, for the first time in its history, as many people living in cities as in villages. Last year, Chinese scholars predicted that its rural population would halve by 2030, from today’s 900 million to 400 million. Meanwhile, the gap between wealthy urban areas and their poor rural counterparts grows ever wider: 99 percent of China’s most impoverished citizens hail from the countryside.

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The fourth installment of our Writers on Teachers series: Los Angeles Review of Books contributing editor Rita Williams with an appreciation of her mentor, Alison Leslie Gold.

When I first heard of Alison Leslie Gold in the late eighties, I had no idea what a visionary author she was, or how much she would teach me about the writing life. I knew only that the founder of the desert recovery house where I worked was hoping Gold would write about the place. I worked with many teenagers there whose stories needed telling, but the only thing these kids desired more than fame was secrecy. Had they spilled the whole truth, they might have attracted more interest from law enforcement than the reading public. (This reticence was shared by the staff as well.)

Anyway, Gold was on to covering a story of considerably larger proportions: that of the crimes of the Nazis against Jewish refugees in Holland. I had not heard of Miep Gies, the woman who protected Anne Frank and her family until they were taken off to Bergen Belsen, but I know now that Miep’s candor was the exact opposite of what Gold would have found had she come to the desert. Anne Frank Remembered, Miep’s story, which Gold wrote with her, is a book which will, in all likelihood, sell forever. It’s a testament to Gold’s insight that she was able to see how badly we needed to hear from this quiet woman who protected Anne Frank’s diary without reading it, hoping to return it to Anne when she came back. But this was not to be. Only her father, Otto Frank, survived, and when Miep turned over Anne’s diary to him, he realized it had to be published.

It may not seem a compliment that I cannot recall the first time I met Alison Gold, but that is one of the great guns in her arsenal. She’s very attractive, with a mischievous smile and clear brown eyes, but she can present when she wants to like the dun colored peahen ignoring the flashy peacock. No designer bags, no implants, nothing shiny and red. Such a rarity in a loud town like L.A., where everybody is screaming to be seen. But Gold chooses to arrive quietly, because she is there to discover the story, not be it.

Gold helped Miep relate the details of how she hid Anne Frank and six others for two years until their hiding place was betrayed. We catch a glimpse of this feisty kid from the perspective of a kind adult. Penned up in that tiny annex was a girl on the verge of adolescence. Miep Gies brought her a pair of red high heels. This story becomes all the more compelling because Anne is so normal. But it goes beyond simply sharing her short life.

There is a kind of prescience in the text as if Miep is warning us that one day the meekest among us may be required to stand and deliver should this darkness come round again:

I am afraid that if people feel that I am a very special person, a sort of heroine, they may doubt whether they will do the same as I once did. Not many consider themselves very talented or courageous and thus would refrain from helping endangered people. This is the reason that I want everyone to know that I am a very common and cautious woman and definitely not a genius or daredevil. I did help like so many others who ran the same or more risk than me. It was necessary so I helped.

Anne Frank Remembered had become quite a sensation by the time that Gold and I became friends around 1990. I was trying to write, but having a hard time controlling my material. I’d produce in spasms, when inspiration presented itself, falling into self-loathing doldrums when it would peter out, and rarely would I send anything out.

One day I was at Alison’s house and asked her if she might take a look at some of my stuff. I was writing a novel at the time — not anything personal because I wasn’t ready. The last thing I wanted was to divulge my history. When I lost my parents at the age of four, my aunt (who was to live long enough to become the last African-American widow of a Civil War soldier), became my guardian, but I considered it a matter for therapy, not literature. Alison suggested I take a longer view. About a week after this conversation, I learned that my aunt had been invited to participate in a military ceremony at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Intrigued, I called her up and she invited me to come along. Although I hadn’t seen her for many years, I knew it was high time we make peace, as she was nearly 94 years old.

Since the bones of a soldier had come above ground on the Gettysburg battlefield, the officials decided that he should be awarded an Arlington style burial. No one knew whether he had fought for the Union or the Confederacy, so a search began for representatives from both sides. By then all the remaining veterans of the battle itself had passed away. But when one last confederate, Alberta Martin, and one last union widow, my aunt Daisy Anderson, were located, plans for the ceremony expanded considerably. Union and Confederate re-enactors arrived in droves. Time Magazine, as well as The New York Times, sent reporters and photographers. Every branch of the military provided pall bearers. And finally, my aunt and I rode through Gettysburg in a horse drawn carriage accompanied by a Marine escort.

What struck me most watching Alberta Martin and my aunt that day was how similar they were. Both were poor Southerners who had come of age in grinding poverty and each called her spouse “Mister.” Both had married men who were five or six decades older. Each of them clearly still harbored that ancient anger that had ignited the Civil War to begin with. But there was one huge difference. Had this pivotal battle that turned the war in favor of the Union been lost, both my African American aunt and I might very well be emptying Mrs. Martin’s nightsoil that morning.

By the time I saw Gold once more, my aunt had died. She said simply, “It’s time to start. No one else knows this story from the inside like you do. You don’t have to do it all at once — start thinking of writing as a marathon rather than a sprint.”

We spoke of many other things that day, but what struck me most was how very much like a marathoner she was. How calmly she went about her work. She dressed simply, no frivolous adornment or wasteful spending. She wrote in the morning — when it came easily as well as when it didn’t — all the while quietly building her own distinguished career, telling other stories of the Holocaust, including The Devil’s Mistress, Fiet’s Vase, and more recently, Lost and Found, part of the Cahiers Series.

I considered how tenderly Gold must have coaxed that story out of Miep Gies, because she was coaching me in much the same way. I set to work simply at first, writing about how my aunt plucked a duck, how she laughed at the Texans she took hunting when she was a licensed guide. She had been so determined to sculpt me, and I had so rebelled at the idea of being anyone’s inert clay. Her death had almost allowed me to finally meet her, on her own terms.

Gold suggested I forward a couple of pieces to a friend of hers at O Magazine — something I never would have imagined was within my reach. Not only did they buy the piece promptly, but I got a new agent who set up a bidding auction for a book based on this material.

What Gold modeled for me was the idea that the writer delivers stories that the reader needs. The point is to do that job well. Approached from that perspective, the terror that one’s very identity is at stake dissipates. The acceptances aren’t as exhilarating, but neither are the rejections so crushing. It becomes a simple matter of tackling the next sentence.

MEGAN ABBOTT

on Tom Perrotta’s post-millennial suburban humanism.

American Cannibal © Blaine Fontana

Tom Perrotta
The Leftovers
St. Martin’s Press, August 2011. 368 pp.

When Tom Perrotta was in the third grade, he wrote a short composition from the perspective of the Apollo 13 astronauts. “My essay,” he recalled, in an interview for Post Road magazine, “called for optimism and determination in the face of danger.” This anecdote, told with a characteristic blend of self-effacement and humor — Perrotta admits, for instance, that he cannot take credit for the Tom Hanks movie to follow 25 years later — speaks to the complicated mix of nostalgia, disillusion, and yearning that seems to mark a particular contemporary brand of American mourning, our mourning for a past that, while imperfect, still offered enough of us a sense of confidence and hope. You know that Perrotta is winking at us about his 8-year-old self — his JFK-style call-to-action, if it weren’t a child’s, would feel old-fashioned, platitudinous, unearned. But, you also get the sneaking suspicion that Perrotta still believes in that call — or, more precisely, believes in the boy who made it. After all, his novels, for all their mordancy, are, at heart, humanist. As William Blythe pointed out in his New York Times review of Little Children, Perrotta’s novels raise the question of “how a writer can be so entertainingly vicious and yet so full of fellow feeling.”

Prior to The Abstinence Teacher, Perrotta seemed ever ready to puncture his characters, but clearly strove to make sure we liked most of them just enough in the end. In his latest novel, The Leftovers, Perrotta is harder on his characters than ever, and harsher about the world. And yet ultimately the novel is even more humane than its predecessors — with a humanism that extends beyond an understanding of his characters’s foibles into something much deeper and messier. He has assembled a cast of distinctly Perrotta-style suburban dwellers and exposed them to a world both dark and inhospitable, a world where they prove themselves helpless, unable to reckon with a future or even the present, unequal to the big sorrows of life, those that strike more powerfully than personal disappointment, rattling marriages, and suburban discontent.

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Recent Blips:

”A Year of Reading Differently” by Edward Stourton: ”A year ago, with a house full of groaning shelves and books encroaching Triffid-like into every corner, I resolved to buy no more new books and to try out an electronic reader. Here’s what happened next.”

“How Bert Jansch Changed Folk — and Rock, Too” by Sasha Frere-Jones: “As long as the genres under discussion are neither traditional American blues nor country (where a different subset of heroes obtain), Bert Jansch is one the most important figures in finger-picking and the acoustic guitar itself, alongside people like Davey Graham and John Fahey.”

Benjamin Carlson investigates Oregon’s bucolic Scientology High: “…where students imagine they’re in a Harry Potter book, make lots of clay models, look up “the” in the dictionary and learn the ethical principles of L. Ron Hubbard — all while paying more than $42,000 a year in tuition and fees.”

”Octopi Wall Street!” by David Gilson: “A few days ago, photographer and idea blogger David Friedman tweeted, ‘Octopi Wall Street. You can have that.’ Beyond the Occupy Wall Street-inspired wordplay, he was on to something. There’s a long American tradition of mixing economic populism with cephalopods.”

In “Fear of Dragons,” Yu Hua (author of “To Live” and “Brothers”), one of China’s most important novelists, discusses reasons to feel nervous about the arrival of the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution.

MERRILL MARKOE

on Susan Orlean’s biography and cultural history
of “The Wonder Dog of All Creation.”

Picture Postcard courtesy of Immortal Ephemera

Susan Orlean
Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend


Simon & Schuster, September 2011. 336 pp.

In Hollywood in the early 1930s, a handsome German Shepherd from France was drawing a salary eight times larger than had ever been paid to a human actor. He was Rin Tin Tin, and by then he had become more than dog. He was an industry, a symbol, an allegory, a fable. He was gossiped and written about, welcomed for lunch in the Warner Brothers commissary, and listed in the Los Angeles phone book. He received an endless stream of fan mail and 50,000 requests for photos a year.

Now the biography of one of the most famous dogs of all time has been written by one of the great non-fiction writers of our time; it’s a literate dog lover’s dream date. In Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, Susan Orlean unearths the true story of the unlikely wartime rescue of a puppy, as heart-rending a tale as any silent movie melodrama. She also chronicles the many humans affected by his fame and fortune, while offering an informal examination of the ever-ascendant role of the dog in American culture from World War I to the present.

In attempting to tell these stories as thoroughly as possible, Orlean manages to pinpoint and then unite pretty much every aspect of contemporary Ameri-canine entertainment culture, threading them back to their earlier antecedents in silent films. Along the way we have an opportunity to meet long forgotten canine stars such as Strongheart — “the wonder dog, more human than human” — and rediscover canine-centric films like Rescued by Rover, which cost $37 (and gave us the name Rover).

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Literary Landscape © Stanford Kay

The second installment of RICHARD RAYNER’s monthly column.

Arthur Machen
The White People and Other Weird Stories
Penguin Classics, September 2011. 416 pp.

Arthur Machen (rhymes with “bracken”) was born in Caerleon-on-Usk, in Wales, in 1863. By 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, his once promising career as an imaginative writer appeared to be on the wane. He’d gone through the modest inheritance left him by his father, and he was working, neither happily nor efficiently by all accounts, as a reporter and critic at a big London paper, The Evening News. On September 29, 1914, the News ran a short story with Machen’s byline; it was the first time in more than a decade that he’d published any fiction. The story, titled “The Bowmen”’ and now republished in The White People and Other Weird Stories (edited by horror scholar S. T. Joshi with a preface by filmmaker and self-confessed fantasy geek Guillermo del Toro), had a timely wartime subject, featuring a band of beleaguered British soldiers about to be overrun.

“As far as they could see the German infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards,” notes the story’s narrator, who writes with an air of casual authority and reality, as though reporting facts rather than making something up.

Some of the British soldiers sing songs, defying the barrage. Others, to keep fear at bay, give names to the shells that are tearing their comrades limb from limb. One soldier remembers a restaurant at which he ate in London, where all the plates were printed “with a figure of St George in blue, with the motto, Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius — May St George be a present help to the English.” The soldier, who knows his Latin, repeats the invocation and feels

something between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The roar of battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a thunder-peal crying, “Array, Array, array!” … And as the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were like the men who drew the bow, and with another shout, their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the German hosts.

Soon the “singing” (lovely adjective) arrows fly so thick and swift they darken the air, and those soldiers in World War I are saved because “St George had brought his Agincourt Bowmen to help the English.”

Machen himself didn’t think very much of the story. He was an ambitious writer, but often left stories unfinished or published them before they were quite ready to go. Perhaps the hasty composition of “The Bowmen,” its rough quality of having been written at speed as if on deadline, contributed to what happened next.

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Coming of age in two debut novels:

RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ on Justin Torres’s We the Animals

and CAROL SNOW on Christopher Grant’s Teenie.

Man Weighing Himself © Dan McCleary 2004

Justin Torres
We the Animals
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, August 2011. 144 pp.

The American novel has given us its share of troubled young protagonists. Think of Holden Caulfield, or Scout Finch; of Rhoda Penmark in William March’s 1954 novel The Bad Seed, or of the Curtis brothers gang in S.E. Hinton’s classic The Outsiders. More recently, we’ve had Chappie from Russell Banks’s Rule of the Bone, Legs Sandowsky from Joyce Carol Oates’s Foxfire, and the various narrators of Junot Díaz’s Drown. These youngsters, all burdened with the universal adolescent struggle to fit in — their individual values, dreams, and desires butting up against familial or societal pressure to conform — appeal to us largely for their willingness to say, think, and do the things so many of us wish we could, or had. In so doing, they become antiheroes, survivors of the hard-won transitional stages between childhood and adulthood, freedom and obligation.

Justin Torres’s debut novel We the Animals follows not one but three of these antiheroes — the unnamed narrator and his older brothers Manny and Joel (all three under 10 at the beginning of the novel) — as they navigate both the usual adolescent in-betweens and another, more culturally specific one: They are, as their father (who they call “Paps”) tells them, “Mutts … You ain’t white and you ain’t Puerto Rican.” But the brothers don’t suffer this condition in isolation or silence; in fact, they revel in their common in-betweenness: “The magic of God is three.” This strong sibling bond provides much needed support to all three boys as they struggle to survive their parents’ troubled marriage in an economically depressed home. The boys run amok “like animals” — they refer to themselves also as, “Us brothers, Us Musketeers” — an unholy trinity of rambunctious and destructive pre-adolescents always hungering for more, “more volume, more riots.” They associate with no other friends, cousins or neighborhood kids because, the narrator tells us, “we didn’t need them; we had each other for games and hunts and scraps.”

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Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Thursday, October 6^th: Join LARB contributing editors Ann Louise Bardach, David Kipen, Jonathan Lethem, Tom Lutz, Mona Simpson, and Michael Tolkin for a live action advice column, hosted by The Paris Review and PEN USA, at the Cactus Lounge at the Standard Hotel, Hollywood beginning at 7:30 pm.

Writers Bloc presents novelist Russell Banks in conversation with Meghan Daum at the MGM Building beginning at 7:30 pm.

Saturday, October 8^th: The Poetic Research Bureau presents Peter Gizzi at Charlie James Gallery beginning at 7:00 pm.

Sunday, October 9^th: Judy Chicago presents A Conversation with Her Younger Self at Pomona College beginning at 3:00 pm.

Elissa Schappell reads and signs her story collection Blueprints for Building Better Girls at Skylight Books beginning at 6:00 pm.

Second Noir at the Bar with featured reader Christa Faust at Mandrake beginning at 8:00 pm.

Tuesday, October 11^th: 12^th Annual Polish Film Festival begins; first night features an opening night gala at the Egyptian Theatre beginning at 6:00 pm.

Luis J. Rodriguez discusses and signs his memoir It Calls You Back at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.

Anne Enright in conversation with Brighde Mullins at the Central Library beginning at 7:00 pm.

Writers Bloc presents Stephen Greenblatt with Eric Idle at Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills beginning at 7:30 pm.

Thursday, October 13^th: LACMA presents The Rum Diary with special guests, Bruce Robinson, Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and Aaron Eckhart beginning at 7:30 pm.

PHILIP GOLDBERG

on insiders, outsiders, and the debate

over Sri Ramakrishna’s sexuality.

Bastra Haran, Krishna with Gopis (cowherdesses)
Ravi Udaya F.A.L. Press, c. 1910-1920s Courtesy of Om from India

Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana
Interpreting Ramakrishna
Motilal Banarsidass, July 2010. 300 pp.

Hinduism is the third largest religion in the world, and probably the most misunderstood. This was of little consequence in the United States as recently as half a century ago, though there have been periodic bursts of interest since Ralph Waldo Emerson first became enamored of the Upanishads. Today, though, more than two million Hindus of Indian origin live and work side by side with their fellow American citizens, Hindu temples, like synagogues and mosques before them, have cropped up in cities and suburbs throughout the country, and Americans increasingly do business in India. In addition, millions of non-Indian Americans are engaged in Hindu-related practices such as yoga and meditation, for both spiritual and secular reasons. In this context, what might otherwise seem like a narrow scholarly debate about a long-dead mystic takes on extraordinarily broad significance.

Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana’s Interpreting Ramakrishna is a painstaking attempt to refute the central theses of a scholarly book — Jeffrey Kripal’s Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna — published sixteen years ago, one that roiled political and cultural waters academic volumes seldom disturb. Based on Kripal’s doctoral dissertation, Kali’s Child took as its subject the legendary nineteenth-century mystic Sri Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna was one of the most colorful, enigmatic, and revered holy men in India, where such figures are as much a part of the landscape as the ornate temple towers looming above dusty villages or the unassuming shrines tucked into alcoves in teeming cities. Intrigued by the man so many consider a modern saint, Kripal set about dissecting the sage’s psyche with the scalpel of psychoanalytic theory. What he believed he uncovered at the secret heart of Ramakrishna’s life and work was homoeroticism and sexual abuse.

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MARLENE ZUK

on the beekeeper’s Faustian bargain.

“bee?” © Mark Hanauer http://bit.ly/mSjmaq

Hannah Nordhaus
The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America
HarperCollins, May 2011. 288 pp.

Honeybees are like starlings and chickens and thistles and wheat; they do not belong here in North America. Sure, they have been here, by way of Europe, since 1620, but their origins are African, western Asian, and southeast European — criteria by which many of us also lack native legitimacy. In The Beekeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America, Hannah Nordhaus reminds us that honeybees are not indigenous wildlife that have been gingerly tamed, or whose natural proclivities we tweak and observe. Instead, they are more like miniature cattle, which are charming in small numbers as a backyard hobby, but when used commercially can lead to stench and group exhaustion.

The Beekeeper’s Lament is not only about bees, or the people who make a living off of them, fascinating as both of these subjects are. It’s about the dying of rural America, the way we grow and sell our food, the reason people take risks, and, ultimately, about loving, as Nordhaus puts it,

something that can’t love you back, that is just as happy to hurt you, that lives without concern for its keeper or his profit margins or his pride, and that dies with astonishing indiscretion — that simply does what it was born to do.

It is a poignant and keenly observed narrative of almond orchards and a beekeeper’s Faustian bargain. And the story is particularly Californian.

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JOSEPH CAMPANA on Marjorie Garber, Helen Vendler,
Marjorie Perloff, and Harold Bloom

and WILLIAM FLESCH on Stanley Fish and Robert Pippin.

Fox writing with a quill pen (1852) Courtesy of The New York Public Library 

JOSEPH CAMPANA
Harold Bloom
The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
Yale University Press, May 2011. 368 pp.

Marjorie Garber
The Use and Abuse of Literature
Pantheon, March 2011. 336 pp.

Helen Vendler
Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill
Princeton University Press, March 2010. 176 pp.

Marjorie Perloff
Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century
University Of Chicago Press, December 2010. 232 pp.

The Renaissance courtier and author Philip Sidney described poetry as “that which, in the noblest nations and languages that are known, hath been the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges.” The four centuries between the publication of his Apology for Poetry and the present day might as well be four millennia. It’s easy to argue that poetry, which for Sidney referred broadly to literary activity, has been under attack since at least Plato and always seems to survive and even thrive in the face of resistance. Some even look to a brave new world of possibility for literature in a digital age. Still, it’s hard not to be discouraged in the face of an intensifying crisis of faith in the value of both literature and education. What can be said about the importance and function of literature in what seem, to many, increasingly bleak times?

Few literary critics achieve or maintain the kind of cultural visibility that Harold Bloom, Marjorie Garber, Marjorie Perloff, and Helen Vendler have sustained for decades. Bloom has taught for most of his career at Yale, Garber and Vendler at Harvard, and Perloff at Stanford; each publishes with a major commercial or university press. All make claims for the potency and primacy of the literary, if often in radically different ways. Bloom and Vendler champion the poetic tradition approached through close textual analysis, though Bloom prefers grand narratives and Vendler taxonomy. Like Bloom and Vendler, Garber values the tradition, but for her, literature offers problems not just for interpretation, but for public policy. Bloom and Perloff are enthralled by genius and the importance of artistic legacies, though Bloom’s veneration of classic literary works seems at odds with Perloff’s preference for the latest forms of innovation. These publications function as summations of these influential critics’ careers; the inadvertent cluster they form also provides a snapshot of our tenuous moment in the history of literature.

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Recent encounters:

A Conversation with Deborah Eisenberg by Tony Perez: “It wouldn’t seem to be much to ask of a reader, but actually, it turns out that a lot of people like — and expect to be able — to read fiction while they’re half asleep.”

Geoff Nicholson on The Ecstatic: “I’d been aware of the band for a while. From the reviews and descriptions – ‘Japanese psychedelic freak out noise terrorists’ was a typical attempt to summarize – they seemed to be a band I ought to check out…”

“The Education of Tao Lin” by Kaitlyn Phillips: “Much of his success, however, is not literary, rather it is his ability to maintain two things: his fan base, the cultivation of which is an operation facilitated primarily by his Tumblr (and now Twitter), and relevancy to the fickle media machine of literary New York. Lin plays impressive hardball.”

Superchunk’s Jon Wurster on R.E.M.’s final bow: “As I teeter between consciousness and unconsciousness, R.E.M.’s ‘Sitting Still’ comes through my headphones. I flash back to that Easter weekend road trip and then to that hot August afternoon at JFK Stadium. I look at the guy asleep in the front passenger seat. I shake my head in amazement. If this isn’t a perfect example of life’s (or ‘lifes’) rich pageant, I don’t know what is.”

”Dr. Don: The life of a small-town druggist” by Peter Hessler: “He is, by the strictest definition, a bad businessman. If a customer can’t pay, Don often rings up the order anyway and tapes the receipt to the inside wall above his counter. ‘This one said he was covered by insurance, but it wasn’t,’ he explains, pointing at a slip of paper on a wall full of them. ‘This one said he’ll be in on Tuesday. This one is a patient who is going on an extended vacation.’ Most of his customers simply don’t have the money.”

In the print and access restricted interether, two books:

American Idyll: American Antielitism as Cultural Critique by Catherine Liu

The Dominion of the Dead by Robert Pogue Harrison.

JONATHAN LETHEM

on his obsession with an immortal literary character.

Norman Mailer Reads Norman Mailer 1969 Prestige Lively Arts Catalog # LA 30009 

Advertisements for Norman Mailer:
Salvage from an Infatuation

1.

There once was a boy who fell in love with Norman Mailer, a writer who called himself “Aquarius.” Call this boy Aquarius-Nul, then. The name suggested all utopian possibilities the boy had glimpsed, born in the middle of the ’60s to avidly countercultural parents. Their world, which he’d take for the world, was a show that was closing: the dawning of an Age, but no age to follow the dawning. This boy’s own stories, when they came, painted his parents’s tribe as a withered race of superheroes, Super Goat Men and Women, who’d at least been large once in their lives. Aquarius-Nul’s uptight cohort sometimes seemed inclined not even to try, only to mock such attempts. (Aquarius-Nul was as uptight as any of them. Call him A-Nul, maybe.)

2.

When Aquarius-Nul, who favored outlaw or outcaste identities (the Beats, the science-fiction writers), glanced at the then-present Mount Rushmore of U.S. writing, made of the Big Jews and Updike, Mailer was the only alluring prospect. For the teenage Aquarius-Nul, a major American novelist bragging of interest in graffiti, underground film, marijuana, and space travel was irresistible. Even better, Mailer was the only head on that Rushmore who nodded to the value of the outlaw or outcaste identities (the Beats, and science fiction). That Mailer was further a Jew and a Brooklynite yet had shrugged off those legacy subject matters made him, for Aquarius-Nul, who’d want to believe he could do the same, too good to be true. In fact, others on Rushmore would sustain Aquarius-Nul’s interest before long. But not before Aquarius-Nul had burned through Mailer’s whole shelf, sometimes in delirious wonder, sometimes guiltily bored, and, strangely, often both at once.

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As the author of the perennially protested Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich knows a thing or two about being banned. But as Ehrenreich helps us wrap up Banned Books Week on the LARB blog, she clues us in to the cold, hard truth: getting banned isn’t always so easy.

To judge from the gleeful responses of my publisher and literary agent, being banned is not bad for book sales. The first attempt to “ban” my book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America occurred in 2003, when it was assigned as required reading for incoming students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. When conservative students and state legislators protested this choice — with, for example, a full-page ad in the Raleigh News and Observer — I was deluged with interview requests from that state, and relished the opportunity to discuss itsappallingly low wages and high poverty rate. Nickel and Dimed’s recent ascent to the list of the top ten banned books in the United States has generated fresh interest, which has not, so far as I know, harmed sales.

So the question is: How do I get more of my books banned? In particular I would like to draw the attention of would-be censors to my two most scholarly books, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War and Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, both of which were admiringly reviewed but, by the standards of Nickel and Dimed, only scantily read.

My case for banning these more erudite books is as follows: The most common and apparently heart-felt argument against Nickel and Dimed has been that it “bashes” Jesus and is in other ways offensive to Christians. I will not offer a full refutation of this charge, except to mention that the book has won high praise from some Christians — apparently of the “social gospel” persuasion — and led to numerous opportunities to speak at churches and in other Christian settings. My point here is that Blood Rites and Dancing in the Streets contain far more material that is potentially offensive to Christians, as well as to adherents of other religions.

After all, the most offensive statement in Nickel and Dimed is my description of Jesus as a “wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.” On the vagrancy and socialism there can be no question; Jesus was an itinerant preacher who demanded an immediate redistribution of wealth to the poor. As for the “wine guzzling,” I offer a much fuller explication in Dancing in the Streets, which draws on many respected academic sources to draw a parallel between Jesus and the Greek deity Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy. Both offered eternal life to their followers, renounced material possessions, avoided romantic entanglements, and had a special affinity for women and the poor. Most relevantly, Hellenic culture associated both with viniculture.

For a truly lurid assessment of religion though, censors are referred to Blood Rites, which argues that the original deities venerated by humans were animals: in fact, dangerous and carnivorous animals like lions, leopards and jaguars. Humans have always had reason to fear these animals but, as scavengers, the earliest humans, or hominids, also depended on them as suppliers of meat. The combination of terror and occasional gratitude inspired by predatory animals was, I argued, the basis for the religious feelings later directed toward both anthropomorphic and abstract deities.

My censorious fellow citizens, then, would be well-advised to cast their net a bit wider and consider banning Blood Rites and Dancing in the Streets. They are much denser than Nickel and Dimed, and encrusted with endnotes, but the reader will be rewarded with a rich trove of heresies – enough, I hope, to keep these books in print.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a Contributing Editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of all the above books, plus Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, and many others. Her most recent is Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America.

Today the LARB Blog concludes its weeklong focus on censorship in the world of young adult and tween lit with the unmistakable voice of Lauren Myracle. Thank you to the remarkable list of writers who joined us, including Ron Koertge, Ellen Hopkins, Susan Patron, and Sonya Sones. As was noted at the beginning of the week: it’s a confidence game. People either have the confidence — in their ideas, in the right of others to express different ideas, and in the general societal health of this distinction to coexist — or they don’t. If they don’t, it’s often authors like Ron, Ellen, Susan, Sonya and Lauren (and their books) that truly feel the heat.

Tomorrow, Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the oft-challenged Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, rounds out the ALA’s National Banned Books Week with a modest proposal. And for a look back at the history of literary censorship, see Loren Glass’s piece on Grove Press in the 1960s on our main site today.


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Sometimes a Book Is Not a Cigar
by Lauren Myracle

Photo courtesy Lauren Myracle.

In fact, rarely is a book a cigar. What, then, is a book, and who decides? I believe that sometimes a book is a work of art, sometimes it’s a piece of crap, and, well, sometimes a book is just a book. This diversity creates an incredibly nuanced continuum of beauty and ugliness, significance and silliness, but at the end of the day, I’ll take the whole, messy construct and hug it tight. I can’t conceive of a life without books, which is why books claim the number three spot in My Grand List of the Universe’s Greatest Gifts. (Number two? People. I really, really like people, especially those who reside in my heart. Number one? The connective tissue of life—mysterious, compassionate, wild, and loving—which I choose to call God.)

Of late, however, my book-loving revelry keeps getting interrupted. Hate it when that happens. But hate it or not, people sure do get worked up about books. Adults, in particular, seem to get worked up about books, and certain adults get extremely worked up about certain books written for children, though it’s worth noting that “children,” in this context, tends to be used as an umbrella term for teens, tweens, and the grade school set alike.

In response to the legions of adults who try to MAKE BAD BOOKS GO AWAY, the American Library Association founded Banned Books Week, an annual campaign born from the desire to celebrate our freedom to read. I am so with them in that desire. I celebrate my freedom to read, your freedom to read, and the freedom to read that teens, tweens, and the grade school set have as well, in accordance with my, your, and their First Amendment rights to free and open access to information. And yes, the First Amendment does apply to minors, as per Theresa Chmara’s article, “Minors’ First Amendment Rights to Access Information”: “It was well established in the landmark case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that students do not ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.’”

Of course there are plenty who disagree with my stance on intellectual freedom, and just as many who disagree with those who disagree. We all know the drill: First, upset adults condemn me (and other authors) for writing books they see as lurid, depraved, and appalling. When I (and others) protest, the book challengers raise their voices and tell us to shut our flipping pieholes. Undeterred, authors and other freedom-fighting folk raise their voices right back, whipping their hands before them in their best side-swiping stop sign fashion and crying, “Oh no you didn’t!”

But they did (and do), and we did (and do), and frankly? The debate has lost its downy freshness.

We know that adults who care about what their kids read aren’t the bad guys.

We know there’s a difference between a parent telling his child that she can’t read a given book and a parent demanding that NO child should be able to read a given book.

We know, or generally tend to agree, that parents should be allowed to dictate what their own kids read…although of late, I’ve started pushing a little harder on that one. (As in, yes, parents should construct loving boundaries for their kids, but their love shouldn’t stem from fear or ignorance. Likewise, parents have the right and the responsibility to protect and guide their children, but teens, to my mind, aren’t children. Teens need opportunities to reflect and think critically about their world, and they need models for this. Ideally, this modeling would come in part from seeing their parents read, as books are a safe way to explore uncomfortable material.)

Regardless of which side of the debate we align ourselves, we also have at hand ready and familiar responses to the arguments most frequently put forth. For example, if kids read books about cutting, will they go on to cut themselves? Some might, perhaps, but it’s likely that those who do have other things going on in their lives that make them crave the semblance of control that accompanies such a self-destructive behavior. Which is to say that most kids won’t, because reading about cutting (or anorexia or bullying or suicide, pick your poison) doesn’t make a kid run out and do whatever they’ve just read about. Give kids some credit.

Or take these tried-and-true attacks and counter-attacks: Should school libraries be a free-for-all buffet of content, complete with subscriptions to Hustler and manuals for how to build a bomb in three easy steps? No, and that’s why librarians are trained to build collections appropriate for the specific populations they serve. Do all professionals who work in the realm of kids’ books have kids’ best interests at heart? No, and it would be naïve to think otherwise. Does the bottom line of profit come into play in the decisions some writers, editors, and booksellers make regarding what books to push or not push? Sure seems likely, doesn’t it?

And so the rhetoric goes, blah blah blah blah blah. Perhaps the biggest talking point in this year’s banned books discussions has been the question of whether or not “dark” and potentially offensive books can nonetheless offer a shining ray of hope to the novels’ young adult readers. Can reading about rape, for example, help build empathy for those who have experienced the cruelty of rape? Can reading about rape offer solace to a girl who has been raped by showing her that she’s not alone? For a great entry point into this discussion, Google author extraordinaire Maureen Johnson and her trending Twitter thread “#YAsaves.”

But even that line of justification, for me, brings the blah blah blahs front and center once again. Why? For the simple reason that it is a line of justification, and in my opinion, attempting to justify art brings art right back into the arena of black-and-white, my-morals-versus-your-morals absolutism.

Now Freud, on the other hand, might have seen the issue differently. Freud, who often saw penises where others saw cigars, might have followed the YAsaves Twitter thread and seen a really big and awesome penis (because penises, for Freud, were usually GOOD and ENVIABLE THINGS). The reason I say this is because Freud believed in Aristotle’s “art as catharsis” stance. If a book can help a single reader work through pain, then voilà! No need for further intellectual grappling, as the book’s worth has already effectively been established.

Well…not so fast. I’d argue that even if books do save readers (and sure, I think there’s truth in this claim), to burden books with such an expectation is a dangerously limiting stance. Can’t a book just be a really good book? Or a moderately good book, or even a sucky book? Call to mind, if you can, a sucky book that doesn’t save, edify, challenge, or inform a single reader. Does such a book still warrant the fierce oh-no-you-didn’t defense of intellectual freedom supporters?

After thinking far more about this topic than I ever imagined I would, I’ve come (for now) to this conclusion. Books are art. There is bad art and there is good art; there are bad books and good books. Nonetheless, every book deserves a fair shake, regardless of its perceived moral stance, its alleged ugliness or depravity, or the number of lives it has or hasn’t saved. More to the point, every reader should get to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to put down a given book or keep on reading.

William James claimed that absolutism—the idea that there exists in our world truth with a capital T, and values with a capitol V—allows people to take a moral holiday, because if everything is black or white, right or wrong, then no soul-searching is needed when the time comes to make a moral judgment or take a moral stance. Stephen Colbert argued a similar point by satirically coining the term “truthiness,” which he defined in an interview with The Onion as follows: “What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true. It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true.”

He went on to explain (in an uncharacteristic moment of seriousness) that such a stance is inherently selfish, because the underlying assumption of truthiness is that only the person holding the magic conch shell can speak the truth, and even she speaks the truth only while the conch shell is in her hands. When the conch is passed along, so, too, is its truthiness.

This idea of selfishness is a good place to end, because that’s what attempts to limit intellectual freedom come down to. As my brilliant editor, Susan Van Metre put it, “When a critic of adult books says, ‘Don’t read this,’ the adult reader still gets to make up his or her mind whether to read it or not. When a critic of books for children says to adults, ‘Don’t buy this for your teen or tween or child,’ the would-be-reader gets cut out of the equation altogether.”

And that’s not cool, because teens, tweens, and kids aren’t pets. They’re people. They may be shorter than us (or not, in the case of my thirteen-year-old), but they still deserve the chance to discover their own truths (with-lower-case-t’s), and to transform those truths—or not—day after day, year after year, book after book after marvelous-terrible-goofy-wonderful book.

LOREN GLASS

The second installment of Glass’s history of
Barney Rosset’s legendary publishing empire.
[Read Part I here]

Evergreen Review Issue No. 25, Courtesy of Barney Rosset, © Evergreen Review

“You treat Grove as if it was a real publishing company!”

I’m sitting at a coffee shop in the Farragut neighborhood of Brooklyn with Fred Jordan, Barney Rosset’s right hand man and managing editor of the Evergreen Review throughout the sixties, and his son Ken, publisher of the online magazine Reality Sandwich. I had sent them a draft of the introduction to my book on Grove Press, and they didn’t like it. “If you take a publishing company to be a commercial enterprise, Grove never was,” Fred complains. “It wasn’t a business,” his son interjects, “It was a project driven out of passion, which Barney completely self-identified with.”

If Grove wasn’t a business, what was it? “We just called it Grove. Because it was just its own thing,” Ken replied. Jeanette Seaver had likened it to a family; Morrie Goldfischer had repeatedly used the term “team” to describe Grove’s core group. Nat Sobel told me that Rosset compared the company more specifically to a football team, adding “I’m the quarterback, and I’m calling the signals.” What about a rock band? “It’s more like a band than anything else,” Ken agreed. And then he added, “The relationship was not so much from one person to another. It was one person to Barney, and then Barney to everybody else.” And Sobel confirmed, “If we had any personal relationship, it wasn’t with each other, it was with Barney.”

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Celebrating Banned Books Week, the LARB Blog continues its focus on YA censorship with Sonya Sones, author of the recently published L.A. Times bestselling novel, The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus, as well as four award-winning young adult novels: Stop Pretending, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, and What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know.

The “Getting Banned” series began with Ron Koertge and continued with Ellen Hokpins and Susan Patron. Lauren Myracle concludes the series for us tomorrow.

Musings of a “Sexually Explicit” Author
by Sonya Sones

Photo courtesy Ava Tramer

I’ve been a card-carrying member of the dangerous authors’ club since 2004, when my young adult novel, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, landed on the American Library Association’s list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of the year. I was thrilled when it made the list again in 2005 and 2010, and even more delighted when it earned the 31st spot on the ALA’s list of the Top 100 Most Banned/ Challenged Books of the Decade: it’s heady stuff to share list-space with the likes of Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury and Ken Kesey.

I wasn’t always a young adult author. When I first started out I was just a young adult — a young adult with loads of rich friends who spent the summers at their country homes or at camp. But my family couldn’t afford such luxuries, so I traveled to the library instead, letting books take me all the places I wished I could go.

Then, I discovered the steamy dreamy Diaries of Anais Nin, and became an avid journal-writer, often spending more time writing about my life than I actually spent living it. Even so, I never thought of becoming a writer. Instead, when I grew up, I became an animator, and, eventually, a film editor. When I had a couple of kids of my own, and began reading to them, it was my favorite time of day: the book in my lap and an arm around each of my enraptured darlings. That’s when I decided to try my hand at writing.

I didn’t set out to write books for teens, but that turned out to be the voice that came most naturally to me. Lots of people talk about having an inner child, but I’ve got an inner teen. And she’s right there with me, whispering in my ear whenever I sit down to write. In fact, she’d probably argue that she was the one who wrote my books, without any help from me at all. And you might even believe her. She can be very persuasive. Last week she almost had me convinced I should get my bellybutton pierced. Which is not a good look for someone my age.

Despite that inner rebel of mine, I never intended to write controversial books. And I was stunned when people wanted to ban them. But I decided not to let the foolish accusations of self-righteous people stifle the voices of my characters.

Though you’ve got to have thick skin to be a banned author. Parents from all across the country have written to me to rant about how disgusting and inappropriate they think my book is, and have filed formal complaints called “challenges” to attempt to get it removed from middle school and high school libraries. Apparently, there are legions of narrow-minded folks out there who feel that if a book isn’t appropriate for their own child, then no child should be allowed to read it. It would be lovely if we could just ignore these people, but unfortunately, we have to give them the respect they don’t deserve.

When a formal complaint is made, members of the community meet to discuss whether or not to comply with the request to remove the book, following the guidelines created by the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. Librarians, teachers, students, and parents present their arguments in an open forum and reach a decision.

What’s good about these meetings is that they get people talking about important issues, like freedom of speech. What’s bad about them is that sometimes they lead to books actually being banned. And when a book is banned, everyone loses. Because, as the 2010 United States Ambassador of Children’s Books, Katherine Paterson, once said, “All of us can think of a book…that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf — that work I abhor — then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then, we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.”

Why do parents think What My Mother Doesn’t Know is so abhorrent? The Intellectual Freedom Committee cites “sexually explicit” as the reason most often given. This is pretty funny (or pretty depressing, depending on how you look at it) because nothing more than kissing happens in the book—not even the slightest grazing of a boob by a hand. I swear!

But the problem is that the people who try to ban books often don’t actually read them. They just read the juicy parts. I can’t tell you how many letters I’ve received from incensed parents telling me that they were horrified when they read “excerpts” of my book. If these people had taken the time to read the entire book, they’d have seen that when the narrator, 14-year-old Sophie, is pressured by her boyfriend to have sex, she refuses to let him push her further than she wants to go. In fact, his sexually aggressive behavior is the main reason that Sophie stops dating him.

This past year, there was a new complaint about my book. The Intellectual Freedom Committee cited “sexism” as one of the reasons it made the cut. How very weird and disturbing to be accused of such a thing… My theory is that the parent filing the official complaint checked off the word “sexism” because it had the word “sex” in it and that made it sound nasty. And, of course, she knew, from the two pages she had read of What My Mother Doesn’t Know, that my book was indeed nasty. Just a theory, of course.

In truth, whenever the annual Top 10 list is published, I keep my fingers crossed that my book will be on it again. Not because this will increase sales (though it does) and not because it will lead to more teens discovering and reading my book (though it will). The reason I love being on the list is that when I am, I get invited to speak at schools about why books shouldn’t be banned. Which is wonderful, because there is still the possibility that I can lead a child in the right direction, before they’ve been dragged too far down the wrong path by a misguided parent.

The last time I spoke on this topic, at the Pegasus School in Huntington Beach, I told the kids about the controversy that arose in Houston when Ellen Hopkins was uninvited to their YA Lit Festival after a parent complained about the content of one of her books. I explained that some of the other authors who were asked to speak at the festival decided to stay home, in order to show their solidarity with Ellen. Then, I asked the students what they would have done, if they’d been one of those other authors. A student instantly raised her hand and said, “ I would have accepted the invitation, but when I got there, instead of reading from my own book, I would have read from Ellen’s.” How magnificently devious!

But if being devious is what it takes to protect our right to read the books we choose to read, then so be it. We are, after all, living in a world where William Steig’s illustrated story about a horse, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, was banned because the police happened to be depicted as pigs. ‘Nuff said.

I think the great Irish playwright and critic, George Bernard Shaw, summed it up brilliantly: “Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.”

Sones’ first novel for grown ups, The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus.

JOSH LANGHOFF introduces CHUCK EDDY,
the man with more voice per square inch than any other rock critic,

and MICHAELANGELO MATOS finds out what makes him tick.

Chuck Eddy © Lalena Fisher

JOSH LANGHOFF

Chuck Eddy
Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism
Duke University Press, August 2011. 335 pp.

Rock critic Chuck Eddy is one of the world’s great music fans. For the past 25 years, his writing for The Village Voice, Creem, Rolling Stone, Spin, and other outlets has kept Eddy at the center of pop music conversations. He’s been an obstinate champion of overlooked genres like teen pop, country, AOR, rock en Español, and metal, and many record collections would be poorer without him. Eddy’s quintessential record review, though, had nothing to do with any of those genres. Rather, it’s a meditation on Michael Jackson in the form of a review of Jackson’s 1991 Dangerous album for the Village Voice titled “Michael Jackson Loves the Sound of Breaking Glass.” A hectoring invocation — “Hey, so how come nobody’s compared the fucker to There’s a Riot Goin’ On?” — sets us off and running for 2,500 words that reek of Eddy, the cranky old man, tracing Jackson’s “fear and loathing” not just back to Sly Stone, but to Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway.” He evokes rock as much as pop and R & B, including his faves Slade and Kix and the snide trinity of Dylan/Rotten/Axl. And then there are the mannered devices: alliterative rhymes (“bopgun pops and bumblebeed beats”), lists (“electrogrunge/Burundi/square-dance/parade-music”), and holy-shit hyphenates (“crawl-on-your-belly-like-a-reptile throb”). Reading Eddy’s new anthology, Rock and Roll Always Forgets, you learn to either welcome these devices like old friends or, if they start getting on your nerves, to simply skim over them.

Most striking is the tone of confrontation. Eddy also loves the sound of breaking glass, and he uses Michael Jackson to rail against whatever stones he finds in his own passway. Racing through a secret history of aggressive Jackson lyrics, Eddy challenges, “But who noticed? We were too stupid to understand the subtlety he’s been shoving in our face for the last 21 years.” Regarding the album’s sound, he asks, “If there’s nothing new happening on this record, as certain fools have claimed … how do they explain all this noise?” Critical darlings suffer similar scorn: “And if Living Colour and Fugazi, neither of whom know the first thing about music-as-pleasure, can get away with piles of protests about not a damned thing we didn’t already know, why shouldn’t the most popular entertainer in the world be allowed the same courtesy?” Eddy Bugbear #1 is Lazy Critical Consensus; the most recent piece in this anthology is entitled “The Year of Too Much Consensus.” For Eddy, other criticism is as surefire and entertaining a foil as Harold Bloom’s School of Resentment, Paul Krugman’s Very Serious People, or Pauline Kael’s Auteur Theory motherfuckers. Eddy’s spirit of confrontation fits his Michael Jackson review like a crowbar fits a windshield. It’s magnificent.

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PIOTR FLORCZYK and JACOB SILVERMAN

on new translations from Central Europe: Andrzej Stasiuk’s travels into the past and Imre Kertész’s pre-Nobel Prize novel of “eternal forgetting.”

Babie lato, by Jozef Marian Chelmonski, 1875 National Museum of Warsaw

PIOTR FLORCZYK

Andrzej Stasiuk
On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe
Translated by Michael Kandel
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 2011. 272 pp.

If you wish to see the Romanian town of Babadag, get in your hot air balloon, with a nice cup of coffee. Glide past the convenience store on the corner of Venice and Sepulveda, which isn’t too far from where I am writing this now, and over the toothy mountains and frothy seas you know from postcards. Eventually, you’ll find yourself in Europe. Avoid the flashy capitals. Europe can be overwhelming, so think of it as East and West — there is nothing wrong with following in the footsteps of finicky, divisive political history. Heading east through Germany, pay attention to how the neatly ordered villas give way to Soviet-style apartment towers. Once you cross into Poland, you’ll see how the race toward modernization and beautification (the Poles tucking in their shirts for a seat at the big boys’ table of Europe) has gone into overdrive; don’t ask questions when locals remind you that you’re in Central — not Eastern — Europe, which, as far as they’re concerned, is some other place altogether. You’ll hear about Sobieski, Chopin, Mickiewicz, Miłosz, Wojtyła, and Wałęsa, or about how Marie Curie’s maiden name was Skłodowska, and that she was born and raised in Warsaw, not far from where you’re standing, facing the skyscrapers and the national stadium going up in the shadow of the spruced-up Palace of Culture and Science, that was gifted to the Polish people by Stalin and company.

But if you wish to see Andrzej Stasiuk’s Poland, where Warsaw’s traffic and designer boutiques end, where you are not following the ancient amber trade route so much as the needle of a compass held by one of Poland’s most engaging writers (whose popularity in the English-speaking world is on the rise), you must, necessarily you must, point your balloon south. You’ll need to see Kraków, the country’s cultural heart. From there, it’s a mere stone’s throw to the small village in the Beskids where Stasiuk lives and writes, having abandoned many modern luxuries in favor of a house in the foothills, herds of sheep, and an occasional horse-drawn carriage. “My Europe is full of animals,” he announces, not unironically, in his book On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe. In this collection of 14 travel essays, Stasiuk travels more or less along the 24th longitude, through Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, and Moldova.

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Celebrating Banned Books Week, the LARB Blog continues its series on censorship with Newbery Award-winning author Susan Patron.

Susan is the author of The Higher Power of Lucky, for which she won the Newbery. It is the first of the Hard Pan Trilogy that also includes Lucky Breaks and Lucky for Good. She is also the author of the ALA Notable book Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe, and a historical novel, Behind the Masks, which will be published in January 2012. She was a youth services librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library for thirty-five years before retiring in 2007, and currently serves on the board of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

The series began on Monday with Ron Koertge, outlining the case(s) against him, and continued yesterday with Ellen Hokpins confronting the fear at the heart of the matter. Yet to come are Sonya Sones and Lauren Myracle. Stay tuned!

Thoughts on Joining the Dangerous Authors’ Club
By Susan Patron

Photo courtesy of Sonya Sones

My most recent project, a novel for Scholastic’s “Dear America” series, takes place in the Wild West town of Bodie in 1880, at the height of its gold rush. I set out to write about the life of a middle-class girl, a lawyer’s daughter. As soon as I began researching the other characters, I discovered that women constituted only a fraction of the town’s population, and most of them were prostitutes. As a writer, I’d encountered controversy and challenges to my work before, and had a fair idea what the response would be, in some quarters, to a middle grade story with prostitutes as characters: not good at all.

I knew I could save myself a lot of trouble by avoiding the subject of prostitution. Conflicted, I lost days of writing time while thinking about my choices and how best to tell this story. Censorship can begin with the author herself, being cautious and concerned.

In its official capacity, the American Library Association tracks occasions in which people or groups try to obstruct intellectual freedom and the right to read. The most common way this happens is when a book or other material in a library is challenged; the other is where it is banned by such an outside party. If the institution agrees with the challenge, a ban may occur. By the ALA’s definition, “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.”

The ALA keeps track of all challenges and bannings. We can go to their website and find out when, where, and how often a particular book was challenged. But censorship is not always committed by the usual suspects.

There are also occasions when librarians censor books, in subtle ways that may not be consciously intended and may never be noticed. They may simply choose not to purchase the controversial books in the first place. Or they may limit the target reader’s access to the book. For example, the librarian shelves and catalogs a middle-grade book — a novel with, say, a ten-year-old protagonist, recommended by the publisher and review journals for ages 9 to 11 or 10 to 12 — in the young adult section. Why? Fewer complaints, less chance of confrontation, a way of avoiding having to defend the book should a parent object. In short, this person acts out of fear of an anticipated challenge, not an actual one.

The Higher Power of Lucky

Which gets us back to the disreputable women of Bodie. Well, fine, I’ll just leave out the prostitutes, I thought. Undoubtedly my editor would be grateful, my publisher would be grateful, teachers doing units on the westward movement who might want to assign the book would be grateful, parents finding themselves in the position of having to explain about men paying money to have sex with women would be grateful. Hell, I myself would be grateful when reviewers evaluated the book on its literary merits rather than on words or topics they considered inappropriate in literature for young readers.

But then I read about one of Bodie’s “soiled doves,” as prostitutes were called circa 1880, who married an upstanding butcher and wanted to integrate herself into “decent” society. Nope, the proper ladies of Bodie weren’t having it; they rejected her. When she died, they didn’t even want her to be buried in the consecrated section of the cemetery.

The whole question began to give me pause: How often do writers shy away from language, customs, historical fact, and bad behavior on the part of characters because these issues may cause discord, negatively affect sales, or make people uncomfortable? Are we watering down our prose or subverting our history out of fear of controversy? If a character parodies, say, a Catholic nun, do we delete the scene because Catholic schools may decline to purchase the book? If the course of our plot leads to an act of violence, do we remove it to appease parents with anti-violence agendas? Are any characters other than really, really bad guys allowed to commit immoral acts in children’s books? They certainly do in real life. Is the literary landscape we offer children one that should hold up a mirror to what we call life?

I knew I had to use this piece of history as an element in my novel; it was too good a story, and it was true to the times; in some ways it defined the times. Rather than go the safe route and water down or ignore this aspect of life in the mining town, I told prostitute Lottie Johl’s story, forcing my protagonist to confront the hypocrisy and exploitation to which these “fallen women” were subjected. I decided to trust young readers to work it out for themselves, to ask questions or do further reading. Or skip it altogether, if they weren’t interested, going on to follow the main thread of the story or choosing a different book. Otherwise, if I didn’t trust that middle-graders could handle a significant aspect of the history being described, I’d have to choose some other period of history. But if you think about it, no historical or contemporary period is devoid of terrible stuff from which someone will want to shelter children.

It’s crucial to note that a parent has every right to shelter his own children, to guide and advise on their reading. But he does not have the right to limit other children’s reading. This also leads to larger ethical question: Do we writers confuse our job with that of teachers, religious leaders, parents? Their job is to set examples, establish limits and rules, teach good manners, pass along moral values, exercise sound judgment, and model appropriate behavior for children to imitate. The job of writers and other artists is to prod and poke, to provoke questions, to challenge assumptions, to lift that corner of the rug and give readers a look at what’s been swept underneath. Our job is to respect readers of any age, which means to be honest with them. As the world struggles along, gasping from wars, death, evil, and inhumanity, it is no favor to children to hide or ignore or soften the human condition. They witness it every day on the web, on TV, at the playground, and in their own living rooms.

Lucky Breaks

If our goal is only to tell a good story but not to teach or improve the reader, or to provide good role-models, doesn’t that undermine the power of literature itself? No, for as anyone knows who has cried over the fate of a fictional character, or who has felt in her own heart the struggle of a character making a decision on which so much depends, books illuminate the dark corners. They allow us to test our own values, to nurture our capacity for empathy, to see subtleties of right and wrong, to understand moral ambiguity. Books help us, in other words, to be more human.

And, almost magically, good books that speak to our deep inner desires, fears, and hopes create a hunger for more books. Books are good for us; they are good for children, and they will not harm the reader.

I’m here on somewhat false pretenses. Though I have been banned, I’m not a YA author. I write middle grade books that are, in some libraries and bookstores, sometimes shelved with YA books. I believe in using correct anatomical terms for body parts, including a dog’s scrotum. I believe we can be straightforward with readers and they will be grateful for it.

When I was ten, I read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and discovered something horrifying about the world. Anne left us the great gift of her own humanity; her story informed my heart in ways I understood but could not have articulated. The book has been banned and is still challenged repeatedly, so I guess Anne is one of the founders of the Dangerous Authors’ Club. I’m honored to be a member.

Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe

For Banned Books Week the LARB Blog is featuring banned authors weighing in on the experience of@font-face { font-family: “Calibri”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }—you guessed it@font-face { font-family: “Calibri”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1;—being banned. The series began yesterday with frequently challenged YA novelist and poet Ron Koertge, outlining the case(s) against him. Tomorrow, Newbery Award-winning author Susan Patron will join us, followed by Sonya Sones on Thursday, author of one of the top 100 most challenged books of the decade.

But it continues today with Ellen Hopkins, a poet and award-winning author of eight top ten New York Times bestselling young adult novels, including her just-released Perfect. Hopkins’ first novel for adults, Triangles, hits bookshelves in October. She lives with her husband, teenage son, two dogs, one cat and a whole bunch of fish near Carson City, Nevada.

On Censorship, Fear and Truth
by Ellen Hopkins

Photo courtesy of Sonya Sones

I hear it all the time from other writers: “I wish my books were banned. Imagine the sales!” As the most challenged author in 2010, according to the American Library Association, I can tell you that I have never written a book hoping it would be challenged. Neither did I come to writing for young adults expecting fame and fortune. That I have gained a small measure of them was all about the need to tell a story. And I was determined to tell it candidly. I became a New York Times top ten bestselling author by writing truth, disguised as fiction.

Censorship is fear-based. People fear what is different, another color or religion or sexual identity they don’t recognize as consistent with their own. Why look deeper for understanding when it’s easier to excise some “other” from your existence? And if you can’t delete them from your country or state or neighborhood, at the very least, why not remove them from your library? Upside: you don’t have to try to explain to your kids why you’re frightened, when you’re not really sure yourself. Downside: the fear remains, and it grows exponentially, generation to generation.

In October 2008, a young woman, hounded relentlessly by a pack of teenage girls, hung herself outside her bedroom window, displaying her pain in clear view above the front lawn. At her funeral, the girls who were largely responsible for her death walked up to the casket and laughed. The reason they made fun of her? Her family had emigrated here from Bosnia, and she had a “funny accent.” Fear bloats into hatred. Children are bullied, and children become bullies, and some children commit suicide while some children cheer.

How might books be able to change this? By opening young readers’ minds to the idea that we are all, in fact, human; that we share this planet by some design, and that we all belong here. We all search for love, we all suffer pain, and we all, in ways big and small, need each other. It is imperative that we develop empathy and understanding for those whose life experiences are different than our own. The place to begin is with our children, by allowing them to read broadly. Diversely. Fearlessly.

My young adult books write the teen experience, and they don’t sugarcoat. My first novel, Crank, was the fourth most challenged book in 2010. While I chose to write it as fiction, it was inspired by the very true story of my own teen daughter’s addiction to crystal meth: a story she and I both lived. It was our story, but also one shared by tens of thousands of families in this country. My daughter was a brilliant, beautiful child with dreams that will never come true now, because of the damage the drug inflicted on her. I wrote Crank to illustrate how one bad choice can change a life forever. But I had to write it with unflinching honesty, or risk being called a fraud by someone who has walked this path themself. The first time the fictional Kristina does crank, there is no hiding the truth: it’s fun. So she does it again. Before long, it’s not fun. It’s necessary to feel good. Then it’s necessary to feel okay. Then it takes more and more to feel okay, and this is addiction.

The sequel, Glass, explores the deepest part of her addiction, and the final book in the trilogy, Fallout, moves into the perspectives of Kristina’s three oldest children, who have largely lost their mother to the addiction. Kristina is not an altogether sympathetic character. Some readers love her, others definitely don’t. But they all want to know the outcome of her decisions. Perhaps, when faced with this choice, they themselves will run the other way. Reader letters tell me this is so, and for that I am sincerely grateful.

Crank has been challenged because it contains references to drugs (uh, yeah), explicit sexual content, and offensive language. Yet terms like “explicit” and “offensive” are rather subjective. There is sex in the book, including a rape, but I was keenly aware of my teenage audience, and wrote those scenes with them in mind. The sex is neither pornographic nor even erotic, and there are no descriptions of body parts. These scenes are there to portray Kristina’s deteriorating sense of morality, and how far she is willing to go to feed her addiction. They show outcomes to the original choice she made to try crystal meth that first time. And they are truth.

As for offensive language: well, which words exactly, and offensive to whom? Some people are offended by “damn” or “hell” or “bitch.” All are in the dictionary, and not as expletives. As for the all-scary F-word, I use it twice in the book, and purposefully. There is a scene where Kristina, who has always been close to her mother, looks at her mom and for the first time in her life says, “Fuck you.” Her mother, who has denied the signs of her daughter’s slide, in a moment of recognition, slaps Kristina — also a first. It is a powerful scene because it signals a rift that will take many years to repair. And it is the truth.

My other novels touch on physical and sexual abuse, teen suicide, teen prostitution, coming out, questioning faith, teen pregnancy, and other issues that affect young adult lives every single day, at home, at school, at church and on the street. I don’t write to offend. I don’t add graphic scenes that don’t inform the story. Yes, there is sex in my books. Teens have sex, or think about having sex, or have sex forced upon them. There is strong language in my books. My teens say “damn,” “hell”, “bitch” and, yes, “fuck.” Not every character in my books says any of these words. Some kids never would. I write those kids, too. Because always, always, I write people: the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful.

My latest novel, Perfect, is about the drive for perfection, an unattainable state of being, because no two people see “perfect” in the same way. It looks at beauty ideals force-fed to women at a very young age. It examines athleticism, and how far a young man might go to attain his goals. And it also shows how some parents’ all-encompassing pressure to succeed can force a child to become someone they don’t want to be. Maybe even away from who they were destined to be.

Such parents may very well believe they are only doing what’s best for their children. Most would-be censors probably believe they are protecting innocent minds from corruption. I steadfastly maintain that the truth isn’t corrosive. But fear is. And truth is a formidable weapon against fear.

STEVEN J. ROSS

on J. Hoberman’s history of movies in the age of McCarthy.

I Married A Communist, RKO Pictures (1949) Lobby Card

J. Hoberman
Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War
The New Press, March 2011. 432 pp.

In March 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I was interviewed by a Fox TV news anchor whose first question was, “Don’t you think that Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon are traitors for opposing the war?” When I suggested that the Constitution gives every citizen — be they a president or an actor — the right and obligation to voice his or her opinion about the future of the nation, the reporter looked at me in disbelief. In her mind, patriotism equaled whatever the leading Republican said it was. The idea that two movie stars could openly oppose the president was simply scandalous.

In Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, J. Hoberman, the Village Voice’s longtime movie critic, raises the question of what it meant during the Cold War years to be a patriotic American, and in particular what it meant for the movies. This is part of a three-volume study that will chronicle “American politics from 1945 though 1990, as filtered through the prism of Hollywood movies — their scenarios, back stories, and reception.” What is chronologically the second volume in this trilogy, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, was published earlier, in 2003. This book, in effect the prequel to that volume, covers the years from 1945 to 1956.

The Cold War was not the first time movie industry leaders courted or clashed with politicians. Studio leaders have always been afraid of Washington; afraid that politicians would one day heed the cries of cultural conservatives and establish tight federal censorship over the industry. Industry heads responded by gathering powerful political allies. As early as 1916, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association gave money to any politician — Republican, Democrat or Socialist — who openly opposed film censorship. Louis B. Mayer took the Hollywood-Washington connection a step further in the late 1920s by fashioning the first permanent relationship between a studio (MGM) and a party (Republican). In the 1930s, Warner Brothers curried favor with the Roosevelt administration by producing films sympathetic to FDR’s agenda. During World War II, Hollywood showed its loyalty — and staved off a long-lingering federal antitrust suit — by making films that fueled domestic patriotism and planted the seeds of the myth of the “Good War.”

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SCOTT ESPOSITO

Jesse Ball, publishing dystopia, and the triumph of marketing.

The Beginning of the End
© Lisa Jane Persky

Jesse Ball
The Curfew
Vintage, June 2011. 208 pp.

By now, dystopian fiction has been served up just about every way possible. To my knowledge, one of the few ways it hasn’t been attempted — or, at least, well executed — is in the realm of minimalism. That brings us to The Curfew, the third novel by Jesse Ball, a writer who in the past few years has carved out a quite visible and enviable place for himself as an experimental fiction writer, and as a poet and artist. The Curfew’s shortcomings perhaps demonstrate why the minimalist dystopian novel has yet to find a successful practitioner, and for me they speak as well to the nature of authorship in our somewhat dystopian publishing moment.

All Ball’s work tends to the minimalist. His sentences are short and direct, his paragraphs too. His novels have plenty of white space — both literally and metaphorically — and they stick very close to their central character. Like Ball’s previous work, The Curfew’s small confines are packed with sparse exchanges of dialogue. There are very few details, the clipped narration used for utilitarian scene-setting. Rarely does the language venture into the abstract.

The book is about a man named William and his daughter, Molly, who live in a totalitarian regime. The overthrow of the previous regime is handled so briefly as to essentially be a parenthetical — at some point in William’s past the country wasn’t totalitarian, then things changed very quickly — and now William lives a dual life as a writer of epitaphs (or “epitaphorist,” in Ball’s coinage) for gravestones and a member of the sect-like insurgency against the regime. The narrative focuses upon him, his wife, whom he lost tragically, and his daughter, who cannot communicate via spoken language.

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@font-face { font-family: “Cambria”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }It’s a confidence game. People either have confidence — in their ideas, in the right of others to express different ideas, and in the general societal health of this distinction — or they don’t.

For Banned Books Week the LARB Blog is featuring — you guessed it — banned authors, weighing in on the experience of being banned, including two novelists whose books made the American Library Association’s 2010 top ten list for most frequently “challenged” titles. It should come as no surprise that they are all YA authors: a category of writer who, perhaps more than any other, is on the front lines of today’s censorship battles.

New York Times bestselling author Ellen Hopkins and Newbery Award-winning author Susan Patron will be writing here on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively, with Sonya Sones, author of one of the top 100 most challenged books of the decade rounding out our “Getting Banned” series on Thursday.

The series begins today with frequently challenged YA novelist and poet Ron Koertge, outlining the case(s) against him. His latest YA novel is Now Playing: Stoner & Spaz II (Candlewick Press) and his latest books of poems are Indigo and Fever (Red Hen Press).

Hazardous Material
Ron Koertge

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Photo courtesy of Sonya Sones

Oh, I’m banned all right. I’ve been in the Kid Lit business for more than thirty years, and I’m regularly criticized, reviled, and consigned to the Challenged Shelf. Aren’t they used to me by now? I’m also cosseted and praised and handed awards. Guess which one I like best.

Exhibit A: Shakespeare Bats Cleanup. Not that Shakespeare. Will isn’t about to put down his quill, slip out of his tights, and step into the batter’s box. My Shakespeare is a fourteen-year-old boy, Kevin, who loves baseball and poetry. SBC is a novel-in-verse, and, in one free verse poem, the Kevin wonders about the sports metaphor still prevalent in middle school: getting to first base with a girl, second base, third base, home run!

Out of the blue, someone in Texas, a mom, writes to my publisher and complains about inappropriateness. My editor writes back. Ruffled feathers are realigned. The book goes onto a special shelf. The Challenged Shelf. The one in the corner. With the yellow caution tape around it. Sometimes Alice Walker is there waiting for me, or Harper Lee. Did I feel banned? Not particularly. I like parents who show an interest in their kids. Is it likely the child in question couldn’t wait to finish the book? Absolutely. Censored and adored.

Exhibits B and C: Stoner & Spaz and its recent sequel Now Playing: Stoner & Spaz II. My editor at Candlewick Press and I agreed that we’d get in trouble with these books. One of the main characters uses drugs and swears a blue streak. S&S was challenged all over the place, often for “advocating drug use and foul language.” I’ll let you in on a closely held YA author’s secret, which is our standard response to this particular concern: Are you fucking kidding me? The novel is, among other things, a cautionary tale. I’m a novelist, okay? Not a polemicist. But nobody in her right mind would use Colleen, putative heroine of the novel, as a role model.

Still, the challenges were expected and S&S went onto the shelf alongside Alice Walker and Harper Lee. Candlewick fielded most of the letters from parents; I answered the ones from kids who loved the book and from librarians who wrote to say it was one of the most purloined books in their collections. It seemed to whisper, “Steal me” from its place in the dark. Does S&S deserve to be challenged? Absolutely. It’s not for everyone. It’s a book for older kids. Should it be banned? Now we’re in the weeds. I was once asked to answer that question, but I’ll save that little story for last.

Let’s turn to exhibit D: The Arizona Kid. This YA novel of mine has to be at least twenty years old. Candlewick reprinted it a few years ago because it’s a good book. Its story—about a young man encountering and coming to terms with a strange new environment—never gets old. Billy (the sixteen year old narrator) goes to Tucson, Arizona, for the summer and stays with his uncle Wes. Billy gets a job at a local race track and meets a cute exercise rider, Cara Mae. They like each other. They’re also from different worlds. Billy’s home is loving and tolerant. Cara Mae’s is rough-and-tumble, hand to mouth. So far, so good. But wait! Uncle Wes is gay. That’s right: a sixteen-year-old boy is staying with a forty-two year old gay man. Call the cops.

It goes without saying there’s not a hint of impropriety between Billy and his uncle. Wes has been out for decades. He’s visited Billy’s folks many times. There’s no secret. That summer, Wes is honest and frank with Billy about everything. Going to work on time, cleaning up after himself around the house, being considerate with Cara Mae, and, here it comes: what it means to be gay. In an oft-quoted passage, Billy tentatively asks his uncle, “How can you kiss guys?” Wes replies with a shrug, “How can you kiss girls?” They agree that some differences are baffling, but there they are.

One of the charges leveled against The Arizona Kid is that it contains a hidden homosexual agenda. Really? Well, God forbid gay men and women should be large-hearted and kind. Or that their relatives should like to be around them.

Years ago I agreed to sit on panels about censorship. After all, even in my fifties I was still the Bad Boy of Young Adult fiction. And here’s what I noticed: at the end of the evening nobody had changed his or her mind. In fact, most of the debaters were more firmly convinced of their rightness than before. It was a phenomenon I’ve learned to call Hardening the Collective. Nobody had a good time, nobody laughed, nobody went out afterward with the opposition and had a drink. I’m glad there are people who are willing to go to those forums and fight that fight. It isn’t for me. God (or the gods or the Source or the Divine Mind or the Great Pumpkin) gave me a little gift, and it’s not a gift for disputation. I’m a poet and a storyteller. I like to fool around with words all morning, go to the race track in the afternoon, then have a drink with my wife and count the money I’ve won.

I also know that somewhere in the U.S. a kid is smuggling one of my books past his mother. And that’s good enough for me. p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }