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Saturday, December 26, 2009

THE PENALIES OF 'SUCCESS'

For the pocket-kandkerchief of readers who maybe panting to receive TRoL #20, I have news: there are no copies available, the entire run having been exhausted even before it arrived on these shores. Yep, it's sold out, like #3, and I haven't even a copy myself. The last time this happened, my Old Pal and co-founder, Mr. Bellow, against my more prudential will, airily ordered up a double, nay a triple print order for #4. We have an awful lot of #4s as a result.
There is a lesson to this. TRoL does not -- with a very few exceptions -- distribute to book stores such as Barnes & Ignoble. Why not? Because they take 60% of the cover price, pulp those that don't sell, and generally have no interest in anything but wiping out independent booksellers: certainly none in literature. We operate purely by subscriptions. Therefore, if anyone out there wants the magazine -- which is doubtful, as doubtful as the arrival of the US cavalry to save a beleaguered fort being betrayed by Richard Widmark -- we pray that you will subscribe. That way you will get #21 within weeks, which contains a whole book, Souvenirs of Starobielsk by Josef Czapski, on which Andrzej Wajda's new film is based. Plus other good stuff.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

WHAT IS AND ISN'T GLOBAL

You know what a globe is, a round thing often with pictures of countries, empires and waste spaces on it, a theater (Shakespeare's), and lately as common a word (nearly) as f**k. Janet Daley, the London Telegraph columnist and public scold, had this to say about it in relation to the Copenhagen codswollop. There, she said, when uttered by such as Gordon Brown, the very bright but over-ventilating UK prime minister, the word 'global' meant 'it's not my fault.' She went on to point out that the terrible word, 'bandied about with such ponderous self-importance' -- I ask, what else are politicians, if not self-important? Who else would consider them important? -- had 'political ramifications' and just saying 'global' was assumed 'to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people -- that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.' With her piece came a picture reveatory of the new era of the non-smokey back room in which our 'leaders' reshuffle the pack and run our affairs for us. There were: a definitely utilitarian bunch of chairs, the remains of sandwiches, many empty glasses and a select tutti-frutti of our global bosses -- the ever thoughtful-looking Mr. Obama, the figure-racked head of Gordon Brown, a dumpy, gesturing Angela Merkel, a head-down-in-his-collar Nicolas Sarkozy, various flunkies (I thought I recognized the the worried brow of the ineffable Richard Holbrooke -- he who brought on the Great Balkan Crisis) and one or two insignficant 'other' leaders from who cares where. They were the important people, not us. And they looked world-weary.

I have views about 'global', and they start with a fundamental doubt: is anything really global? Is Ham?

Best always to start thinking with simple, homely things, right? Like ham. Is San Daniele a Jamon serrano? No. Is grana also reggiano? How's the parmesan in Botswana? If in the Tonkin Delta or Sarawak, les jeunes filles en fleur, the flowering maidens can marry at twelve or before, but not in Connecticut, and if homosexuals can marry each other in dear old Massachusetts but face the death penalty in Uganda, are our customs global? Should they be? The word 'discrimination' once implied a form of connoisseurship: you could tell a Hals from a daub. Well, I have an old-fashioned belief that nothing I give a good damn about is even remotely global. On the contrary. It is so local, so rooted in custom, tradition and individual taste that there are producers of some hams that are better than others, and to me 'global' means Kraft cheeses (God save us) and miscellaneous ham. It also means a new class of 'leaders' who think they detail -- at least for their brief (but handsomely-pensioned) moments of fame -- the secrets of the universe, their problems and their solutions. Yet the marital quarrels that might befall these leaders, of more import to them than melting icebergs and the water-level of picturesque Vanuatu, are personal, not global. To my knowledge, neither Machado de Assis nor I are in terrific demand as writers in Estonia or Singapore, not to speak of Djibouti. Is any cultivated person 'global'? or is he simply at home in diversty?

What is rightful war to some -- for all states or nations exist only because they provide security for their people -- is genocide to others. Kosovars, Kurds and even Gazans probably feel they have certain minimal entitlements, but so do Serbs, Turks and Israelis. Is the resolution of these 'internal' conflicts a global matter. Madame Carlo Ponti of the Global Punishment Corporation no doubt thinks so, but who thanks her for her demands that such-and-such should be done about Problem X? Is there such a thing as 'global' justice? Mayhap there could be, if we were all the same. But as we are not -- Hottentot and Huckabee alike -- global but particular, it is hard to see conflict resolution globally. If Pinochet is such a dreadful man, a goodly number of Chileans are perhaps happy that Mr. Allende is not running the show alongside Hugo Chavez. How about the people who are making literature or culture in general disappear? Are they any less global criminals than the inept Burmese generals who remember what what Aung Sung Kni's father had in mind for the road to Mandalay?

Your morals are not my morals and vice-versa. There is, as Madam Daley argues, no 'sacred' connotation to the word 'global', no more than there is anything secular and 'narrow' about how nations behave. They react, as nations, to the way we, individually, feel, and if China, India, Brazil and South Africa think it better to extract their people from extreme poverty by thinking of their people rather than 'globally', bully for them. Sorry, my generation knows all too well what happens when the Pure take over with their 'global' concerns and their 'global' solutions are writ into law.

Monday, December 21, 2009

THE BULWER-LYTTON PRIZE

For some reason which escapes me, the good folk at San Jose State have held an annual contest since 1982 in which contestants are urged to compete with the worst possible opening sentence of an imagined novel. The contest is named after the hugely successful novelist-cum-philanthropist and Dickens' close friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton because he began a novel with "It was a dark and stormy night. . .", the which innocuous phrase precedes every attempt by Snoopy to write a novel. The reason must be, in that citadel of learning, that someone has nothing better to do.

I will be accused of humorlessness, but I beg to differ with the principle. On the following grounds: (A) It is no great task to find far worse first sentences than Bulwer-Lytton's in existing novels written today, where they flourish by the dozen. (B) For Snoopy, already a literate and ambitious dog, that opening sentence certainly has a meaning and a reason behind it -- dogs don't like such nights; they shiver, bark, howl and cower. (C) Bulwer-Lytton, like many another neglected Victorian from the great age of the novel, was a writer of some substance.

Okay, so it's all in good fun. We like spoofs. The underlying truth is, however, that there are very few people left who can read Bulwer-Lytton: his language is alien, difficult, and requires effort and attention -- as does Dickens'. There is, on the Net, a professorial quiz which proposes that the reader identify specific passages of Dickens (presumably good) and Bulwer-Lytton (presumably bad). It is a tricky test and a false one. Other passages in either author could reverse the verdict. This gradual effacementof the literature of the past, and its language, is something we might deplore rather than seek to parody. My Oxford Edition of Our Mutual Friend contains many pages of notes to explain Dickens' fascination with, for instance, the specific languages of trades now long lost, doll-makers, conveyancing clerks, water-men, Philistines of the day and such. On my shelves is a treasured dictionary, the Dictionnaire du monde rural, in which one can recover the implements used in threshing, winnowing and other rural pursuits. Every language loses a part of its lexicon every day. Danbury, Connecticut, was the hat capital of America; now the only head-cover we see is the baseball cap. The loss is constant, and the language is not replenished by the conjugation or declension of 'f**k', which seems to be as far as common parlance goes. What is a writer to do if the language he uses erodes even as he writes?

It was a dark and stormy night when the profs of San Jose State thought they knew what bad writing was. Far greater pollution is shown daily and climate change can't be blamed for the poverty of our current language.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

THE EFFICIENCY OF AMERICA?

So GM, with our millions, will close down Saab, whose cars are so far ahead of theirs -- in comfort, economy, efficiency and durability -- that there can be no real comparison. That's intelligent. The web news sites generally described Saabs as 'quirky'. By which I presume they mean that they were engineered to high standards and used better steel than any American car.

I don't know how you feel about our fabled business efficiency, but I have a distinct sense that it has long gone -- though I'm not sure that this is entirely the fault of American business. Surely it is (a) our general provincialism, (b) Homeland Security, and only then (c) our overpaid business executives.

Exempla: If you hire a car in Indianapolis, it costs $135 a week. I mean, that's what it actually costs. What you actually shell out is $381 for the same car for the same period. This is because of local and national fees, taxes and other hoo-ha. Checked out your air fares recently? How much are you paying to keep in existence all those worthy Transport flunkies who: damage the contents of your bags, question your lipstick, chuck your liquids, and ask you to spend an extra hour in the discomfort of airports? The quick answer is, a whole lot. Or perhaps you know why transfers of money within the same bank, from one branch to another, can take up to three weeks, when any terrorist anywhere can transfer it instantaneously from any part of the world to another? Here the culprit is the Government, whose concern about laundering drug money is far greater than its concern with the nose-sniffing that goes on at home. And then, of course, there is its concern that the money you might care to move could possibly be destined for those same terrorists. Or perhaps your pleasure lies in having uninterrupted use of your computer without having idiot messages from Hewlett-Packard telling you just how healthy your printer is, or having Microsoft turn it off in the middle of your sentence because, oops! it had to correct an error which Microsoft itself caused?

I have long wondered -- my father and grandfather having both been entrepreneurs and lone wolves -- just what 'businessmen' actually do, apart from infighting, nattering at the coffee-vending machine, and generally gumming up the works for their companies. The answer is: they devise new ways to soak you: with inefficient machines, with hidden charges, with buying and selling the future of the people who actually do work. One example will serve. ATMs saved the banks vast sums previously spent on tellers (as e-mail saved similar sums on communication). Great. Only have you noticed that the charges for using those machines has now risen from zero to 2.5% or more; or if used aboard (where's that? they wonder) to 7%?

I can't resist one more example of our 'efficiency': how much of your time is spent listening to the endless 'options' of voice-mail before you, if lucky, get to talk to a human being? Our health care is a bit like that too. You wait a long time and get no satisfaction.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

HISTORICAL MEMORY

Good readers interested in history will be aware of the value of historical memory. That is, memories of the past with which there is a direct connection to the present, such as what your grandparents might tell you about what life was like when they were young. Without these testimonies the past fades until it is revived in what we call 'history'. Sometime, perhaps thirty years ago, the Times of London (then still a distinguished newspaper) asked its readers to submit authentic stories which they had heard, live, in their own lives. The idea behind the query was to find the person with the oldest historical memory, and as I recall, it was won by a grizzled Devonshire gentleman who had in his youth been dandled by his great-grandfather and told tales how his grandfather had served as a cabin-boy at Trafalgar (1805).

I was beaten out by a few years, for my historical memory goes back only to the Napoleonic kingdoms of Italy. My great-aunt Elisabetta Publicola-Santacroce was, on the only time I saw her in Rome after the war, a formidable old lady who lived in an ancient and spacious apartment just behind the Pantheon, on the Pozzo delle Cornacchie (Crow's Well). She stomped about with a heavy wooden tripod as support and told me tales of how enamored of Napoleon's French officers her grandmother had been in her youth, how 'liberating' they had been, how colorful, how unstuffy. Stendhal, who was then French consul in the Roman port of Civitavecchia, in his correspondence, confirms meeting members of that great-great-great-grandmother's stories.

None of which may be of great interest to others, but confirms the advice I give all young people: while you've got them, ask as many questions as you can from your Elders, for once they're gone, you are adrift in the history of others.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

AMERICANA

Dickens was received at the White House by President Tyler, who said he was glad he could come by, and hoped he would see him again, sometime. Was this the first observed instance of our ever-shortening attention span? One learns from reading. Living as we did under the banner of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity as discovered by Jefferson, Mrs. Trollope found 'mankind an unamalgamated mass of grating atoms.' A fictitious equality had 'poisoned the American political system.' Men 'attained power and fame by eternally uttering what they know to be untrue.' Which sounds to me a fair enough description of Congress.

For surely no man was ever elected by stating the unpleasant truth that Inequality is what is, and Equality is only what some people think should be. 'When monstrous institutions' do their best to change men's 'nature' they open them up to gratifying their every 'furious and beastly rage', said Dickens. That, too, should be plain. Turn up a little corner of liberty and the whole Magic Carpet flies off with you aboard. Not all our fantasies of what we can be are good, or even sane.

Some of the best things in Dickens lie in his excoriation of journalists. He was one. He knew what he was talking about. I have been one and I think I know what their game is. One part of the trade, as it was, is immortalized in Evelyn Waugh's wonderful Scoop. That little novel, intensely funny, and Black Mischief have to be among the most politically incorrect books still in print. How long before they are banned? At least in Massachusetts. The other part of that drink-sodden profession, its megalomaniacal side, its cant about objectivity and standards, is meat for the P.G. Wodehouse jaws. All I want to know is how is it that we have allowed the 'media' to govern our opinions? When I see Mme. Anampour's 'sincerity' advertising on CNN, I puke: no fact is too obvious for her to posture about her concerns with this and that cause, and that cause is supposed to give us 'grave concern'. Which is nonsense. Journalists don't stand for anything except their expense accounts. Whereas good reporters -- and Dickens and Defoe were marvelous ones when not preaching -- let us hear, let us see, and let us understand what is going on. The moment a journalist thinks he's something more than our eyes and ears and begins to think he is someone whose name we should remember, he's kidding himself and trying to fool us. You need both qualities -- self-deception and persuasiveness -- to become a celebrity. How to avoid that is not taught in schools of journalism. And though a sucker is born every minute, we don't have to join them.

I remember some delicious nights, all starting at 11 p.m., when Mike Wallace started his black-and-white inquisitions on TV. For about three weeks everyone I knew gathered about the box to see Mike, stuffed with facts and evidence, get the bastards. It was riveting, great fun, and one imagines with delectation O.J., Glenn Beck, Jim Baucus et alia being taken apart. Alas! Came the day when one phoney 'celebrity' (I seem to remember he was a glorified hairdresser) appeared on the show. At first he answered politely. But by Minute Ten, he began asking questions back, of Mike. He too had facts and evidence. Mike, with whom I used to play tennis regularly, never really recovered. Now that was journalism.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

ON THE USE AND ABUSE OF MEMORY

In its issue of November 20, the TLS carries a review of Delete by Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, that raises some very interesting questions about information. It appears that in 2003, researchers at Berkeley sought to estimate how much 'information' had been produced in the previous year. They came up with the figure of five exabytes, which equals 37,000 Libraries of Congress. Delete as you will, that information will continue to live -- for which much gratitude from those whose computers are stolen, fritzed, or screwed up by the excesses of Microsoft. If nothing is lost, you can be sure the FBI and dear old Homeland Security has a copy. Somewhere. Of your rages and kinks and curiosities. It is strongly suggested that you do not look up the ingredients of bombs or how to effect a transfer of money between Akron and Aden.

The author's view -- and I have not yet read the book -- is that we have forgotten the importance of forgetting. Which means that almost anyone can access whatever you have not forgotten, or forgotten thoroughly enough. If you wrote that scurrilous, angry letter to your boss telling him you know how much he pads his expenses, with whom he is currently dallying, and by what schemes he plans to conceal his insider trading, then thought better of it and deleted it, it's still out there somewhere. Has it ever occured to you not to do something because you knew it would come out and be used against you? Women who visit gynecologists always wear clean knickers; we who vent -- unless we are old enough not to care any more what anyone thinks -- might prefer for it not to be known that we had once been fired for a grammatical incorretion. Quelle honnte!

The author's second fear is that too much memory us a dead weight, weighing against change and action. There are and have been people who remember absolutely everything; there is no doubt they wish they didn't. Would you wish to remember the smell of a Mexican oyster that turned out to be bad, or how much toothpaste was left in the tube on May 13th, 1946? The Mayer-Schoenberger view is that we must learn to forget; that we should set 'term-limits' on the digital 'information' we create.

This second problem is the one I find disturbing. Whether or not we will eventully use given memory (photograph, text, etc.) is impossible to predict. As the reviewer says, 'the value of what we keep changes depending in part on what we lose' and 'what we consciously chose to delete may serve to distort the past as what we chose not to delete may distort the future.' I once asked a dear friend how it was that I could not remember much of what I had written or published, and often perforce had to read it all over again. His answer was straightforward: I had forgotten it because I had used it. Having no further direct use for it, off it went.

I think I prefer the sheer happenstance of life: those letters from people you may have known briefly fifty or sixty years ago who see your name somewhere and begin, invariably, with 'You probably won't remember me, but. . .' That 'but' counts.

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON DICKENS

In the construction by Dickens of The Old Curiosity Shop and Barbary Rudge, as in Nicholas Nickelby, the spaciousness of the times made available for details that are today passed over as 'mere description' and skipped over by students eagerly seeking some underlying theory or psychological insight. Those details, in the age of print, were the Reader's senses: his sight, his smell, his absolute peculiarity. Dickens could and did invent characters by the hundreds. They delighted in and of themselves. Contained in a half-dozen sub-plots, they were no driving force to the plot. But when he needed them, there they were, ready to provide a vital refuge, a new twist. Literature was not then fast food. It was an expansive culture and believed firmly in reality. But also in humor and pathos. Dickens' Society for the Improvement of Everything we live in now.

Monday, December 14, 2009

THE LITERARY LIFE 1836 AND 2010

In reading Mr Slater's lugubriously written but carefully informative biography of Charles Dickens and his 'breakout' year, 1836, I am compelled to report the following:

1. That in that year, Dickens published, sketched, contracted for and wrote: at least two novels, some thirty 'sketches' of up to 10,000 words each, innumerable press reports, an operetta or two, while managing also to fit in his own wedding.

2. That in that year, his readership, which was to grow and stay with him throughout his writing life, another thirty-six years, became firmly established. He was of course his own agent -- since that now-parasitical occupation did not then exist -- wrote his own contracts, and was pursued to do more. Much of his production was available in print within days, some within weeks, and only a very small part required that he should wait for a few months.

3. That in that year the sheer exuberant variety of his work, ranging across genres and having as its subject 'ordinary life and ordinary people' was such as to create a real presence for him, not to speak of an income, by the end of that twelvemonth, that enabled him to dispense with his taxing, nocturnal reporting work.


It is small wonder that anyone who writes for his living as I have done for sixty-plus years should be profoundly envious of such encouraged prodigality and Dickens' close relatinship with his readers. I acknowledge, of course, that writers come in all kinds. There is the minging producer of the occasional poem or story and the logomaniac. Occasional writing -- such as Dickens' many sketches -- barely figures in the writer's life today, there being but scant market for it. For Dickens, such writing was his training ground. Newspapers and magazines abounded and consumed such material as soon as it could be worthily created.

Dickens would have been able to portray his Nancy Pelosi (the hairy one, in Italian) and Harry Reid in the kind of writing which dwellt less on what they did as on which sub-species of humanity they belong t0, how they walked, how their lips furled, how they talked. In other words, vividly, as a part of life. Apparently no one does this any more, though the reason may be that no one but I would publish it. But I have failed miserably to persuade writers that this is where art begins.

Serial publication made it possible for Dickens not just to respond to his public but also to change his novels in the course of writing them: that is how the Pickwick Papers began, as sketched by 'Boz'. When, however, Mr. Bellow and I, in ANON, sought to get writers to send in their manuscripts chapter by chapter, free to change them at will thereafter, we received a fair number of replies detailing that what was possible for Dickens (and Dostoievsky, etc.) was impossible for them. We reckoned that they cowered before the Perfection Brigade and that the rough-and-ready was not for such refined artists as themselves.

As for periodical publication of any kind, or the existence of such magazines as TRoL, many took the position, and so stated it with vehemence, that 'all that' literary activity was a waste of our time and talents: a true writer was one with a cabin in the woods producing the undying.

As for seeing one's work in print, what was more or less standard in my youth -- six to nine months -- has now become years. After all, how could Harvard or Yale possibly take a flying leap on a text that hadn't been peer-reviewed by a dozen dullards? And what would the charming editors at publishing houses do with their time if the author claimed sole responsibility for his text? (Granted, in many cases this would have led to some pretty awful and illiterate texts!)

Dickens was writing in a blessed era of literature in which the written, printed word was as valuable as nourishment of the mind as food was for the nourishment of the body. Of the six shillings a week he earned when he was twelve, Dickens spent at least sixpence on periodicals. I make that to be 8.25 percent of his income. The average college graduate, we are told, reading ten years later, manages to get through 1.5 books a year. Assuming modestly that his income (after tax) is 40,000$ per annum, a similiar thirst for the printed word would cost him $3,350 p/a, not a raw thirty bucks. There are clearly not many readers today who share his passion.

I doubt it is for any single reason that writers are now worth nothing more than a single meal without drink per annum. More likely is that reading in general has been abandoned by our educational system,and by teachers who are themselves -- like much of the public -- barely literate. When our esteemed senators were presented with major legislation (stimulus, health care), we are informed that they could not possibly read several hundred pages in the given time. Part of their problem, no doubt, was that the bills were not written in English but in lawyerly legislatise; but another problem, and a more likely one, was that in their busy days of flying about and dining and conferring and plotting, they barely had time to read even a whole newspaper. Or the inclination.

I should of course add that in 1836, Dickens was twenty-four years old and almost totally unknown, and that in the year that followed he began to edit a magazine, one of many in which he had -- by both editing and writing -- a powerful hand.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

TO DEMONSTRATE OR NOT TO DEMONSTRATE

I have a very simple-minded view of demonstrations. From the singing of Boola-Boola in my youthful Yale days to the Mexican Wave, from marches for this or that right to the theatricals of PETA or the thuggery of anti-G7, 8 or whatever, I don't join in. For the good and simple reason that what I feel about the given pros or cons, in sport or elsewhere, of a particular cause, I cannot feel sure that the idiot next to me, behind me or in front of me, raising his fist and chanting back the slogans fed into his tiny mind by the organizer with his megaphone,for one instant shares my feeling, be it of outrage (at politicians) or adoration (of Chelsea F.C.). I am and always shall remain, a rump of One.

Demonstrations are to me exactly like the group of European ministers, all grinning at the good lunches they have enjoyed, lined up outside somewhere for the photographers: tailor's dummies all, but none so grinning or fatuous as Mr. Gordon Brown or Mme. Hillary Clinton. On my telly, these figures of fun and flatulence are always accompanied by an Imp, name of Sarkozy, who looks like the dwarf in Twin Peaks. There are many ills in today's world about which I have strong feelings -- Bernie Madoff and Exxon, Baucus and Bush, Cheney and the Modern Languages Association-- but my desire to tear them limb from limb is strictly my own affair. I don't join, and like Groucho Marx, I expect they are glad that I don't.

Of course, I like to think that my approach to the abuses of the day are more nuanced that the imbecile in front of me who rises at Fenway to block my view of a contest for seeing which I have paid good money, but it probably isn't. Chances are that I am not by nature a Joiner of anything. There probably is a reason why I am unable to join a Herd. But I think it is for those who enjoy being a part of the Herd to explain to me why they should choose to go out on a cold, rainy night in Copenhagen to protest about Climate Change. Did they not drive in and park their cars, or fly in from the outposts of Lower Dissent? Do they all eschew fast foods and go barefoot? Why aren't they, for instance, sampling the joys of Anglo-Saxon poetry or loooking after their kids, or learning how to make a souffle, or, in fact, doing something useful? Does their water run while they brush their teeth (if they do)? Can they stop the icebergs melting?

The Mob is an awful thing. Michelet, who got this straight from his uncle, who had dealings with the tricoteuses of the French Revolution, found it and them repulsive. The money wasted on policing such demonstrations of 'democratic', but subterraneously organized, protest would be better spent on. On what? On almost anything. Ridding the opera of debauched directors. Abolishing capital punishment. Private charity. Making a bonfire of collective vanities. Scanning the brains of those who buy Prada. Providing an architecture in which people can live and breathe. Buying fresh and refusing frozen. You name it: almost any cause is worth pursuing privately, starting with the reformation of the Self.

Friday, December 11, 2009

CRIME NOVELS AND STIEG LARSSON

In the guest house I keep some four hundred carefully selected crime novels from many countries: from Idrisson in Ireland to Tabucchi (Italo-Lusitanian), from Vladimir Volkoff (emigre Russian) to the great Nicholas Freeling (Dutch), Andrea Camilleri (Italian), Ian Rankin (a Scot) and John Le Carre (true Brit like his forebears Graham Greene and Eric Ambler), Ray Chandler (expat Brit in Hollywood), and, of course, the Pleiade edition of the priapic Georges Simenon. These are what the French call noirs, the Italians call gialli, and that we used to call plain 'mysteries' but now categorize as 'procedurals', 'psychological', 'historical', and whodunits, etc.. Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd? asked Edmund Wilson about Mary Roberts Rhinehart. Answer, I do. And have written quite a few myself in my I.I. Magdalen persona. It strikes me that -- in the hands of a good writer -- such novels are the last reminder of the true narrative tradition in literature.

Americans rate highly in the international market, especially in Europe,where the brutish is highly esteemed, but apart from Chandler and Elmore Leonard (who started out re-inventing the language of crime) I stick with the avatars, the dirty or convoluted (Ellery Queen, Rhinehart) writers of the 'Thirties and 'Forties. The Scandinavians (Wastberg and Co.) have long been good at the task: their cops somewhat bumbling, their criminals at odds with their smug, suicidal cultures. Until he began to take himself seriously and fell off the roster by concentrating on political corectness, Henning Mankell, now vurtually unreadable, was a fine example. The few Japanese (Matsumoto) who get translated have been remarkable: an ant-like society seems especially troubled by murderers single, if not by murder collective.

Then along came Stieg Larsson, the bolshy Swede, whose Millennium trilogy has made him the world's second best-selling writer. The trilogy is a terrific read because his heroine, Lisbeth Salander is way off all charted behavior in the genre. Seemingly indestructible, she is a sexual fantasy of the author's, whose desirous panting (bisexuality, sado/masochism, bondage usw) is in tune with every kind of lefty 'cause' imaginable. Peep into his background, and the issue is clear: he and his lifelong, unmarried partner, were unsullied sixty-eighters with extreme views, to whom everything that Sweden's highly-structured, busybody and basically conservative socuety stood for was anathema. Unfortunately, Larsson, whose phenomenal success was accompanied by his untimely death at fifty, is pretty relentless in his espousal of the radical agenda. Besides the total flatness of his style (a business-like non-language that may be in part a reflection of his translator), his enormous skill in plotting is offset by the boring predictability of his social concerns, especially in the character of 'crusading' journalist Blomqvist, a man whose company at dinner I would do much to avoid. I can also do without husbands who encourage their wives to seek sexual partners elsewhere, hot scenes of torture, and a general encouragement to view as criminals not just those who commit murder but also those who guard society against such as 'fascists'. The tendency to preach within the crime genre should be eschewed.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

POLITICS AND HEALTH CARE

I have no intention of making an idiot of myself by joining in a health care 'debate' whose conclusion should be now be obvious to all. A handful of senatorial slurpers at the public trough, led by someone called Baucus, have determined that we, the public, should not have a single-pay system of health care.

I take the following as obvious:
(1) Such a plan takes many years to work out in detail. I was alive and well when it was introduced into the unhealthy, underfed, and grudging population of the United Kingdom. Nearly sixty years later that population is far better off and far healthier. It is not I who would benefit from a US equivalent, but my grandchildren.
(2) There is no such thing as a perfect Health Plan. Any will have its problems and its failures.
(3) It is unlikely that any could conceivably be worse, more ill-managed, more inequitable and more spendthrift than that which the United States now 'enjoys'. I paid a private doctor a goodly retainer each year, but 95 percent of Americans -- not exactly the healthiest nation on earth -- couldn't possibly have afforded this sort of 'private' care.
(4) I have a vague recollection that a sensible single-pay government-run universal health care was what we voted for and were promised.
(5) Anyone with the slightest knowledge of such plans in more civilized places, from Taiwan to Poland, knows that they work. Fall ill from Lapland to Cahuita, Costa Rica (where I live), you will be taken care of without a question -- or a demand for pre-payment when you knock at death's door. In Costa Rica it costs a family $38 p/m for full coverage, including any and all medications. Of course, the local system us not as 'advanced' as that in McAllen, Texas, which has the highest per capita costs in the United States, for the good and simple reason that its doctors and hospitals manage to make sure a scratch on your knee will have you tested for diabetes. In Europe, such health care is part of a government package that includes FREE education for as far as a student can go, FREE medical care regardless of who you are, where, or what your income is. (It gets abused, yes, but the taxes paid for the service more than make up for the abusers), and many other sensible services, such as socially-engineered local and national transportation costs, support for culture and much else.
(6) The bill for this is high: a tax-rate that is something like 38-40 percent of income instead out the American 31-34 percent. It is a tax which -- when every child gets some 300-500$ of go-to-school equipment every year -- does not seem exorbitant.

Since all this is crystal clear to anyone who has traveled, read about or studied how these health plans work (which varies greatly from country to country) one wonders how Baucus and Company have come up with the kind leg of a donkey. I likewise it is worth considering just how powerless we are to get our legislators to do the obvious. Just as clear is a much older story: don't dream for an instant that you live in a democratic society in which access is equal to all and your legislators are reponsive to your desires. Congressional eavesdropping on the national mood is like the pit-patter of distant rain compared to the thunder of Tea Parties, Drug Companies and the likes of Glenn Beck.

It won't do for you to say, 'Throw the rascals out!', for others will follow the present batch.

Did someone mention campaign promises: Health care, a withdrawal from war, transparency, no income tax for those on Social Security, and Yadda-Yadda?

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

IDENTITY THEFT, ITALIAN JUSTICE AND THE TURNER PRIZE

8.xii.09

First I hear from a contributor that some creep has been using his name and flogging his own writing as C.M.'s. Strictly speaking, there's only one posible defense against literary identity theft. If someone cares to use Joseph Conrad as his pseudonym he must, like Borges' Pierre Menard, write just like the original. The trouble with this story is that the thief in this case knew the man whose identity he was stealing, had in fact been a class-mate. Challenged, he said he just 'liked the name' and then said it was the name of a distant relative in Ireland. Nothing new about literary fraud. I gather blogs are wide open to intrusions of this kind. If another Keith Botsford wants to post here, what would the appropriate response be? One likes to think that one's style, turn of mind, peculiar curiosities, one's 'angle' is inimitable. But Pierre Menard simply wrote Don Quixote all over again, word for word. Such is the post-modern Fate

* *

The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. has introduced a new concept to history: a headline which reads 'A New Renaissance'. The re-birth of a re-birth? To think that once, many years ago, the Guardian was a true guardian of good writing.

* *

A brouhaha is stirring in the American depths over the conviction of Ms. Amanda Knox in an Italian court. The marvelously smug Hillary Rodham Clinton had to duck the issue, but not Maria Cantwell, one of our distinguished senators. It would seem the prevailing opinion in some circles that Italian courts are somehow inadequate to the task of trying persons who commit murder within their jurisdiction. Now, Italian courts may be all sorts of things: they can be slow, they favor eloquence over content among lawyers, they are certainly slow, they have quaint customs and wear funny hats, and the judiciary is highly politicized, but none of this indicates that they are incompetent. They are rather dogged and bureaucratic, but they also have some admirable traits which I should like to see adopted in our own: they are polite and civilized, they cannot hand out death sentences, appeals from their decisions are automatic, and the system under which individuals are brought forward for prosecution, via an examining magistrate who must weigh all the evidence before allowing a prosecution, strikes me as admirable. There are no 'elected' district attorneys with a political status to maintain, no jurisdictions (like Mississippi's) where lawyers can congregate to make a case for massive tort payments, and no lawyers who advertise for class-action suits to increase their billings.

* *

The Turner Prize has just been given to the painter Richard Wright for painting the walls of an 'architectural space' with gold-leaf that will disintegrate within months. After some years of winners who 'situate' themselves in the art world by lying in an unmade bed, 'install' themselves by running wideos, who exhibit here a brick there a brick or mummify animal parts in tanks, this year's prize has been hailed as a 'triumph'. If all the British Sunday papers, the heavyweights, so thunder, the public will follow. Some may wonder where the art involved in painting has gone. This is not to reflect on Mr. Wright's art, for I have only seen the wall in question on Google, but I do marvel at the unanimity of critics: do they all go to the same spa to get their brains washed by Saatchi, the Tate or the egregious lovers of the spurious in the New York Times?

Monday, December 7, 2009

Should Scientists Study History and Geography?

One of the advantages of a national system of education is the kind of public debate that ensues when 'reforms' to the existing system are proposed. The current ministry of education in France has proposed that teaching history and geography in the last two years of the lycees, devoted to preparation for the famous bac which enables students to enter universities, be eliminated for those in the technical/scientific specialization. The protests, led by Alain Finkelkraut, have aroused the usual French passion for abstract debate.

In its simplest form, the question is, do scientists need these subjects for their professional goals, or would they be better off with more science and less history and geography? We have no comparable debate here: first because the curricula are determined locally by professional 'educationalists', and second because we have long ago eliminated geography in our school systems, and basically scant history. The result has been a nation with only the vaguest notion of geography in the broad sense -- that is, not merely where things are located but of the consequences of such locations. As mathematics and music are languages, almost all human activity involves mapping, from the templates of word-processing to the geography of the human mind.

I was wont to give my students at Boston University a blank map of the world. Three out of twenty managed to place France off the coast of Japan. That would not have happened thirty or forty years ago. Similarly, my eighth grade class in Balboa, California, in 1939 used the same European history textbook as is still used, only now at the Junior/Senior level at university: a net loss of seven years.

I don't think scientists need to know history and geography to be better scientists; I believe they need to know both in order to be better people. We need far more knowledge of the past in order to act prudently in the present and for the future; and our lack of knowledge of how geography and mapping work in our minds in relating one element to another is like not knowing how to co-ordinate hand and eye in hitting a ball.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Maasimo Rizzante: Non siamo gli ultimi (Effigie, Milano, 2009)

In his excellent run-through of the principal themes of twentieth-century literature, Massimo Rizzante (see his text on Roberto Bolano in TRoL 20), a poet and connoisseur, wrote about TRoL as follows:

"In 1997, after fifty years of feverish activity as a writer, journalist, translator, historian and university professor, Keith Botsford, with his great friend Saul Bellow, founded 'News from the Republic of Letters'. This is a cosmopolitan review, entirely without advertising or sponsorship, with a few thousand readers. Part of its purpose, KB explained, was to give some hope to good young writers who found it difficult to publish their work. Saul Bellow spent a good deal of his time reading unpublished manuscripts and defined this task as 'both a duty and an Utopian act' in a world in which attentiveness to quality writing was ever more the province of a very small circle of readers. [. . .] I was at the time a young provincial European, imbued with a natural pessimism. When I met him, this seventy-year-old giant, a constant smoker and full of energy, said: 'You remember the early Christians? Today art survives in the catacombs, and it is in the catacombs that faith retains and strengthens its resolve and its hope to see once more the light of day.' One day, ten years ago, I asked Bellow if there existed any sure way with which to form Sensibility. He said he didn't, unless it might be through taking into oneself certain literary masterpieces as if they were consecrated hosts.

"It is perhaps partly the curiosity of a tourist who becomes an exegete, or an exegete who fancies tourism, someone who is not limited by -- he lacks the necessary time -- the possibilities and limitations of individuals, but who has the illusion that he is able to be, at any time or in any place, at home. As KB said, it was like Augustine's 'vain curiosity', the curiosity that led some to seek out, without any particular purpose, that which lies beyond his own existence, that is outside of himself. [. . .] Every time I open an issue, I am taken miles away from Literaturistan. Every literary review worthy of the name has the same desire to embrace Weltliteratur; it is a desire without limits and should stay such. Goethe defined it as a 'madness': a madness and a faith rising from the catacombs.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

WRITERS & GATE-KEEPERS

Our writers -- some young, some old, scattered all over the globe (because we will read manuscripts in most language -- are mostly concerned with literature. Publication is all-important for them; it is a way of displaying their wares and finding their readers. Like most magazines, we take and publish only a small percentage of the dozens of submissions we get monthly. The usual result for many is a form letter or card. We don't do that: except for those who ought to have known better when they submitted. As for instance, we don't do obscenity, porn or smilies.

The new, often young and untried, writer has his work cut out for him today. It was not always thus. When I started out publishing, neary fifty years ago now, the most common communication I got from editors was, 'Where's the manuscript? What are you working on next?' Agents recruited; publishers recruited. Both were more or less literate; both knew a good book from a bad. My agents in England -- Helga Greene, Deborah Rodgers, Pat Kavanagh -- were intelligent, polite and diligent. So were Candida Donadio and Harriet Wasserman in America.

Today, I make it that there are at least five levels of gate-keeping to be navigated before a book of 'literary' fiction makes its way to the public. First, the general negative response to 'literary' fiction, for if publishers don't want it, then agents don't want it either. This negative reaction has nothing whatever to do with whether the public wants the dreaded LF ('literary fiction'). Some do, some don't, and some might if they had access to it. Saul Bellow and I calculated that with a population of 300 million, a minority literature was still possible. The 'one in a thousand' still gave us a base of 30,000 potential readers. We thought we should be able to attract maybe five percent of those, or 1,500. And indeed TRoL did. So the market for LF existed, however small, and it seemed our job to attract it. Needless to say, the same should apply to publishers. Of course it does not, since the conglomerates which now dominate the business, in tandem with Barnes & Ignoble and the other chains, are only interested in Volume, and we are delgaditos, ever so meager, thin and appetiteful.

Therefore, taking our cherished Work in hand, we set forth to find agents, the Number 2 Gate-Keepers (Mine are long dead, clinically depressed, retired, or have jumped off the Golden Gate bridge.) Well, good luck to you. When I returned to fiction in 1990, I set forth in search of such, starting with the agents I had long worked with. Candida Donadio Associates, I found, had been taken over by a not very good crime writer whose view of LF was painfully expungatory; he didn't want it and he didn't think anyone else did. As is the norm these days, he did take up he better part of nine months to reach that decision, or so inform me. High hopes were placed in my old friend Herbie Gold's new agency, to be headed by the very able ex-editor of the Los Angeles Times book section. He took even longer, and much hand-wringing. God he loved it, God he wished he could. . .You know the line. After some dozens of these, I simply gave up the search for a agent.

Which in turn led to Gate-Keeper 3: that no commercial publisher will even look at a book that has not been submitted by an agent (preferably by el Tiburon, Mr. Wiley, 'owner' of Messrs. Bellow, Amis, Roth and countless backlists). There are exceptions. You may submit directly to publishers if you have done something suitably disgusting, if you have insider info on Michael Jackson or some other spurious celebrity, if you retire (or are fired from) public service, and so on. Random House will greet you with open arms, and so will many, if you can guarantee enough fame to get you on Fox for minimal payment, if you can splash out a few hundred thousand on PR, are buddies with Oprah, or have a specific lobby (Tea Party, Evangelical, etc.) as your target audience. Supposing you have none of the above, being no more then good at your trade (LF), then this Catch 22 will keep you unpublished.

Gate-Keeper 4 is the critical establishment, a dying breed. Writers get known by word-of-mouth, yes, but also by serious citical attention. Where would they get that today? With rare exceptions, the main 'reviewing' organs, the newspapers and magazines that take writing seriously, have never been of a very high quality. With the take-over of many magazines by the Academy, that dead hand has been instrumental in destroying literature, the truth being that professors love themselves and hate books. The middlebrow media, such as the New York Times or the weeklies, in America especially, remain closely tied to the commercial publishers who advertise in their pages. In what country would you have a 'service' such as Kirkus reviews to tell you what will sell and what you should cover: opinions delivered by housewives at piece-rates?

The final Gate-Keeper is the Public. I bow to them. All the previous Gate-Keepers have done their best to exclude literature; the public has been resistent, and is the final judge of the survival of this writer and the oblivion that awaits that one. The other Gate-Keepers have deprived them of choice. We labor to make it otherwise; as do others. I am not optimistic.

The New Language of Soldiering

One of the most curious and familiar aspects of our language is its very American facility for creating euphemisms. The America I acquired, aged eleven, in 1939, still had garbage men; it had a bureaucracy known as Personnel that made hiring and firing official. That wasn't Human Resources any more than garbage men were sanitation engineers. In military terms, I suppose the most familiar of these euphemisms is 'collateral damage' which means killing people more or less by mischance (or incompetence) when you didn't really mean to.

Because there is a serving officer among my children, I tend to read more about war than I otherwise would have. And because I was once, briefly, in Afghanistan -- a country mythical to my childhood for the Khyber Pass and the brave men who fought against 'rebel' Afghans -- I also tend to follow the progress of our conflict in those parts. It was with those interests in mind that I read in my TLS (November 20) that NATO calls our troops there 'stability enablers'. Our boys are there not to kill Taliban (aka the 'Anti-Coalition Militia, ACM) and flush out the 6'4" Osama bin Laden, but to enable stability, something other countries have been trying to do since the 1840s, with a conspicuous lack of success. This process involves training Afghans to do what we currently seek to do, maintain security. This is known as 'leveraging local capacity.' According to the author of the book under review (Patrick Hennessey, The Junior Officers' Reading Club) he and his fellow officers were there 'to play with the Afghans and to teach them to use their rifles for the time when the real soldiers had blown up all the Talibaddies and could hand a peaceful, if not prosperous province (Helmand) with smiles and handshakes and flag-ceremonies.'

As Henessey points out, however, few soldiers really know who it is they are fighting. The ACM, the Talibaddies, could be al-Qaeda, foreign jihadists, disgruntled poppy farmers, co-opted villagers or adventurers out for a bit of fun. Then the clever word-merchants devised 'Tier One' and 'Tier Two' baddies: the ideologists and irreducibles, and the Opportunists who might be 'included' in future negotiations. The army's squaddies, who do the actual fighting (according to my son who returned in April from a six-month tour there, largely to survive), use ordinary language: the enemy consists of 'flip-flops'.

Friday, December 4, 2009

THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

There have been many changes of format in what we call TroL over the years. When Saul Bellow and I began it, we thought of it as a tabloid for the intelligent reader. We put out twelve issues in that format, all of which we are in the process of archiving on line. Issues 13-17 represent the desire of the Toby Press to make it into a paperback book-like magazine, a format which I personally detest, for magazines are ephemera: to be read and discarded unless you happen to be, like me, a collector of such texts. Until we are properly archive, I hang on to my file copies.

After Saul’s death, I continued the magazine – it had always been paid for out of our pockets, and is now paid out of mine only – because I thought Saul would like it to go on, and Saul, despite constant letters from Philip Roth asking him why he ‘wasted his time’ putting out a magazine’, did want it to continue. The relationship between TroL and Toby was not a happy experience. Toby was, and is, a publishing house in Jerusalem, and very much a one-man band. Issues were greatly delayed; our capable editor/proofreader, Aloma Halter, left Toby; and Toby failed completely to market us at a distance.

I then took it back: only to find that our subscriptions had taken a ninety percent drop. Issue 18 was printed in Costa Rica, and 19 in the U.K., thanks to a loose association with a designer of genius, Ornan Rotem.

It was only then that I realized what was wrong without our policy.

The official name of the magazine is ‘News from the Republic of Letters’ and I had been laggard in paying attention to the word ‘News’. That idea – that we should be bringing a constant flow of new literature to our Citizens – derived from the first Republic of Letters, as edited by Pierre Bayle. It was his contention that any subscriber to the magazine could tuck it into his pocket or portmanteau and, whether in Dublin, Bologna or Warsaw, would be received as an enlightened colleague, one who brought ‘news’ and collected news from new sources.

That is why, with Issue 20 we changed our format yet again. We remain a tabloid but we have fewer pages and appear more often, making our magazine fresher and more relevant. We now will publish as we originally intended to do: whenever there is enough first-class material to fill an issue of 16 to 24 pages.

Number 20 will appear shortly, Issue 21 in January and so on. This means that writers don’t have to wait forever to see their work in print; that our comments (especially PB’s Notebook on the back page) will reflect more closely what is going on; and that our section on books (The Reader) will be far more up to date. I suspect the only subscribers who won’t like the new format are libraries; books are easier to handle.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Number 20, TRoL

1.xii.09

With issue Number 20, TRoL will appear in a new, more slender format, but also more frequently. The magazine which Saul Bellow and I created some ten years ago has always been irregular, which is no doubt the despair of libraries; but we saw no point in binding ourselves to appearing with monotonous regularity when we could not guarantee that we had sufficient material of the kind we wanted. The title included -24the words 'News from', the idea being that we would constantly be bringing readers to see all sorts of texts they would not otherwise see.

That, in turn, was based on the seventeenth century Republic of Letters. Then, if you were a writer or scholar and were traveling, say, from Dublin to Bologna, by tucking the review under your arm, you were assured of a warm welcome wherever you went: you brought news with you and could gather fresh news from its citizens abroad. That remains of the essence. Which is why we have halved the magazine's size and will now appear when we have 16-24 pages of first class texts. As of writing, we can and will bring out four issues in the next few months.

We shall be fair to our subscribers: if you signed on for four, you will get six.

I hear many complaints that we are unobtainable in the local B&N, Borders and so on. Such indeed is the case, and there are reasons for it: it's a pointless exercise. First, because these supermarkets are among the chief culprits for the now well-advanced demise of literature in the market place. Second, they are not interested in selling such magazines as ours. Third, they pulp. Fourth, they often demand payment for placement. In fact, their view of literature dxtends as far as the required reading for the local college.

We are available at Gotham in New York, Seminary in Chicago, City Lights in San Francisco, John Sandoe in London, Casetti in Rome and a few other places.