Functioning data, obsolete media

A dispute with a company that charges an exorbitant fee to replace data on floppy disks that will no longer be accessible by the latest version of its software program leads me to wonder if the same thing could happen with the Kindle, iPad, Sony Reader, or other electronic reading devices. As far as I can tell, no one has given any thought to what happens in the sequel when electronic reading hardware becomes obsolete.

After all, those of us who paid full purchase price for data on floppy disks did so under the assumption that, as with the purchase of a print-and-binding book, we were obtaining the contents for all time. What would prevent Amazon, however, from dropping Linux in favor of a different operating system, and then charging customers an additional fee to “translate” the books they had already purchased into the new system?

What happens when Amazon ceases to support the version of the Kindle that you own? Unlike the codex, an ebook requires a piece of hardware—a machine—to be accessible. Isn’t it entirely possible that the machines will be replaced and the electronic data will have to be bought all over again, and again? And that some texts will no longer be available in the new format?

Needless to say, this is not a problem with print and binding. Nearly two years ago, I divided books into two categories: “those which are needed for practical activities and those which are collected, treasured, preserved from destruction.” The Kindle, I speculated, would never replace the latter. And perhaps the reason is that the hardware for accessing such texts—the human mind—is in no danger of becoming obsolete, despite the hostility to it in some quarters.

Tenure

My friend and colleague William Bedford Clark has a delightful poem called “Tenure Deliberations” in his new volume Blue Norther (Texas Review Press, $14.95):

Today the dossiers sit at the head
Of the long table where the Chair convenes
Our meeting. What we say must not be said
Outside this room. We adopt this strict means
Against litigation. Bile and rumor
Move among us as silent witnesses,
While we debate journals, imprints, ardor
In the classroom, what a reviewer says.

Six years, up or out! Nothing personal . . .
But the grim stakes are higher still, for we
Are in the dock; each candidate’s record
Serves as rebuke or vindication. All
Here must judge themselves too and secretly
Cower in what peace tenure may afford.Exactly so. The decision whether to award tenure is as much a depart­ment’s judgment on itself as anything else. So much is code for whether a candidate is, like Count Mippipopolous, “quite one of us.” Questions of status and connections crowd out evaluations of merit and originality. What the department is looking for are the right signs, the reassurance that the candidate shares the interests of the tenured faculty, and in the future will vote accordingly.

In Grand Strategies, which I will be reviewing for Commentary, the long­time diplomat Charles Hill says that the line dividing “precivilization” from civilization is crossed when justice replaces status. Status is related to family or clan; justice is one of the foundations of the state:The state focuses on the public good; the clan cares most for its own private cause. The state is committed to administer justice; the clan is sensitive to its honor. The state recognizes and enforces contracts; the clan may deal in something akin to contract, but hierarchy or status counts for more.Many university departments, especially in the humanities, are organized like clans. Their “silent witnesses” are “bile and rumor,” the stock ticker of reputation among members of a clan. Their tenure deliberations are not an exercise of disinterested and impersonal justice, despite the claim that their decisions are nothing personal. They are the formal means of recog­nizing and enforcing a commitment to a department’s private cause, its honor, and its hierarchy.

Last days of the academic ruling class

Higher education in America is an economic bubble that’s about to burst, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has been saying all summer. When Brooklyn College—a college with an undergraduate Jewish enrollment of twenty-seven percent—assigns a book to all incoming freshmen to serve as the basis of their “common experience,” and when that book is by a radical pro-Palestinian who claims that the government “limits the speech of Arab Americans in order to cement United States policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” you begin to suspect Reynolds may just be right.

The problem is not the assignment. In my experience, few if any of the Brooklyn Collge freshmen will even bother to open the book. I can remember the title of the book that was assigned to all incoming freshmen at U.C. Santa Cruz the year I went up there (it was Arthur Koestler’s Act of Creation), but that’s the sum of what I remember about the book. I bought a copy, but never heard it discussed anywhere on campus. Same for the various books that were assigned to incoming freshmen at Texas A&M University over the years. After the English department made a fuss over choosing them, they were never mentioned again.

The problem is the reaction to Brooklyn College’s choice, as reported by Bruce Kesler (h/t: Instapundit). Donna F. Wilson, dean of undergraduate studies, replied to objections from the retired sociologist Werner Cohn by saying:

Each year professors in the English Department and I select a common reading for our entering students. We choose memoirs (a genre familiar to students) set in New York City, often reflecting an immigrant experience, and written by authors who are available to visit campus. Students in freshman composition respond to the common reading by writing about their own experiences, many of them published in [a campus publication]. This year we selected How Does It Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America by one of our own faculty members, Professor Moustafa Bayoumi, because it is a well-written collection of stories by and about young Arab Brooklynites whose experiences may be familiar to our students, their neighbors, or the students with whom they will study and work at Brooklyn College. We appreciate your concerns. Rest assured that Brooklyn College values tolerance, diversity, and respect for differing points of view in all that we do.The invocation of the holy academic trinity of “tolerance, diversity, and respect for differing opinions” is the ceremonial means by which true tolerance, intellectual diversity, and recognition of differing opinions are released into the wilderness. Those who choose books for college study, no matter how politically tendentious and one-sided, are immune to objections from those on the outside.

Yesterday I made the personal acquaintance of such immunity. An English professor at a nearby college dismissed the complaints of the writing majors in a senior seminar, who did not see the point in reading Jacques Derrida.

Rather than an economic “bubble” that is about to “burst,” it is this self-satisfied immunity to public incomprehension and criticism which may at last be fading. There is no way to defend the time and expense of a four-year education which is founded, not upon its economic benefit nor upon the freedom-making greatness of the texts and authors that are assigned, but upon the soi-disant privilege of the book-choosing class.

Note: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Stay awhile, why don’t you? Have a look around. If you are interested in academic questions, this post on why university faculties are dominated by the Left might be to your taste. And here the opposite question is considered: namely, why aren’t there more conservatives in the university?

Damaged in transit

I have been unpacking my library. Because not all of the bookcases have been built, I have just been getting the books out of their boxes in random order. The job has been slowed by the depressing sight of opening each new box. The packers for the van lines did not know what they were doing. My wife says they did not think of books as having any value. Although they wrapped our paintings with extreme care—only because they were framed behind glass, if you ask me—they tossed my books into the boxes any which way. They picked up whole rows and dropped them on their tails with the spines rubbing against the box. Then they piled books on top of them, regardless of any difference in the sizes of the books. The results are dozens of crushed, bent, cocked, and torn books, many with their spines rubbed white from bouncing up and down for twelve hundred miles.

My experience, then, has not been Walter Benjamin’s. Instead of being reminded where I bought a book, and the circumstances under which I read it, I am reduced to asking whether I can afford to replace it. The first edition of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays was a gift from an old flame, who inscribed it. Does it really matter if it now looks like my wife backed over it in a fit of anger? A hip and glossy study of abstract expressionism looks as if I had thrown it across the room repeatedly. As I recall, that’s pretty much what I wanted to do at the time. Has history been added to my library, or only mimicked?

“It is amazing how books can change the way a room looks,” my wife said. She was marvelling at the whole collection. I am distraught at the fate of a few.

A light summer’s reading

I have made no secret that most of my time this summer has been taken up with what is euphemistically called “relocating.” Other than books that I have read on assignment, I’ve had time for only a few others, none of which got beyond disappointing me. Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman’s biographical study of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe who died sixteen years ago amidst fervent shouts that he was the messiah, did little more than recast the official Chabad version of the rebbe’s life. The authors were particularly tone deaf in their reliance upon the biographical fact that Schneerson was academically trained as an engineer. Unable to explain how he switched without apparent warning from a secular career to become the world’s most prominent Hasid, they fall back upon saying only that he “engineered” the switch.

Pearl Abraham’s American Taliban, a reimagining of John Walker Lindh’s story, stumbled badly. Abraham makes her John Jude Parish a surfer who is “committed to the daily minute, to living the present in the present tense, to finding the extraordinary in ordinary time, in the here and now.” The choice was an astute one, if Tim Winton’s Breath is a faithful account of surfing. Of course, Winton’s novel came out two years before Abraham’s.

Jesse Katz’s memoir The Opposite Field is about two of the subjects closest to my heart: fatherhood and baseball (coaching Little League baseball, to be specific). There is much to like in the book, but eventually its earnestness began to wear on me. Perhaps I have developed an allergy late in life to lyrical waxing about baseball.

The best book that I read while struggling to organize and manage the cross-country move was Allegra Goodman’s Cookbook Collector. Not her best novel, but an interesting peek into the IPO’s that inflated many a bank account during the dot-com bubble of the ’nineties. Goodman’s shifting point of view, her interest in several characters at once, her refusal to preen or condescend, keeps the novel fascinating on every page. I’ll have more to say on The Cookbook Collector at greater length a little later. For now, though, I’d have to call it the book of the summer.

Hello, Columbus

My family and I arrived in Columbus several days ago, and are settling in. While the locals complain of a heat wave, we newcomers from south Texas look at them incredulously and enjoy the cool snap. The house is in disarray, and the library, designed by my stepfather in red oak, is still under construction. All of my books remain in boxes. Ordinary life has begun to resume, even though school has yet to start. I am grateful to my loyal readers, who have returned to A Commonplace Blog again and again, impatient for new book talk. It is past time to reignite the conversation. Let’s begin again.

Frank Kermode dies at 90

The literary critic Sir Frank Kermode has died at the age of ninety. His most recent book, Concerning E. M. Forster, completed a return to traditional life-and-works criticism, which he abandoned for a spell to become fashionably dense and theoretical. His return from theory was one of the most encouraging events in the recent history of literary criticism. Although never a distinguished prose stylist, he wrote well enough to attract a general audience. And that in itself was a great accomplishment. His like will not soon be seen again.

Neocon critics

Terry Teachout, ed., Beyond the Boom: New Voices on American Life, Culture, and Politics (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991). 237 pp. $18.95.

Originally published in Commentary (February 1991): 63–64.

According to the conventional understanding, baby boomers were hippies in the 60’s and then, after tuning out, turning off, and dropping back in, they became yuppies in the 80’s. At one extreme they are associated with antiwar protest, down-to-where-I-like-it hair, bell bottoms and tie-dyed T-shirts, McGovern for President, Eastern mysticism, the novels of Hermann Hesse, the poetry of Gary Snyder, sex, drugs, and rock-’n’-roll. At the other extreme they are the image of self-absorption and greed: two incomes, no kids, fancy cars, even fancier sailboats, junk bonds, safe sex, an expert knowledge of restaurants, Italian suits, the return of the wet look, and a certainty that their generation, if no longer the most idealistic in history, is still the most conspicuous.

It is the thesis of several of the essayists in Terry Teachout’s new anthology Beyond the Boom, however, that there are actually two boom generations. The hippies, those old enough to have found the Vietnam war personally threatening, can now be described as “older boomers.” They did not become yuppies because they never dropped back in. They drifted from job to job or settled in the university, drawing about them volumes of neo-Marxist theory like an old comforter. “Vietnam seems to have broken them,” Teachout writes in his introduction. “They . . . lost their nerve and were never heard from again.” The younger boomers, by contrast, surprised everyone by voting in heavy numbers for Ronald Reagan. They broke decisively with the politics and culture of their older brothers and sisters, and theirs are the voices you will be hearing “tomorrow,” Teachout promises—“and the day after tomorrow.”

Much support for this view can be found in Beyond the Boom. Although they range in age from thirty to nearly forty, the fifteen contributors are as one in repudiating the ideas embraced by the first wave of the baby-boom generation. Maggie Gallagher and Richard Vigilante convincingly demonstrate, for instance, that the political carryover of 60’s activism included no-growth restrictions which drove up the price of real estate, keeping younger buyers from the market; and a reliance upon government that led willy-nilly to staggering taxes, the deterioration of personal responsibility, and schools distant from or antagonistic to parents’ standards and values. In this light, what may appear as “yuppie greed” is in actuality a reassertion of an ideal much laughed at by 60’s activists—the “bourgeois ideal,” as Vigilante puts it, of “well-ordered prosperity in a law-abiding community.”

Actually, however, the book these authors have collaborated to produce is at best only tangentially concerned with the boomers, early or late. The chapters range from Roger Kimball’s “Requiem for the Critical Temper,” which traces the decline of literary criticism since the 50’s, to David Brooks's happy revival of the seventeenth-century character essay, “Portrait of a Washington Policy Wonk.” Some of the best writing in the book has nothing at all to do with the baby boom. Andrew Ferguson’s “Everything You Know Is Wrong” is a caustic belittlement of revisionist history, the spirit of which is summed up in Ferguson’s title, a line from an album by the Firesign Theater. At the other end of the tonal scale, Lisa Schiffren’s “Whiff of Grapeshot,” the surprise of the volume, is an earnest defense of the martial virtues.

Uncharacteristic of their generation—in as far as that generation is lingeringly identified with the values and deficiencies of the “youth culture” of the 60's—the writers in this volume are also not particularly interested in substituting a clearer image of it. They are not even sure that a generation is an intelligible category. After considering the failure of the boom to bring about a realignment in American politics, Richard Brookhiser concludes: “Maybe no one found a way to use the boom generation or its successors for political purposes because those generations didn't exist in the first place. . . . [T]here are no generations, in a politically coherent sense, at all.” And to judge by this volume, the same could be said of generations in art, literature, religion, business.

Yet if they are not coherent as a generation, the fifteen authors of Beyond the Boom are coherent as a movement—they are neoconservatives. And their book announces a flowering of criticism among a younger set of conservative intellectuals, the legatees of such as Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Hilton Kramer, Thomas Sowell, Joseph Epstein, Midge Decter, Robert Nisbet, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Edward Shils. Indeed, the authors of Beyond the Boom extend the achievement of neoconservatism as a critical movement. What makes them especially significant is that as Americans who came of age during the 60’s, or in the years immediately following, they acquired their intellectual maturity, their critical surefootedness, almost entirely at the expense of the ideas of the 60’s. This first-hand contention with bad thinking has given them, as writers, an authority and (at times) a hard literary edge that sets them apart from their run-of-the-mill contemporary, the workshop graduate who conceives of writing as the itemization of a sublimely ordinary life. Even when their subject is personal experience, these young critics return continually to ideas.

It is ideas, as Richard Brookhiser says at one point, that the neocon critics see as “the real force for change” in culture and politics. And from this angle, neoconservative criticism becomes the deliberate avoidance of what Bruce Bawer, in an essay on American movies since the 60’s, calls the “fashionable posture of ‘sensitivity’ ”—which usually means an “insensitivity to thoughtful distinctions.” The critics in Beyond the Boom are not too worried about being sensitive. In “Break Glass in Case of Emergency,” George Sim Johnston takes to pieces the “vague religiosity” in which many Americans find refreshment—just as long as it “does not interfere in any way with how they live.” Genuine religious ideas are too “rigid and authoritarian” for most people, and Johnston predicts that only “an unprecedented cataclysm, a new Dark Ages,” will shake them.

Not that these writers are out to shake anyone, at least not in the sense of winning converts. The function of social and cultural criticism, as they engage in it, is not so much to propose answers as to offer clear thinking on questions that are at present badly confused. In his essay “Second Childhood,” for instance, John Podhoretz shows how cultural attitudes toward children in America have oscillated wildly from a pleasant vision of their “spiritual greatness and moral superiority” (as embodied in the movie E.T.) to the current anxiety, needled by exaggerating the problem of child abuse, that children are “possessed of an infinite capacity for victimization.” In lieu of the truth about childhood, what Podhoretz's essay provides is a calm moment in which to reflect that the truth about childhood is not what it is popularly said to be.

This is a gain in knowledge, although it does raise a question about these young critics at this stage of their careers. They do not like The Greening of America, deconstruction, Gary Hart, health foods, the Grateful Dead, feminism, Jay McInerney, nuclear-free zones; they do not like too many new movies, and they are not crazy about the notion of old movies as high art, either. They are rather obscure, however, on the question of what they do like. At one point Walter Olson speaks of “reading Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman by flashlight under [the] bedcovers,” but he really means to contrast his private reading to the “Keynes-and-points-Left economics lectures” he was made to sit through in college. Andrew Ferguson touches upon the normative force of tradition, but he really means to scorn those (unlike him) who consider tradition to be “the vessel of the vulgarest errors.”

Although Beyond the Boom is crammed with derision for cultural quacks and mountebanks, it includes no sustained defense of a single artist or intellectual figure. At this stage, the neocon critics are still absorbed in the task of hauling away the last rusted-out ideas of the 60’s. But it is hard to believe this will satisfy them for long, particularly in view of their great gifts. For the correction of bad thinking is, as Santayana says, a “terrible tax to pay to the errors of others.”

Absence of Mind

Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 158 pp. $24.00.

Marilynne Robinson sets out to restore subjectivity to modern thought in her 2009 Terry Lectures, reprinted earlier this year as Absence of Mind. Any account of reality which leaves out the “testimony of the individual mind” is limited and defective, and yet that is pretty much the only account of reality which moderns will offer or accept. “A central tenet of the modern world view,” she says, “is that we do not know our own minds, our own motives, our own desires.” Modern thought, whether descended from Darwin or Marx or Freud, is eager to unmask those motives and desires, revealing the real forces behind human behavior. (How the modernist can act from superior motives and desires, if everyone else’s are suspicious, is a mystery that he is not curious to solve.) With gentle logic and a zinging prose, Robinson shows that the modern enemies of mind, those who engage in “a hermeneutics of condescension,” claim the authority of science without practicing “the self-discipline or self-criticism for which science is distinguished.” In the end, thought without mind is self-refuting.

Much of what passes for modern thought, Robinson argues, is little more than the bulletins of science without the method of science: “parascientific literature,” she calls it. It sets out to establish its scientific credentials by excluding “the beauty and strangeness of the individual soul, that is, of the world as perceived in the course of a human life”—this is its first principle, its “signature,” its “inflection.” As Robinson convincingly demonstrates, though, the genre of parascientific writing first arose and took form as “a polemic against religion,” and has never really progressed beyond its origins and earliest form.

Robinson’s immediate target is the self-congratulatory New Atheism of Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, which chortles (in the subtitle of a bestseller) How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. For Robinson, however, there is little new about such men and such books. “The motif of a shocking newness that must startle us into painful recognition is very much a signature of ‘the modern,’ ” she points out, and their adoption of the motif is, by this point in literary history, shockingly old. For her, the historic “threshold”—the rupture between tradition and modernity—was crossed some time in the nineteenth century, when the “confidence that science has given us knowledge sufficient to allow us to answer certain essential questions about the nature of reality, if only by dismissing them,” caused intellectuals’ heads to spin. By now, she says, “the parascientific genre feels like a rear-guard action, a nostalgia for the lost certitudes of positivism.”

Robinson is the right one to defend the mind and soul, subjectivity and “novelistic interest,” against those who would eliminate inwardness from reality. She is not only a great novelist—one of the two greatest American novelists of her generation—but she is also intensely religious, an unembarrassed Calvinist whose Death of Adam, a 1998 collection of essays, unembarrassedly entertained “the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them.” Unlike many of her contemporaries in the fiction-writing trade, Robinson understands that a fashionable atheism is far graver a threat to literature than religious intolerance.

Absence of Mind is divided into four chapters. The first, “On Human Nature,” borrows its title from a 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning book in which the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson sets forth a popular version of his view that human behavior is genetically determined. Wilson is not Robinson’s only example of a parascientific thinker; she also examines Dennett, the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, and the biblical scholar James L. Kugel. In this chapter, she carefully defines the “assertive popular literature,” the “remarkably reiterative literature,” that she calls parascientific.

“The Strange History of Altruism,” her second chapter (and her best), revisits the problem that bedevils any system that would explain away human subjectivity—namely, the random acts of kindness that human beings occasionally perform, even when (to all appearances) they gain no benefit from them. From its beginnings, the genre of parascientific writing has faced the difficulty of how to redefine altruism as something else entirely. For Robinson, this tendency is sadly typical of the parascientific frame of mind, “defining humankind by the exclusion of the things that in fact distinguish us as a species.”

In the book’s strongest and most memorable passage, she examines how the parascientific writers have handled the case of Phineas Gage (1823–1860), the American railroad worker who became famous for surviving “an explosion that sent a large iron rod through his skull.” The case is a favorite of parascientific writers, who are struck by the fact that, after the accident (in the words of one), Gage became “fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane.” What this supposedly proves is that a brain injury had destroyed his ability to exercise appropriate social control over his speech, demonstrating that appropriateness of speech cannot properly be described as an activity of mind.

Robinson makes short work of such analysis. The explosion might have damaged not merely his skull, leaving Gage disfigured and half-blind, but also his hopes and self-image. If so, irreverence and profanity might not be so surprising, since they are, after all, attitudes that “culture and language have prepared for such occasions.” But parascientific writers never stop to consider how the explosion might have affected Gage’s subjective life, because they rule it out of account from the start—even though, a century and a half after the fact, and entirely dependent upon secondhand accounts in an imprecise and dated idiom, they cannot possibly know anything about Gage’s injury with any degree of certainty. Robinson lowers the boom on them:

I trouble the dust of poor Phineas Gage only to make the point that in these recountings of his afflictions there is no sense at all that he was a human being who thought and felt, a man with a singular and terrible fate. In the absence of an acknowledgment of his subjectivity, his reaction to this disaster is treated as indicating damage to the cerebral machinery, not to his prospects, or his faith, or his self-love. It is as if in telling the tale the writers participate in the absence of compassionate imagination, of benevolence, that they posit for their kind.In the third chapter, Robinson examines “The Freudian Self.” She suggests a different source for the neuroses that Freud identified in his Jewish clientele—by pointing to the ambiguous and increasingly perilous situation of Jews in Vienna. Because he dismissed such immediate worries out of hand, Freud could not even be bothered to refute such an obvious and alternative explanation. That his latter-day followers commit the same error, knowing what became of the Viennese Jews, is inexcusable. Ideas that claim the authority of science are as susceptible as any other to what Robinson calls “cultural contamination,” but the sense that such figures as Freud introduced an “epochal change” in modern thought is only heightened by viewing them “against a background void of detail.” To fill in the background, after all, might require something in addition to science to complete the picture of man.

And that is the theme of her fourth and final chapter. “Thinking Again” reveals that Robinson has been writing a defense of man all along. Perhaps even more significantly, Absence of Mind is a defense of the humanities—history, literature, and especially religion. Without them, human life is incomplete, because the subject of the humanities (“the witness of mind”) is otherwise dismissed as irrelevant. If there is a “modern malaise,” Robinson suggests—if indeed there is “an emptiness peculiar to our age”—the reason is not that the advance of science has caused “an ebbing away of faith,” impoverishing modern experience. To the contrary, men and women still hunger for the “felt life of the mind,” which has been eliminated from their experience only because they have made the mistake of falling under the influence of the parascientific writers thoroughly dismantled in this short but brilliant book.

13 epigrams

These were published many years ago, in an obscure pamphlet issued by Robert L. Barth; then I set them aside and forgot them. The only epigram I have written in the years since, I believe, went unnoticed by readers of this blog. (When I drew his attention to it, Patrick Kurp apologized. “Sorry I screwed up your Martial Plan,” he said.) Earlier today, cleaning out my office in College Station, I came upon these twenty-five-year-old epigrams again, and decided to lend them impermanence in a new form.

1. To J. V. Cunningham

Take these, the work of quiet days,
In place of what I owe you—measured praise.
As you have made my mind your own device
To honor you I epigrammatize.

2. To the Reader

Though you’d prefer a known designer brand,
Accept these rhymes: they’re cheap, but made by hand.

3. To My book

In Herrick’s day men wiped themselves
With quarto leaves. If you ne’er sit
On permanent collection shelves
At least you have got free of shit.

4. To My Bookseller

Behind the thick-backed boys where clerks neglect it
My book will slip and cower if you let it.
Don’t. Make it stand up front where all can get it.

5. Dr. Johnson on the Death of His Mother

                           Idler, 41

If you have tears, whoever you may be,
Enough to drop for mourners filing by,
Then let this train be your last cause for grief:
The last steps of an inoffensive life.

6.

Post-Structuralist, rest in peace,
For whom all substance was caprice,
All meaning vain. At your demise
Yourself were desubstantialized.

7. Martial 3.71

I know, yes. How? I didn’t read your mind.
He’s sore between the legs and you, behind.

8. To Shakespearean Actors

Uncertain kings on th’raisèd stage
Strutting and frothing in a rage
Of unmarked accents, ill-bred shouts,
Easy but in a bawdyhouse,
You act this pre-neurotic drama
To give the audience a trauma.

9.

Men praise here eyes, her lips, her dress, her stockings.
Coy answers naught. And why? To keep them talking.

10.

Once Loose was young, petite, and love was free!
To any man who’ll listen now she tells
Her serial erotic odyssey.
What passion gave away confession sells.

11. Someone’s Epitaph for His Wife

The girl was trouble; I desired no bride
Except in bed, and after she had died.

12. With the Baseball Encyclopedia

These epitaphs, by each man scored
In measures from antiquity,
Keep his life’s record here assured,
Though evened to finality.

13. To My Wife

I never write of love, it’s true.
If love be mutual attraction,
The simultaneous urge to screw,
Let us pass time in mute distractions
Who seek inherence in the act
And have no voices to announce it.
Our marriage is a binding pact
In a dead tongue. We can’t pronounce it.

Singermann

My essay on Myron Brinig’s 1929 novel Singermann is up this morning at Jewish Ideas Daily.

If the novel is ever reprinted, as it should be, it will be because of its transvestism and homosexuality. The best thing about the novel, though, is that it tells a more typical Jewish story—a story that no other Jewish writer ever seemed interested in telling, despite its significance to American Jewry.

Singermann documents the career of a Jewish emigrant from Central Europe who becomes a peddler in the Middle West, and then travels further west to open his own clothing and dry-goods store—the makings of a successful department store. Many if not most of the local department stores in small to mid-sized American cities were established by Jews (the stores have largely been swallowed up by larger chains). The stores, and the Jewish merchants who created and ran them, anchored both the communities in which they were located and the Jews who came there to live and to establish Jewish institutions.

Most of the midwestern Jewish communities in places like Butte, Montana (the novel’s setting), have disappeared. And with them a chapter in American Jewish history. Singermann is one of the few remaining traces.

Hitchens diagnosed with cancer

Christopher Hitchens has released a terse, 37-word statement that he is beginning to receive chemotherapy for cancer of the esophagus. He says nothing about the stage of his cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, five-year survival rates for esophageal cancer are 37% if it has not metastasized, 19% if has metastasized to nearby bones or organs, and only 3% if the metastases have spread to distant parts of the body.

Sadly, though, esophageal cancer is rarely detected until symptoms appear, by which point, again as the American Cancer Society says, the cancer has “reached an advanced stage, when a cure is less likely.”

It is sobering to learn that a writer of such fierce and unshakable integrity must face such a grim prognosis. Coincidentally, I finished eight weeks of radiation earlier today, designed to eradicate the last remaining traces of the metastatic prostate cancer with which I was diagnosed two-and-a-half years ago. At the time, I was given small chance to survive, but I have beaten the odds, and perhaps Hitchens can too. Even though he would sneer, I shall pray for him. I can’t imagine a world in which his voice is silenced.

Spatial form and electronic texts

I’ll say this for the Kindle. It is forcing me to rethink my deepest convictions about literary form.

Over at the New Republic, Rochelle Gurstein finds herself hanging back from the celebration of the new electronic media. While the congnitive scientist Steven Pinker (Mr Rebecca Goldstein) plugs Twitter, e-mail, PowerPoint, and Google (“Far from making us stupid,” he bubbles, “these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart”), Gurstein observes that the champions of progress “have no awareness that there are also losses—equally as real as the gains (even if the gain is as paltry as “keeping us smart’)—and that no form of bookkeeping can ever reconcile the two.”

What could possibly be lost in the wholesale adoption of the new electronic media? Quoting a friend, she says that “the world we have on our computer screens lacks physical, tangible materiality” and is “changing the feel of our lives in unpredictable ways.” Gurstein is not especially persuasive on the “physical, tangible materiality” that is being lost among the Kindles and iPads, saying only that we writers want the “the fruits of our labor to exist between hard or even soft covers in our own time and after us” (which is just another way of saying that “we” cling to a romantic conception of literature against the terror of oblivion). Moreover, the “presence of books on our bookshelves transports us back to the time and place where we first read them,” consoling us with an image (or illusion) of the continuity of self.

This is the sort of vague language, expressing a musty nostalgia for a golden age, that makes techno-revolutionaries reach for their guns. But I don’t want to be too hard on Gurstein. She is right that something is lost in reading texts on the Kindle and iPad, and she is right that it has something to do with the “physical, tangible materiality” of books. I wasn’t much clearer when I tried to define the loss last Friday.

Since then I have gone back to an essay that I learned in graduate school to abuse as a particularly noxious outbreak of the New Criticism—namely, Joseph Frank’s famous essay on “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” which first appeared in the Sewanee Review, then edited by Allen Tate, in 1945. (In an irony that probably refutes my case, I downloaded a copy of The Idea of Spatial Form, a collection of Frank’s six essays on the subject, to my Kindle.)

Frank’s basic point is that a “good deal of modern literature makes no sense if read only as a sequence”—as an experience confined to time, occupying no space. The view of literature as exclusively temporal—even if, as J. V. Cunningham pointed out, reading may occur at different times and the times may be compared—might be called the triumph of the scroll. The literary experience unrolls in advancing time, and the reader is constantly urged forward.

The scroll is a notoriously cumbersome format in which to handle texts, as anyone who has ever watched the baal korei struggling to find his place in the weekly reading can attest. But even the rabbis, who were familiar and comfortable with scrolls, held a spatial conception of the biblical text. Not only did it move forward, in a narrative line, but it also invited connections across time, at different physical places in the text. In the second century, Yishmael ben Elisha codified the principle as g’zerah shavah, teaching that similar words and expressions in different contexts can be studied and cited to elucidate one another.

In the twelfth century, Maimonides carried the principle a step further, arguing in his commentary on the Mishnah that the manner in which the Bible was given, which can only metaphorically be described as “speaking,” is of far lesser moment than the fact that it was given by God. As such it constitutes an unbreakable unity, and thus “there is no difference between verses like ‘And the sons of Ham were Cush and Egypt’ [Gen 10.6] . . . and verses like ‘I am the LORD your God’ [Exod 20.2].” Legally and even philologically, there is no chronological development within the Bible; there is no earlier and later; the words of the text are treated as a simultaneity.

There is nothing very remarkable in any of this. It is merely to say that texts form patterns that are distinct from, sometimes even opposed to, their narrative or argumentative development. Because it exists in space as well as in time, the codex, the print-and-binding book, provides a convenient form for such extra-temporal patterning. Obviously, the patterns continue to populate a text even when it is reduced to electronic form. But the forward push that electronic form encourages, its scroll-like unrolling, discourages the spatial recognition of patterns, if only by making the text more difficult to conceive—to hold in the hand as well as the mind—as a whole.

A very small and trivial example. Yesterday I was reading Bill James’s Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame on my Kindle. (I bought the book precisely because an Amazon reviewer complained that it is old. It was first published in 1995.) In typical fashion, James tries to devise statistical standards for admission to baseball’s Hall of Fame. The entire second chapter of the book, “76 Trombones,” is made up of quotations from a variety of sources, asserting that Lefty O’Doul or Phil Rizzuto or Dick Allen or Doc Cramer—some player not currently enshrined—deserves induction in the Hall. After a page or two, the chapter bored me: I grasped its principle and was eager to turn to James’s argument. It was unclear, though, whether James had simply compiled several pages of epigraphs, which would be followed by his own prose, or whether the entire chapter (as turned out to be the case) was taken up by the quotations.

In a print-and-binding copy, I could have quickly thumbed the chapter and flipped to the next. Unable to see the whole in an instant, though, I was reduced to paging [click] through [click] the [click] chapter [click], page [click] by [click] page. The codex mirrors the literary text’s spatial structure by permitting the eye, as if roaming over a building, to take in the whole at a glance. But the spatial dimension is just what electronic texts lack.

Why Kindle won’t replace the codex

In the June issue of The American, the economists Richard Swedberg and Thorbjørn Knudsen develop and extend the theories of Joseph A. Schumpeter on entrepreneurship.

In The Theory of Economic Development (1911), Schumpeter argues that there are five basic types of innovation: “a new good,” “a new method of production,” “a new market,” “a new source of supply of raw materials,” and “the carrying out of a new organization of any industry.” Thus he challenges the ordinary conception of an innovation as simply a novelty item, a new product or technology.

But Swedberg and Knudsen are struck by the fact that Schumpeter’s five types of innovation, taken as a whole, describe the entire economic process. What if, they suggest, innovation is conceived as the whole process of innovation from brainstorm to profit? To succeed at introducing an innovation, they point out, “you not only have to come up with the idea of the iPod, but also to produce it, market it, and make a profit.”

And this explains why innovation is so difficult and rare: the person who comes up with the idea for a new item is unlikely to be the same person who produces it, who differs from the person who finds buyers for it. The problem, as Swedberg and Knudsen lay it out, is one of vertical integration, coordinating the stages of the entire process.

Although I am no economist, the provocative article helped to give voice to my initial reaction to the Kindle, which I received as a gift for Father’s Day. After downloading a small library of free texts from Project Gutenberg, I finally purchased my first etext—Jonathan Sarna’s history of American Judaism. Now, I realize that the book, already six years old, is even older than the Kindle, which will be three years old in November. American Judaism is not hypertexted. The footnotes are merely superscript numbers on the screen.

Even if they were not useless, though, the footnotes would be unwieldy. Here’s why. You navigate around the Kindle’s screen with a “five-way controller,” which means that you must click down the page a line at a time. The cursor is also a little stodgy, leaving ghosts of itself and lagging behind your clicking. Clicking other than a [click] line [click] at [click] a [click] time may leave you at the wrong spot. Instead of the four directional arrows on my Apple IIe, I now have a single “five-way controller,” but its use is the same as on an Apple IIe. The technology is not cool enough to transfer any feeling of coolness to you if you master it.

When I read a book in the ancient form of a codex, I often have my fingers at different places, and flip back and forth, checking, comparing, making notes. This is impossible on the Kindle. And once I understood this, I understood something else. While the codex is a physical text—the book exists in space—the Kindle’s files are linear texts. Perhaps split screens, touch screens, and windows would make the Kindle less awkward to use, but they wouldn’t solve the basic problem. Namely: the Kindle is designed for texts that are intended to be read straight through in linear fashion. But few except for the most superficial texts are intended to be read in this fashion.

In short, the Kindle is a novelty item of surprisingly limited use, and despite the confidence of Michael Yoshikami that there is room for both in the market, it will probably be squeezed out by Apple’s iPad and other tablet computers.

Even so, the iPad appeals primarily to geeks and hipsters. The coolness of the technology, in other words, transfers easily to the user. But the problem that bedevils the Kindle remains. The physical qualities of the text must be reconceived—the text must not be left out of the chain of innovation—if any kind of electronic reading device is to replace the codex as the principal human means for storing and accessing knowledge.

Stealing Home

Sports build character, Joseph C. Phillips writes in a column ahead of Father’s Day, but character is not built merely by picking up a ball. “Character must be taught,” he says. “And to whom does the duty fall? The youth coach.”

Put me down as skeptical. After coaching my sons’ Little League team this spring, I have concluded that sports do not build character so much as reveal it. Besides, a coach is too busy with his real job—teaching the fundamentals of a very hard game—to have any time to spare for moral lessons. Far more significant is that, according to Phillips, eight-five percent of the forty to fifty million kids who participate in youth sports every year are coached by the father of a player on their team. Maybe coaching is simply another way of being a father.

The only novel about the subject, as far as I know, is Stealing Home by the late Philip F. O’Connor. This time last year I pronounced it one of the Five Books of baseball. But it is more than that. On Father’s Day a year ago I complained about the scarcity of novels from a father’s perspective. Stealing Home is one of the few. Originally published in 1979 when O’Connor was forty-seven, it’s easily the best novel ever written about Little League baseball. The main difference between it and the more recent and better-known book about Little League—Michael Chabon’s Summerland—is the presence of the coach and father.

O’Connor does not mythologize baseball either. Instead of a magical bat which is a splinter off the Tree of Life, there are equipment problems. Benjamin Dunne, the bookstore owner who coaches Gray’s Cleaners, must shell out for new balls, a catcher’s mask, shin guards, and batting helmets. Nor is Stealing Home set in a magical realm between the gods and winter, but in a small Ohio city south of Toledo. (O’Connor taught for nearly three decades at Bowling Green State University, twenty-five miles south of Toledo.)

And the problems are human problems. Benjamin’s son Bobo is embarrassed by his father and asks to be traded. The team’s pitcher wrenches his ankle on the first day of practice, and the best player quits, saying that he doesn’t want to play for Benjamin (his real reason is more disturbing). Meanwhile, Benjamin’s store and marriage are failing, and when the divorced mother of one of his players makes it clear that she is available and willing, Benjamin tumbles into an affair with her. But his personal problems interrupt the baseball rather than vice versa. The Gray’s lose their first game by 4 to 2 to last season’s champs. “They was supposed to be better this year,” the shortstop says after the game. “They ain’t better,” says the first baseman. “Maybe they are,” Bobo replies. “Maybe we’re just better than we thought.”

Although they were the “Pee Wee League version of the original New York Mets” a year earlier, the new Gray’s under Benjamin’s guidance are good enough to challenge for the league title. Stealing Home traces their progress while Benjamin juggles the players’ troubles and his own. The boys’ personalities, and what they face at home, affect their performance on the field just as much as their talent for playing ball. This is the side of youth coaching that no one tells you about in advance. And it may also be the biggest difference between amateur baseball and the professional sport. Toss in interfering or indifferent parents and opposing coaches who take themselves too seriously—Benjamin calls them the “dandies”—and the result is an unstable mix.

As the Gray’s begin to come together as a team, they begin to have more confidence in Benjamin. But he does not make the mistake of exaggerating his importance: “Except for Bobo, he doesn’t want to be a father to any of them,” he thinks. He confines himself to coaching hints: “Try to watch the ball hit your bat.” And he “kills off the temptation” to deliver speeches about courage and discipline, knowing that they would probably hurt more than help.

What really turns things around, though, is when Benjamin’s relationship with his own son starts to improve. Early in the season, Benjamin gets a look from Bobo as if his pants were around his ankles when he says something “embarrassing.” But when Bobo stands up for his father against the team’s best hitter, the Gray’s start winning.

Something similar happened earlier this spring to the Camp Young Judaea Tigers. In the first days of the season, my seven-year-old son Saul took a ball off the chest. For weeks thereafter, he was too frightened to “hang in” the batter’s box against pitches. Toward the end of the season, though, he was able to overcome his fear. When Saul started hitting line-drives, the Tigers began to put together three- and four-run rallies.

The baseball action in Stealing Home is surprisingly well-described. You don’t expect Little League baseball to be very exciting, but O’Connor makes it so. The best thing about the novel, however, is how O’Connor shows that the game makes demands upon players and coaches alike, which prevent them from brooding over their off-field problems or kicking or congratulating themselves too much. Perhaps a good father ought to be more like a good coach, and offer only the instructions, moral or otherwise, that he himself can demonstrate.

Three moves equal a burning

I first learned the old saying from Peter Taylor’s 1964 story “The Throughway,” originally published in the Sewanee Review and then collected thirteen years later in In the Miro District. Harry and Isabel, a couple in their late fifties, are forced to give up the house they have lived in since they had first married to make way for a new throughway.

Harry succeeds in forcing a public hearing on the issue, “reveal[ing] himself to all the world as nothing more than a local crank.” His wife does not understand his stubborness, saying that it is “not natural for a man to care so much about a house. . . .” When the day comes to vacate, Harry phones the moving company and cancels the vans. Isabel is appalled; she cannot believe her husband has done something so stupid. And after a little more narrative business, it comes to pass that both Harry and Isabel realize that “all decisions, from that moment, were over for them.” They will be seen over, watched over, the important questions decided for them, as if they were “foolish old people.”

It is appropriate that only the old saying would stick with me from the story, which strikes me as strained and unlikely upon rereading. But the old saying is much in my mind as I prepare to pack up my books and belongings and move out of the house my wife and I had assumed that we would live in for the rest of our lives. We designed our own library in it, and for the first time in our lives we had a real library. In the middle is a massive desk that we had built for us; we could work there quietly in the evenings, facing each other across an expanse of papers and reference works. It is difficult to imagine, in fact, who might buy our house. For who else would this library be so perfect?

And now, instead of enjoying my last days in the wood-paneled sanctum, I must obtain bids from moving companies, arrange to shut off utilities, change addresses on magazine subscriptions, and plot a 1,200-mile route to a new city, a new house, a new array of shelves for my books. I can’t write about them as much as I would like for sorting through them, consigning as many as possible to the yard-sale pile, and recording the remainder for insurance purposes. Moving some of them again, I might as well burn them. But I can’t. I just can’t.

Identifying with their class

Dorothy Rabinowitz advances an interesting (if highly contentious) proposition in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Namely: the growing disenchantment with President Obama—in the Gallup Daily poll, more Americans now disapprove of his performance in office than approve of it—has its source in his failure to identify with “the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance”:

A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class.Whether Rabinowitz explains the President’s upside-down poll numbers is a question that I am not qualified to answer. If you swap the word intellectual for ideological it may explain the condescension toward President Bush and Sarah Palin. But I am less concerned with politics than literature.

And it strikes me that Rabinowitz’s explanation fits the decline of the “serious novel” or “literary fiction” (two terms that make my feet itch) like a missing piece of the puzzle. It is a better explanation, because more comprehensive, that my own claim that a “nationalized bureaucracy of writers [that] stretches from coast to coast” accounts for American fiction’s loss of interest in American places.

It is hard to imagine a living American novelist writing a passage like the last four paragraphs of The Great Gatsby, summoning up the “fresh, green breast of the new world.” American novelists by and large do not identify with ordinary Americans any longer, nor with the American dream (“the last and greatest of all human dreams”), but with their intellectual class—the people with whom they went to school, whose minds are furnished with the same authorities and assumptions, who share a similar understanding of the world. The American continent no longer compels them into an aesthetic contemplation they neither understand nor desire. What moves them are the envies and ambitions, the disdains and irritations, of their class.

Thus all their characters sound like literary intellectuals. Thus they cannot even imagine what their own non-writing spouses, nor anyone else for that matter, do every day at work. Thus the world outside literature and academe is a vague blur, if not entirely invisible. Thus human decency is identified with the correct (and partisan) political opinions. Thus fiction becomes little more than an occasion for ventilating anti-American grievances.

And thus the American novel, once a lively voice in the national debate to specify the American idea, has devolved into the voice of a homogeneous intellectual class. It is just another means, like similar work, training, and lifestyle, for promoting class solidarity.