...what exactly do you do for an encore?

Pulp, His 'n' Hers
Different Class
This Is Hardcore

In the 90s and beyond, the savvy answer to the eternal Britpop question "Blur or Oasis?" was "Pulp". It was a plausible answer in the mid-90s: in Britain, it signalled a desire to be freed from the endlessly hyped Blur-Oasis rivalry; in the US, it signalled "I have heard of other British bands".

From the perspective of 30+ years, the savvy answer looks more like a kind of derangement, contrarianism for the sake of being different. The most avowed Oasis hater must give them two excellent albums and a handful of singles and B-sides, pessimistically a dozen. Blur has been many things over their decades, but never boring, and occasionally excellent. Oasis hit a peak and declined; Blur kept on going, the highs lower but more plentiful.

Viewed from 1995, Pulp had "Babies", Different Class, Jarvis Cocker's unlikely sex symbol status, and a weird one-sided feud with Michael Jackson. Viewed from 2026, Pulp has "Babies", Different Class, a retrospectively rehabilitated This Is Hardcore, and Jarvis Cocker's increasingly confusing solo career. In 1995, they were a worthy competitor; in retrospect, rather more like the Stone Roses or Suede. 

The fractures were evident at the time, if you cared to look for them: His 'n' Hers is "Babies", "Lipgloss", and a bunch of ballad-type songs about bad sex. Different Class alternates bad songs with classics: one can reasonably still go to the mat for "Common People", "Disco 2000", "Sorted for E's and Wizz" and "Mis-Shapes", but by God: "Pencil Skirt"? "Live Bed Show"? "Something Changed"??? The songs borrow compositional tics and even chord structures, see the spoken-word verses and sung choruses of "I Spy" and "Feeling Called Love". "Bar Italia", a song I've always loved, gives away the game at the end: it's just a little sappy and sentimental from a supposedly cold, black heart: the poor man who wants love but doesn't know how to ask for it, and ends up hating everyone else, instead.

This Is Hardcore is the best, but it beset by two problems of its time. First, it suffers from cd bloat: because the technical limitations of commercial LPs, 8-tracks, and cassettes had been overcome, you could add in twice as much music, and a lot of bands' ability to edit suffered as a result. Second, the cynical neutral politics that still had so much currency in the 90s has aged terribly in retrospect. 

Currently Reading, Again

Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest
I think it was Zola's Nana, or maybe it was The House of Mirth, where I formulated the rule: "If it's the early 19th century and you're a plucky, loveable woman with no money, you'll be fine; if it's the end of the 19th century and you're a plucky, loveable woman with no money, your options will ultimately prostitution, drug addiction, dying in the street from poverty, or some combination thereof". 

And in that spirit I say: Effi, girl, you're in danger.

 

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
I am 500+ pages in, which is to say about halfway through in my edition. One once learned, but one forgets, that it's impossible to take on everything in a book on a first reading. It's pretty easy to read a passage, get the point, and then zone out a bit as Smith demonstrates that it's true in England, and France, and Holland, and Scotland, over and over again. (The digression on silver, whose point I took to be in part that the price of silver fluctuates in addition to the price of the things it buys, is a fine example.)

 

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner
Finally, one of these without a long party sequence, though it does have a short party sequence. The narrator is obsessed with Albertine, whom he keeps as the titular prisoner in his apartment, closely monitoring her actions in the fear that she's leading a secret life, lying to him, a lesbian, or some combination thereof. 

If you've been in your 20s, you've likely been on one side or the other of this kind of relationship: two people who should just break up, but don't for some stupid g-d reason. Narrator, just let Albertine go already! You clearly don't like her that much!

The place where it becomes interesting is somewhere behind all of this: the Narrator is trying to understand what Albertine is thinking and why, and neglects the primary step of "communicating in any way" with her. He makes little tests and finds inconsistencies between days and over years; does it mean anything? Probably not! But it does produce an interesting side effect: the thing he's cataloging so meticulously is not Albertine, since he is selectively introducing and ignoring evidence, and not talking to anyone else about the conclusions he is drawing: no, by accident (and perhaps on purpose for Proust) you end up with a very accurate picture of how his own mind works, the unintentional revelation.

 

Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night 
I love Tokarczuk, but some of the themes have started to become obvious across her books: mushrooms, gender and sexual identity beyond male-female dichotomies, mushrooms, real and metaphorical borders, mushrooms, mystical consciousnesses who like to use "we", mushrooms, mushrooms, and, of course: mushrooms.

The Aesthetics of Resistance, in summary

Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. III

So it turns out the question I went to 20th century German literature to answer was the wrong question.

Vol. III differs from the first two in that in does not tell a cohesive narrative. Vol I concerns the narrator in Spain, fighting fascism. Vol II concerns trying to establish himself in Sweden, and dealing with Bertolt Brecht. Vol III is a cascade, shifting from one character to another (many, mostly, women) and recounting how their war ended. For most, this was capture, torture, and death. There is a very real sense in the last volume that time is running out--in the book, in their lives, in the moment during the war--and it becomes stuffed with remembering; names, places, the beliefs and dreams they died for. The futility of trying to save oneself after committing to the resistance, because once you're involved, that's it for you: you might live or die, but that connection is enough, no matter how tenuous or short-lived. 

(And the thing is: these are almost all real people. There really was a Red Orchestra, and they really did sabotage Germany from the inside. But whatever they accomplished is not visible to the people living through it.) 

There's a real anger in the book, too, for the vast majority of Germans who simply exchange one yoke for another: they believe in the Nazis until they lose, and then believe in whoever comes after them, as a matter of blind obedience and not thought or reflection. Anger, too, for the people who went into exile, who think Germany is still the place it was in 1932 or earlier, and one can simply restart and wipe away the last ten years. Anger that the chance to start again was taken away by the US and the USSR who decided that their rivalry was more important, that let the people responsible for the war get away with little or no punishment. 

And I think in some ways this is the thing: the world of ten years ago cannot come back. You might believe that everything that has happened is an aberration, because to you it is an aberration, but the world and the vast majority of people around you live in the reality of right now. You can undermine what is happening, you can try to survive (both valid strategies, though we need a lot of people in the first category, as they did), but the thing you wanted to happen back then will never happen. Nor, and this is the kicker, will anything you have learned in the last ten years help you at all in what comes next: it will simply be new and different.  

A thought

I do not type correctly, that is to say, using the home-row method. I do type a lot, though, so my mostly two-fingered hunt-and-peck system is a lot more like regular typing than it's not. But mostly, crucially, the things that I am typing are things I am writing myself, from my own thoughts, and it so happens that my typing has sped up to be as fast as my thinking. That I cannot do 90 wpm is no matter, because  never need to get up to 90 wpm. I could go faster, but the only thing that guarantees is that my fingers may type a half-formed thought before it's formed, and subsequently derail the rest of what I am planning to write.

Anyway. I was hand-reformatting my resume into a new template for a job opportunity, and in the course of fiddling with spacing and margins and visual elements, I found a number of items in the resume itself I wanted to rework. I certainly could have instructed something to take the content from the one and put it into the other, but I would've missed the other stuff I cared about. One needn't eternally optimize.

Here We Go Again

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I am of course sympathetic to all mental health issues. I recognize that the treatment of mental health didn't really arrive until the 90s, with cognitive behavioral therapy and the rise of Prozac and its kin--medicines that actually work with minimal side effects--and that treatment before that was scattershot and unhelpful, and sometimes actively harmful. There also remains, to this day, a stigma against admitting to mental health issues of any kind, of receiving treatment or being in therapy, and that colors how people treat others with mental health problems.

Grant also that Sylvia Plath's singular ability as a writer is to remember--to describe something terrible with a precise and accurate metaphor so that whatever she's describing feels uncomfortably close. Towards the end of The Bell Jar, she does recognize this as one of her real failings--that people feel better when they can forget, and she simply can't forget.

But good lord what a piece of work. It's hard to watch someone throw away parts of their life, to know they know they are doing it, and somehow feel no sympathy or identification. Is it the illness or is it her? Either way, what a fascinating trainwreck and a person I would not ever want to have to know. She becomes more sympathetic once she's in the care of so-called professionals, but even this is colored: we hear a lot about ECT, and not a lot about what she was talking to the doctors about the rest of the time, though she occasionally admits there's a lot of that talking happening. Every interaction with another person is seen as through a pinhole, with a narrow focus on what they can do for her and how they think of her. Again, mental health issues and sympathy and all, but no thanks.

(I read some Rilke after finishing Plath's poetry and it felt nauseatingly fake, which I think is part of the spell. The idea is that the most unsparing, harshest version of the truth is the only real one, and anyone who works in a mode of kindness or sympathy or even respect for the beauty of the world is lying, or stupid, or a phony. I eventually snapped out of it--I like being alive, I like the world around me--but the spell is powerful.) 

Currently Reading, Intermezzo Edition

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils
(I am intentionally abstaining from Pevear and Volokhonsky translations as I make my way back through Dostoevsky.)
I read this one in grad school and it left no stamp on my memory. It's not hard to see why it didn't: it seems designed to deliver the plot through the most circuitous route possible. Large parts of the novel are just dialogue. The story is told by a narrator who occasionally spoils everything that is about to happen before the action begins. The first 300 or so pages involve a set of characters who then disappear from the narrative. It feels, perhaps, like a Fathers and Sons-style novel that morphed into something quite different, but instead of discarding the unneeded narrative scaffolding, it all remained. The murder is at the beginning of Crime and Punishment and in the middle of The Brothers Karamazov; it may just be a case in which Dostoevsky is a better observer of the consequences of actions than the causes of them; that might be his version of Tolstoy wanting to be a novelist of big ideas but actually being a novelist of small details.
But there was a time when this was the thing I cared about most in a novel: the articulate and detailed exploration of ideas through dialogue. I think back to my own attempts at writing fiction and it occurs to me that I was discouraged many times for two things that resonated with me and were (and are still, kinda) deeply out of step with the reading public: dialogue about ideas and very, very long sentences. Everybody hates a long sentence, unless they win you a Nobel Prize or unending literary fame. 

Sally Rooney, Intermezzo
It's no Beautiful World, Where Are You? but it's pretty good, halfway through. I think I have landed on the thing I like about Rooney that seems to annoy the people who dislike her: there's a baseline conviction in all of her books that there's something beautiful about life and the world that's worth noticing and appreciating. Many things in life can be hard, but the effort is worth it because there is something good that no human action can completely obscure.

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or I
I mean, the hits are the hits for a reason: "Diapsalmata" still goes, as does "The Rotation of Crops". I could do without 100 pages on a play that doesn't get performed anymore, but the central argument about Don Giovanni is an interesting one. "The Diary of a Seducer" is... I wonder if I would have read it differently had it been assigned as part of my Existentialism course in undergrad. From 2026 he looks very unappealing. But one is somewhat inclined to expect that's the point: Don Giovanni can be somewhat blameless because his seduction is (so A argues) of the moment and just because he's taken away by a whim; the Seducer is plotting and this has to bring an ethical dimension in. But one gets this sense from the other essays, as well: they tend to be arguments that undermine themselves at least a little because no human being can sustain a perfectly aesthetic point of view; we're ethical creatures and we need ethics. 

My Dog Can Do Calculus, a thought related to AI

A few years ago, I read a thread on twitter or bluesky from a PhD mathematician working as a professor. It went something like this: 

"I was playing fetch with my dog the other day, and it occurred to me that the dog knows with a high degree of precision where the ball will end up with no more information that seeing it come out of my hand--sometimes he can grab it mid-air without looking. Of course, the world functions in a regular and observable way, so the description of the ball's trajectory is determined by calculus. My dog must in some way be able to do the calculus necessary to find the ball. Therefore, my dog must be smarter than I'd previously thought."

Flawless logic, and wrong. Calculus describes how the ball moves, but the ball being thrown and the dog running to get it are natural processes that happen regardless of whether anyone knows the math. And a good thing, too: if you count from Euclid to Leibniz or Newton, that would be 2000+ years the world would have had to go not knowing where balls were going to land. Nor does knowing the math really help you, either: if an outfielder needed to do a differential to catch a fly ball, we could just give up on sports altogether; no one can do the math that fast, and it's not clear how it would help even if you could.

(It also says something about something that it took 2000 years to accurately describe what a puppy or a toddler can learn to do in an hour, or less.) 

Reflections on a few years of reading 20th century German-language literature

Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
    Doktor Faustus
    Buddenbrooks
Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
Joseph Roth, Radetzky March
Lutz Seiler, Star 111
Clemens Meyer, While We Were Dreaming
Christa Wolf, City of Angels
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
    Life of Galileo
    The Good Person of Szechuan
    The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui 
Alfred Doblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns
Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance vol I and II
Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross
    Transit 
Heinrich Böll, The Train Was on Time
    A buncha short stories
Herta Müller, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter
    The Appointment
Elfriede Jelinek, Women As Lovers
Thomas Bernhard, The Old Masters
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
    Austerlitz
    Silent Catastophes
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

...probably some others I'm forgetting over the last few years (I think none of these are more than five years old, and most are from the last year or two when "read modern German-language literature" became a project)

 

I didn't like The Tin Drum. As with many books I don't like while I'm reading, I played some metafictional games: perhaps Oskar is actually normal sized? Perhaps he's such an unreliable narrator that none of it happened? But I settled down into the idea that it's just a novel with a magical realist premise and an insufferable protagonist. I'm legitimately unsure whether this is intentional, and will need to peruse the secondary literature.

The most flattering reading I can give: Oskar is the average German citizen. He's perfectly aware of what the Nazis are for and do, he's heard of the concentration camps but knows not to ask any follow-up questions. He will support the army if it gets him out of Danzig for awhile, he's fine to go lay on the beach each weekend. Leaving Danzig at the end of the war doesn't bother he because he has a place to go, he's glad to accept the German economic miracle in the West despite not doing anything to deserve it. He is passive in the face of history, contains no outrage over anything but his romantic misadventures, and stumbles into a happy ending he does not in any way deserve.

*****

I've been reading in German and Austrian literature for a few years now. It is dispiriting and compelling at the same time. There are so few of these books that I really love--at a pinch, only Anniversaries--the widened circle including The Rings of Saturn, The Aesthetics of Resistance, City of Angels and Mother Courage. But Mann and Musil and Grass all left me cold. I could appreciate but not love Berlin Alexanderplatz, but that's mostly Günter Lamprecht's fault, and that Fassbinder could make his miniseries after the war. But most of it is formal and correct and perhaps a little lifeless, like you're looking for a heart that simply isn't there. 

And yet, I keep on, and will continue. One is inclined to ask: why?

*****

Spanish language literature will explain things to you, if it does nothing else. The most apolitical or right-wing writers must acknowledge colonialism, and capitalism; political instability and the tricky interrelations of Europe and native cultures. (You might have the politics of Octavio Paz, you're still going to hate Europe a little.) Spain gets off no easier than the Americas, wrestling centrally and constantly with what it means to have experienced fascism for such a long time and then tried (and failed) to forget it.

Japan has a central organizing myth in Godzilla and the million things that refract from it: a retelling of the trauma of how WWII ended for Japan, the primal fears that it raised. (I am quite sympathetic to the alternate view that Godzilla is an attempt to overlook Japan's actual role in the much longer war and their various atrocities and focus only on the tiny sliver of that experience that makes them the victims, but this counterreading is very much in the text already--Godzilla attacks Japan for a reason.) The forced modernization and economic miracle that faded; one can pretty simply hop from the Meiji Restoration to the post-1970 economic boom and find all the parallels one might want. And all throughout it people are writing all sides of it.

Germany... does not do any of this. There is the Exilliteratur, but none of those people really know what happened in Germany because they mostly weren't there. The people who were there remain largely silent. Upon the division of the country, the GDR has its own set of problems, and the West now needs to be integrated into western Europe and so the pesky question of what exactly someone did in the war needed to be forgotten. Then there's the economic boom which... how to say this charitably... convinced a number of people in the West that there was some sort of inherent German business genius as opposed to boring structural economic reasons for such advancement so quickly. Moral accounting was then unneeded, God had signalled his approval of the hardworking German people. And when moral accounting is not needed, very few people will be interested in doing it.

There's political violence and an attempt to refocus the issue of Nazism in the 70s, but it mostly fails. The Die Wende, reunification, and yet another economic boom: the people are finally ready to look somewhat honestly at what they did. As with all such historical reminiscences, it helps a lot that many of the most responsible people were already dead in the mid-90s. But Die Wende is also a time of human economic, artistic, and personal flourishing, so attention is at best divided. (I don't mean to downplay it: the circumstances of division were traumatic, and reunification really was a time of new and exciting possibilities for almost everyone.)

The end result is that you can read and read looking for an accounting, a serious moral reckoning, and find nothing. The Exilliteratur will tell you that everyone in Germany knew and understood the bargain, and were more or less happy to go along with it as long as it was providing dividends. The retrospective work will tell you that, too: one assumes this is part of Günter Grass' motive in The Tin Drum. But to write of this at all suggests that you have misgivings, and most people kept their own counsel.

*****

So you go into reading a literature hoping--expecting, more like--to find some revelations and instead find none. A curious silence or an omission. Why did we begin this project in the first place?

Well, you know why you didn't see anything, you've read Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind and know all about Metaphysical Ketman, the idea that you can keep some secret interior personal space your own. When faced with horrors, you can comply or say and do the things you need to do to keep yourself safe and your life normal. But as Milosz will tell you--or Christa Wolf, who was an informer for the Stasi for a couple of years and just forgot about it--maintaining a double life is psychologically stressful and most people just can't do it for any length of time. The division will collapse and the outer person--the one who complies--takes over. How can you write honestly about what you experienced when your entire continued existence requires you to lie to yourself about what you knew, what you did and didn't do? 

And me, looking for clarity where there could never be any.

*****

But those of us in the US live here, now, with the reality of our own horrors. One might have been able to look away in previous decades because the horrors mostly occurred in places far away from us. Now they are home and visible and difficult to ignore. But the example of Germany can and should show us that people will find a way to ignore what is happening so long as it doesn't disturb them and their lives. 

You know very well what will happen if you sit to the side and hope for the best, and don't pretend that you do not. The point is not to interpret what will happen, but to change it. 

 

Currently Reading, Wrestling With A Giant edition

Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems
It was a Patricia Lockwood LRB article that did it, as it often is these days. I read The Bell Jar as a callow youth in 8th or 9th grade, with little or no sympathy and less understanding. (I didn't hate it, for the record.) I never pursued her poetry or anything else about her. So I come to her work in something like total ignorance, but having pieced together some of her contemporary milieu in my reading in poetry over the last few years.

Look, I'll be honest: I mostly don't like it. She has a flair for observation and image, and any poem that begins with "I was going on a walk the other day" or a near equivalent will be worth your time. She is open and experimental in tone and form in ways that are really admirable: it seems clear enough that she has something she wants from her writing and goes right for it. 

The obsessions are right there on the surface, too: she uses the n-word far more than I expected. She has a fascination with the Holocaust that I think is of both the "I will look unflinchingly at the worst people can do" variety (sister, I can relate) and of the "the fetishism of bodies and body parts is not really so far removed from the treatment of bodies, especially female bodies, in post-war medicine and psychiatry, especially when those bodies are considered to be 'wrong' in some way" variety. But it's very unsettling. Suicide is everywhere; from the safe remove of 60+ years I wonder how no one saw it or did anything about it. It is all, as charitably as I can put it, deeply unpleasant to read. (Her beekeeping poems are this in miniature: brilliant. horrifiyng.)

But: that's surely the point. She is a great mind and an exceptional woman who is trying very hard to be a particularly narrow idea of a "normal" wife and mother, surely the mind rebels at all points, and at the men who enforce the system (father, husband, doctor) most especially. I am precisely the person who should squirm in reading them, and rush to reassure myself, as I did, that I have nothing in common with Ted Hughes. (For many reasons.) And she shuts herself off from the Adrienne Rich option of analyzing her condition with an eye to change it--a poet with a similar background who is sometimes awkwardly personal or embarrassingly political but does sometimes train her eye on me, the skeptical male reader. The world of poetry I inhabit is a lot of things, but it is not essentially and unrelentingly negative. But it's an honest word, honestly come by. I don't think it matters how I feel about it.

I come back to the thing Lockwood comes back to in her essay: Sylvia Plath was once the most boringly normal postwar American girl, and then she was a great poet. But there's no spur, no demarcation point, nothing in the biography or in the work you can point to as the reason she goes supernova. Lockwood, as a writer, mostly focuses on the implications of this for writers: what does your method, practice, training, slow improvement mean when someone can just show up and do that, and not even really be able to explain how it was done? (And distressingly: is it because she was crazy and suicidal? Must I be crazy, too?) A singular writer who leaves no path to follow, and did in a few years more than you will in a lifetime.

But it seems to me that Sylvia Plath works the other way, too: the normal woman who wanted very much to be normal until it couldn't be stifled anymore. Maybe she wasn't really special, she just lucked into a situation that allowed her genius to come out. How many more Sylvia Plaths are out there across all the areas of knowledge, beauty and excellence, now, trying to be normal? 

Currently Reading, Katabasis Spoilers Abound, Proceed With Caution

R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
I liked it quite a bit, but to be clear, it's more Foucault's Pendulum than The Name of the Rose: a perfectly enjoyable outing for academics who want to turn their brains off for a bit, not anything resembling a classic. It's also, to my surprise, more Piranesi than Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: the plot machinations are few, it's mostly about the inner life of the main character.

[spoilers]

Of course, as soon as you can piece together that Alice is not going to die in Hell, you can be pretty certain Peter won't, either. And yes, it is stupidly obvious that they're in love with each other in the way that only grad students can muster--they both kinda know it to be a bad idea and it doesn't stop them. So it then stands to reason that Peter won't actually be dead at the end, and everything else kind of unspools from there. (It was also clear right away that Peter had no plans to sacrifice Alice, it didn't make sense in the arc of the story.)

I see the reason for the negative reviews: people don't want a happy ending. I also see the frustrations with the academic side of things, but I was once in a freshman philosophy class and fascinated by paradoxes--the topic of my first paper was the Sorites Paradox. So I'm clearly the audience for it, to grasp pretty much all of the references. 

Currently reading, Catch-up edition

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
If I had to pick the least romantic thing in this book--there are many to choose from--it is our nominal hero taking for his last non-love-of-his-life sexual conquest (there were well over 600) a literal schoolgirl with braces whom he grooms for a year before trying anything. When this poor girl finds out she's being jilted, she kills herself, information which is communicated to our hero in a brief aside and never dwelt on.

The book easily reads as an anti-romance, but somehow I think that's not how it was intended.

 

William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
The book that briefly broke my reading system. Whereas your George Eliots, Charles Dickenses, your Dostoevskys and Tolstoys, etc etc, all break into nice little solitary units of reading, Faulkner demands to be read whole. There's something oddly compelling about the incantatory tone: not Proust, exactly, or Henry James; nor at the other end Thomas Bernhardt, where the long sentences are a kind of fugue repeating the same themes over and over again. Any particular piece of the writing will make next to no sense, but you emerge at the end of a chapter with a picture of the whole even so.

Not much to say about the plot except that if any one of the characters had hated black people less, none of it would have come to tragedy, but that's the American south for you. Well, that and the unwillingness to look a situation square in the face, or have an open and honest conversation.

 

James Joyce, Dubliners
A bunch of stories which are somewhere between perfectly fine and good, and then, wham, "The Dead". I suspect it plays better the older that you get, but even so, it's incredible to get ten versions of "this Irish father is drunk and sad" and then one of the high points of European literature.

 

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Another one that hits differently because I am older when I read it. I think sort of astonishing for the author to get at such a young age what it is like to be an older person looking back.  

Lyric of the day

"[I] never let a computer tell me shit"

-Del the Funky Homosapien, "Things You Can Do", Deltron 3030 

Something for the season

Currently Reading, Recently Read Edition

Anna Seghers, Transit
There are plenty of war novels that traverse a familiar groove: the futility of war (Catch-22, The Good Soldier Svejk), the overwhelming scope of war (War and Peace, The Charterhouse of Parma), the radical expose of evil where it seems like there is none. Seghers' The Seventh Cross is an example of the last. We know, she knew, everybody kind of could have known that the Nazis were the bad guys, and they received important passive and active support from regular Germans with all kinds of motives. The Seventh Cross is notable in this respect because it was written and published during the war; people come to know the truth in all sorts of ways, and that novel was one of them. Important, but hammering home a point we all know.

Transit is instead a very weird novel, because it is about a German who refuses to leave Europe even though he has very good reasons to want to leave; more importantly, he has--through a series of misunderstandings--the ability to leave. But he doesn't stay for noble reasons, to resist the Germans or to rebuild Europe once it's over: he just wants to be a farmer and not leave. It's like Casablanca if Rick decided to stay but because all he really wanted in life was to run a casino. The novel is even more interesting because it is the exact opposite of the decision Seghers made for herself; it has strong autobiographical elements except that, well, everything the main character does is different than what Seghers did. And it this was it becomes an interesting book, but also a frustrating one: Exillituratur without the exile.

 

Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections
I read the first three stories. Every one was brilliantly done. Every one twisted the knife at the end. I decided to abandon it.

 

Charles Portis, True Grit
One of the hosts of my favorite podcast made an offhand reference to Portis, whose The Dog of the South I had read and felt indifferent about several years ago; I saw this while browsing the library shelves and decided to give it a go. Iconic, perfect, inimitable. Hard to say a bad word about it, except the part with the snakes at the end, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, though this was certainly the point.

 

Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None
Reading this one day and then watching Wake Up Dead Man the next was a real exercise in--actually, you know what, going to blog this separately.

 

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
I was required to read this in high school and did not especially like it, finding it to be well short of scary or horrifying. Maybe five years ago I read and enjoyed We Have Always Lived In the Castle, so I thought I'd give it another go. I don't dislike it as a book, but I also think I am not its ideal reader. One must believe something I don't to make the plot work, but I'm at a loss for what that thing might be. It moves along well until the wife and the other person show up and then there's just too many ideas trying to reconcile themselves in not enough space. Maybe I'm not really convinced that Eleanor was captured in any meaningful sense by the house?  

Currently Reading, Guess I Don't Like Milton edition

John Milton, Paradise Lost
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

An apology to one of my good friends from grad school, who loved Milton and tried to get us all to read him: I did not like Paradise Lost. On a poetic level, I did not like it because it was a fusion of a bunch of things I don't especially like: a Roman cadence and insistence on highlighting the depth of reference of which he was capable (having recently read Ovid, this came across as Ovid in spades), a Greek insistence that every thought must be represented in speech (hat tip to Erich Auerbach for pointing that one out to me a long time ago), and a Catholic willingness to invent little filigree details to make the story "richer", which is to say longer. I had been led to believe Satan was a major character, but he disappears pretty early in the poem; its real hero is Angel Who Provides Exposition.

The thing about the story as represented in the Bible is that it is short and woefully short on details. It's not merely that Milton adds details, but that they begin to change the substance of the story itself in ways it's not clear to me that he's aware of. If Adam is prohibited from eating from a tree in Eden that's one thing; if he gets a long explanation from Angel Who Provides Exposition about what happened before Eden and also there's a bad guy who might be trying to sneak in, the meaning and import of Adam's actions change--especially if he does not pass any of this information on to Eve but subsequently blames Eve for not knowing it. Similarly, the human point of the Eden story seems to be that something has definitively come to an end with no particular hope of resolution; it's the first low point in a history full of low points. But Angel Who Provides Exposition explains to Adam that no, it's cool, it's all going to work out in the end; being banished but having definitive proof that things will be fine is very different than being banished and having no particular idea of how things will go. This is compatible, I suppose, with a certain kind of Calvinist reading, but it's not one that I'm aware of a Calvinist ever making, exactly.

It did strike me that this might just be churlishness, so I should read something that attempted to make use of a similarly gnomic passage in the Bible, and so I repaired back to Fear and Trembling for the first time since 1999? 2000? No later than 2001? And as it turns out, it uses similar material to quite a different end. Kierkegaard is working with some respect for the material and his own limitations--the text says what it says and he does not consider himself free to change it. In fact, he demonstrates conclusively that any other way one might frame the story would make it worse, and weaker, and that Abraham can only be a model in part because we cannot enter into the story or his mind other than how it is presented to us--it's just, in the end, a mystery. 

Trying to Summarize the Last 10-15 Years or So of Reading

The "read all of the classics of literature" goal I set for myself at age 15 is essentially done. There are some holes and Italy remains a weak spot. Herodotus, Lucretius, Chaucer, The Scarlet Letter, and a general recognition that I should be more familiar with pre-1900 English poetry, a thing I am absolutely not going to get on right away. I have read only two of the four classic William Faulkner novels and 1.5 of the classic three by Edith Wharton, but these are nits. There is still more to read, but nothing truly embarrassing.

For a long time my reading was dominated my themes or tastes--reading through modern Spanish-language literature, modern Japanese literature, that weird period where I realized I hadn't read a book by a white English-speaking man for six months and then just ran it out for another year. The four-five-six book system makes things a little more intentional and methodical. Thus I have been working through German and Austrian literature for over a year or so. There's been a lot of coverage but not a lot I really love, though a lot of it comes close.

A distinct Spanish-language phase that ran from 2009-2015 or so. Soldiers of Salamis easily the best of this group. A general distaste for El Boom: I did not entirely enjoy Vargas Llosa, Cortazar or Garcia Marquez (or Allende), or enjoyed them in the way I enjoy Thomas Mann: obvious genius and skill that does not speak to me personally usually through too thorough commitment to the scheme. Spanish-language poetry a tough field; Mexican poetry tends to do pretty well in translation, but whatever it is in Ruben Dario, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda et al is lost on me. All minor Spanish-language writers are great, however; regardless of genre, their books punch at or above their weight no matter length or complexity, and you are like as not to find a work of real genius. (I don't even like the genre of Our Share of Night but it doesn't even matter, the book was great.)

The Spanish phase was replaced by Japanese literature with A True Novel, which everyone compared to Wuthering Heights but to me felt more like A Hero of Our Time. From there to Natsume Soseki, especially I Am A Cat but all others. Haiku was, alas, not as much of a hit as I wanted. We eventually ended up in feminist postwar fiction and genre, especially crime (especially especially feminist crime, a fascinating genre, go read Out). Breasts and Eggs. Territory of Light. Another high-value literature, but very slow in translation, especially since there is somewhat lighter fare that sells better and gets translated more readily.

Which I suppose leaves German-language literature as the current phase. I continue to read it because I do see something of myself and the more esoteric ways of my family in it, but I have to admit there's not really any classics here. Anniversaries is closest, but it's still hard to disentangle how I feel about it from the year of my life I spent reading it. Post-reunification literature has not entirely made it past Die Wende, and I suppose I can't blame them: it must've been awesome to be young in Berlin in, say, 1992. (It was not awesome to be young in Michigan in 1992, but I didn't expect it to be, so.) 20th century German literature has an obvious central gravitational pull, and though my appetite for exile-or-staying-or-surviving-or-thriving is higher than average, a lot of these works have narrative problems because events are what they are: you will probably not escape. If you do escape, you will probably have a bad time. If you stay, you will absolutely have a bad time, even if you never lifted a finger to help the Nazis. 

Classical German literature is also a bit of an issue: there's Goethe and then a bunch of dramatists and poets. The poets work in what feels to me like a high classical and romantic metier that is difficult to read at any length (I am having the same problem with Milton and Paradise Lost at this exact moment.) Goethe is weird and interesting, though it was disappointing to learn that he was, charitably, and even by the standards of the time, a dirtbag, not unlike my hated Rousseau. 

I ran through British 20th century literature for quite awhile--Powell a particular favorite, and Elizabeth Taylor still; Pym did not interest me enough to try more; Elizabeth Bowen did, but I foundered on the (excellent) short stories. The Transit of Venus and especially The Great Fire were and remain favorites. Everything Persephone Books publishes is worth it, and the care they put into their editions is amazing, but the cost eventually became prohibitive. Heat Lightning and The Shuttle and The Fortnight in September, the best beach book ever. Girl, Woman, Other. It remains a reliable source of perfectly solid novels of all kinds.

Lagos and Nigeria ran hot for a few years, but it was hard to get a reliable read on what was really good coming out of Western Africa, a sort of version of the Japan problem.

And America, well... it has become clear to me that modernism and romanticism and the sheer dreaminess of the American Dream touched something in American letters from Whitman through World War I, but by the time Hemingway converted to Catholicism, it was over, and never to return. My Átonia and An American Tragedy are unspeakably beautiful. Modern, post-1990 literature is fine and sometimes great, but I wouldn't hang my hat on it.

I may have come around on LeGuin, but I won't be reading Earthsea. Philip K. Dick works best as a treatment writer for movie premises. Pynchon is very weird, and not in a good way.

I like Sally Rooney's novels. 

Home Thoughts from Home

Phoebe:

Life can feel like these cycles of getting up, scrambling to get children out the door, scrambling to get 9-7 worth of work done in 9-4, then picking children up and coming home and they want dinner but also snacks that have to be prepared during dinner prep and also the older one has homework and I’m not quite sure if we’re doing the homework right nor where her little sister is meant to be during it that won’t distract her, and then I serve whichever disappointing home-cooked dinner and then it’s bedtime routine and then the rest of the workday happens and looking at practical and impractical stuff that can be ordered online but typically ordering none of it then I go to sleep. 

 

1. I should begin by saying that this is a lot like my life, and I am similarly pretty happy with it, although baffled in many of the same ways. I had a staycation where my wife and kids went away for a weekend and it was... fine. I saw movies I would not have otherwise and ate slightly differently than I would if they were around, but otherwise it was sort of blah. But when it's the first week of a new school year in July, or I'm facing down the endless monotony of three weeks off around Christmas, it becomes very clear the extent to which days are carbon copies of each other, and it does wear on you. 

2. In my last year of teaching I was at Chicago, and was advising one of my freshmen who didn't like Chicago and had been accepted to Duke the year before. She wanted to transfer. I wrote her a letter of recommendation and told her what I knew about the student experience. She was accepted, and then began a serious campaign to get me to tell her what to do. I declined that request*, but did try to point her in the direction of the idea that the decision mattered a lot less than she thought it would. 

If she stayed at Chicago, she'd incorporate into her self-narrative the belief that she is a person who can tough it out when things are difficult; if she left she'd be the sort of person who doesn't allow herself to be miserable but takes active steps to make her life better. And at a certain point of remove, it would cease to matter what she had decided--she'd end up pretty much the same person either way. (She acquired a boyfriend while deliberating; she stayed. No better or worse than any other reason to make the same decision.)

3. The central thesis here would be the one from Javier Marias' A Heart So White: at a certain point, doing or not doing, deciding one way or another, all eventually bend back into the same stream because you can outrun neither yourself nor the global circumstances in which you take part. I knew my wife for many years before we started dating; we were in and out of relationships at different times and always friendly with each other. Our relationship happened when it happened, but there's a real element of "of course it was going to work out" looking backwards. And nothing that we fretted about has really ended up mattering that much. Even our frantic 2nd trimester decision to move worked out just fine (we have A Pretty Good House, But With Some Drawbacks; same as every other house), so long as you don't ask me to move again for another ten years.

4. I was perhaps prepared for this by listening to a lot of Yo La Tengo: a long, successful relationship is falling asleep with the Mets game on, doing the dishes, remembering an argument you once had but that everyone moved past. It's pretty boring. The feelings move slower, at a lower register. You don't get the fireworks of being 16 and crushing on someone, you don't get the misery of a relationship that needs to die but won't. You get, say, a child pulling the pencil out of your hand because they can do the rest of the math homework on their own, or an older child pulling the "Do you need a hug? No? Well, I need a hug" to help a younger one feel better when they're having a bad day. Or a spouse just glad to talk to you at the end of the day (a non-talker who loves to talk to you, specifically, is such a winning feeling). 

5.  I have remembered this bit of ee cummings for 25 years:

i have perhaps forgotten
how,always(from
these hurrying crudites
of blood and flesh)Love
coins His most gradual gesture,

and whittles life to eternity

6. And one other note: it is mildly beneficial to be a good-ish father in the eyes of society and the workplace. You really do have to only gesture to the minimum and people will eat that garbage up. But I have also found that actually being interested in parenting them is read by lots of others as weird: I partake in no hoary gender clichés, I try to know their interests, thoughts, and general emotional landscape. Even among the relatively evolved dads in my social set, this is a bit unusual, and quite often treated as such. It's not a complaint, exactly: my kids' school knows to call me first (only took three years), parents of their friends learn that I am the one who organizes the schedule, etc etc. But it is an annoyance.

 

* Here in the sanctity of the web where only God, four people, and AI scrapers will see: based on what I knew of her as a student and a person, she should've gone to Duke. But also it didn't really matter. 

Currently Reading, Somehow We Have Almost Completely Turned Over Again Edition

Herman Melville, Moby Dick
I read this for the first time at the single weirdest reading time in my life: the summer after I completed my dissertation, while living on ~no money and waiting to move to Princeton. I did not like it then, and was especially hostile to the non-story chapters. 

This time, it's pretty undeniably charming. There's some humor and no particular hurry to get anywhere, just to leave and to go. In that way, it's pretty American. (It is, of course, odd to think of this as being written in almost the same world as Balzac and Dickens, and Baudelaire.)

 

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
A fabled writerly trope, observed in the wild: a new female character whose introductory paragraphs includes an extensive description of her breasts. She later stands naked in front of a mirror and contemplates her breasts for an extended period of time. I would abandon the book, but I am... 1000 pages into it (only 300 into volume 2) and have less than 100 pages of completed material left. How far I will make it into the unorganized chapters and unfinished notes is yet to be determined, but the novel has become less interesting once it went from "novel of ideas about the fall of the Austrian empire" to "weird sexual hangups of early 20th century Austrians".

 

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
I am now in the very long (~150) Baudelaire section. When it was on general Parisian topics, it was easy to see the thrust of it all, and all of the pieces fit in neatly: the transition from Revolutionary Paris to modern/20th century Paris by way of glass and steel, hence the arcades, to department stores and Haussmann, and on through Zola and modernity. But I don't quite see what the thesis on Baudelaire is intended to be: he's a transitional figure from say Hugo to the Symbolists and Decadents as well as modern French verse, sure. He's a flaneur, an observer of the dark heart of modernity, and in his willingness to be unsparing he gives a better picture of the decay than Haussmann. But there's Zola, and Dreyfus, and Proust, and it seems pretty easy to form a picture of French modernity that doesn't involve him at all, or can work around him.

This is perhaps good context to say that I've made several attempts at Baudelaire over the years and simply don't get it: some of the poems are good, but the hit rate isn't high. Unlike other languages, I don't know French well enough to follow the translations, and it does seem quite possible that something vital is lost by midcentury American squishes who don't want to directly translate what they consider to be vulgar. But I just don't see it. 

 

Horace, Odes
I like wine, too, but c'mon.

 

Herta Müller, The Appointment
I was indifferent to cold on this one to begin, but as it gradually became clear that (spoiler alert) the main character was going to miss her appointment with the secret police, possibly on purpose, I warmed up to it. I do think the pacing and some of the thematic concerns were a touch overdone--if you've read one narrative about the depredations of communism in Romania, you've read them all--but I didn't dislike it.

They're Writing Songs of Myself, But Not For Me

Montaigne, Essays
Over the years, I've read a few of his essays ("On Cannibals" comes up a lot in early modern contexts); there was sometimes a clever argument, but I was never really moved to dig further. Well, in the spirit of all things coming due to those who read extensively, I gave the complete essays a shot, and promptly abandoned them after I.14. 

I accept as a matter of historical importance that people continuously try to make compatible things that are not, at first glance, compatible with each other. I've even taken a scholarly interest in them, from time to time: what was my dissertation if not trying to merge liberal Protestantism with moral universalism, historical-textual (and therefore Biblical) criticism, and a rejection of natural law? I can see how that would be of no interest to most people, but it was of great interest to me, because I wanted to found my moral judgments on the grounds that were important to me, and wouldn't you know it but someone else had done the same thing 400 years earlier.

But these overlaps are not really interesting, most of the time. How is Aristotle compatible with Islam, Judaism, or Catholicism? The developments of Ibn Rushd, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas are all watershed moments in Western thought, but I don't believe in Aristotle's science, or Islam, Judaism, or Catholicism. So they can really only be of academic interest to me, which is to say, if I am not motivated by a specific question (or teaching, a different type of intellectual exercise), I can't really bring myself to care much.

(cf. also last week's post on Ovid, and the failure to integrate Egyptian deities or anticipate Rome's collapse: it's interesting to me because it's an artistically interesting failure. I don't really feel compelled to have a view on Isis as a god or Cleopatra, so.)

Montaigne is devoted almost exclusively to a similar project: reconciling Counter-Reformation Roman Catholicism with Stoicism. It's hard to imagine two views I am troubled by less, either on their own or in combination. If they can be reconciled, so much the worse for both. Which leads one back to the question that frames a lot of my own non-fiction reading these days as an ex-academic: "why would I bother reading a book about viewpoints I don't like in a style that's not my favorite, when there's no hope of being convinced by anything I couldn't get from other, preferable sources?"  

Frankenstein? More like Frankenmeh.

Pan's Labyrinth, dir. Guillermo del Toro
Frankenstein
(why not?) Pacific Rim

Pan's Labyrinth is a movie that is a classic in the sense of being exactly, and only, what the director wanted it to be. I don't even know that I have much to say about it, except that it is not really a horror-adjacent movie (the horror only involves the humans). It has the ring of a fairy tale, not accidentally. It exists in close relation to lots of other stories but is not exactly like any of them. 

Frankenstein is perhaps an idea del Toro sat with for too long, which he's too close to. It is almost a good movie. But the addition of the rich financier changes what it is that Victor sets out to do: in the book, the sense I got was that it remains unclear to him whether any of his experimentation will actually work. He rejects the monster in part because he never contemplated what might happen if he succeeded and that he might not be happy with the success. In the movie, the financier shifts the question: it is no longer really a question of whether the experiments will be successful--that's what the money is for--and Victor finds himself with something that will not immediately bend to his will, so much the worse for the monster. And so much of Victor's actions, and the monster's self-understanding come to mean different things. The ending really just makes no sense given all of what came before.

Pacific Rim is, well, a good reminder that life cannot be composed only from asking deep questions about the nature of humanity and belonging: sometimes you gotta get the visceral thrill of big machines fighting monsters.