The League of David

A Word from Eco

Umberto Eco -- who I don't read anymore because I'm getting too old to work that hard at an activity I deem  leisure -- recently smacked down the idiocy of the Da Vinci Code, and in the process, expressed the rare, but potent, Italian inclination toward common sense:

His second novel, Foucault's Pendulum, took eight years to write. It was about three editors at a Milan publishing house trying to link every conspiracy theory in history, including that now famous one about the medieval Knights Templar and the secret of the Holy Grail.

'I know, I know,' he says with a laugh. 'My book included the plot for The Da Vinci Code. But I was not being a prophet. It was old occult material. It was already all there. I treated it in a more sceptical way than Dan Brown did. He had the excellent idea of treating it as if it were true. Millions of people believed him. They took it seriously, but it was all a hoax.'

The Da Vinci Code is one of the few novels to have sold more than The Name of the Rose, I point out. Must be quite galling, that. He shrugs. Has he read it? 'Yes.' Did he like it? He shrugs again. 'It's a page-turner.'

The Vatican was not keen on Foucault's Pendulum, by all accounts. Its official newspaper described it as being full of 'profanations, blas-phemies, buffooneries and filth, held together by the mortar of arrogance and cynicism'. Even the late Pope condemned Eco personally as, 'the mystifier deluxe'. Is it true he was all but excommunicated?

'No. The whole affair was nothing but an invention of the newspapers that needed to have an Italian Salman Rushdie.'

Objet d'Art

Come on, it's art.  Can't you appreciate its fine lyricism?  Its deeply expressive humanity?  This is Wordsworth, man!  No, better than Wordsworth!

ARGH!

British civilization is crumbling, and these jokers are looking for the Holy Grail. 

The line between total fantasy and reality continues to breakdown.  That academics need to say crap like this only makes it worse:

According to experts, this is precisely where the Grail belongs - in fiction and films. Eric Eve is a tutor in theology and a New Testament scholar at Oxford University. He says he is unaware of any evidence for the existence of a Holy Grail.

[SNIP]

"In the version of the legend I know, the Grail is meant to be the chalice Jesus used at the Last Supper, subsequently brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea. But there is no 1st Century evidence about what happened either to the chalice or to Joseph - assuming he's even an historical character.

"The probability that the cup found its ways to Joseph and that he travelled with it to Britain is as near as nil as makes no difference. I would say it is purely legendary."

Richard Barber, author of The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend, published by Penguin next month, says the Grail legend came into being more than a thousand years after Christ's death.

"It is pure literature. It was imagined by a French writer, Chretien de Troyes, at the end of the 12th Century, in the romance of Perceval. His vision is at the root of all the Grail stories."

Sigh!

A Philistine Makes Good

The Philistine, er, Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley -- generally a paragon of Philistine sensibilities in things literary -- has a less than flattering opinion of that most Philistine of books, Catcher in the Rye:

Viewed from the vantage point of half a century, the novel raises more questions than it answers. Why is a book about a spoiled rich kid kicked out of a fancy prep school so widely read by ordinary Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom have limited means and attend, or attended, public schools? Why is Holden Caulfield nearly universally seen as "a symbol of purity and sensitivity" (as "The Oxford Companion to American Literature" puts it) when he's merely self-regarding and callow? Why do English teachers, whose responsibility is to teach good writing, repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one?

That last question actually is easily answered: "The Catcher in the Rye" can be fobbed off on kids as a book about themselves. It is required reading as therapy, a way to encourage young people to bathe in the warm, soothing waters of resentment (all grown-ups are phonies) and self-pity without having to think a lucid thought. Like that other (albeit marginally better) novel about lachrymose preppies, John Knowles's "A Separate Peace" (1960), "The Catcher in the Rye" touches adolescents' emotional buttons without putting their minds to work. It's easy for them, which makes it easy for teacher.

Ouch (and yeah!).

Now I know that for most of my three readers, Catcher is, like, the book. It's the book that most formed and informed their teenage view of the world (it was for me, although with reservations). It's remembered with fondness. To this I say, reread it. You'll be just as unimpressed as Mr. Yardley:

From first page to last, "The Catcher in the Rye" is an exercise in button-pushing, and the biggest button it pushes is the adolescent's uncertainty and insecurity as he or she perches precariously between childhood, which is remembered fondly and wistfully, and adulthood, which is the great phony unknown. Indeed a case can be made that "The Catcher in the Rye" created adolescence as we now know it, a condition that barely existed until Salinger defined it. He established whining rebellion as essential to adolescence and it has remained such ever since. It was a short leap indeed from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "The Blackboard Jungle" to "Rebel Without a Cause" to Valley Girls to the multibillion-dollar industry that adolescent angst is today.

You might say that Holden whines truth to power, but that would give the spoiled brat a little too much credit. The character, like the his creator, is a cipher. He perches himself on top of the hill of his own secular self-righteousness, making uninformed pronouncements on other people's limitations. After a while you lose all patience and goodwill and wish nothing more than to have the kid get a job folding jeans at the Gap.

Yardley concludes:

Whatever its shortcomings, "The Catcher in the Rye" is from the heart -- not Holden Caulfield's heart, but Jerome David Salinger's. He said everything he had to say in it, which may well be why he has said nothing else.

Double ouch.

Why people don't read contemporary literature

Slate has the results of an very unscientific poll of contemporary American novelists, asking the ever-so important question: Who are you voting for?

The novelists, of course, rise to the occassion and show their Philistine bona fides: aloof, self-absorbed bloviation from politically uncouth sentimentalists.

What surprises me is how out-of-touch these men and woman are from day-to-day reality. Their social and political outlook has not changed with the times, and many seem to be stuck in the early 80s, still waiting for the great Soviet revolution. As most Americans have slowly but steadily shifted right, these are men and women who pride themselves on standing on the outside of the mainstream of American society.

That's fine, I guess. But what's happened is that practically all the novelists -- who are supposed to be writing for the American market -- are so blatantly out of touch that they populate a world all their own. In the end, who the hell wants to waste a day or two reading a novel written by someone who doesn't live in the real world.

In a different sort of election, I might have voted for a Green Party candidate, or some such, but I think the current time period represents a state of true desperation. -- someone named Dan Chaon

By Bush logic, I should vote for him, since he gave me a hefty tax cut. In fact, the greatest increase in our deficit comes—not from the Iraq war—but the tax savings to the upper income brackets, on average more than $50,000 a year. -- Amy Tan

Ms Tan is voting for Mr. Kerry because he'll raise her taxes. You want taxes? Here, take mine, bitch.

I look forward to voting for John Kerry, a man of exemplary intelligence who was brave in war and then brave in protest of war. -- John Updike

Mr. Updike still fighting the Vietnam War. He goes on to mention "voodoo economics." He's still fighting Reagan, too.

I actually voted for Nader in 2000...However, everything changed over the next four years. It became self-evident, I think, that the Bush presidency is the most corrupt in modern history. Under the cynical disguise of evangelical Christian moralizing (and don't even get me started on Bush's moronic theology), Bush conducted (and continues to conduct) a fire sale, in which he auctioned off the entire nation to the highest corporate bidder, piece by piece. -- someone named Rick Moody

Mr. Moody also seems to hate Christians. Now, that's the ticket for sellling books in the US!

Like virtually everyone I know, I'm voting for Kerry. And probably for exactly the same reasons. To enumerate these reasons, to repeat yet another time the fundamental litany of liberal principles that need to be reclaimed and revitalized, seems to be redundant and unnecessary. Our culture has become politicized to a degree that verges upon hysteria. And since I live in New Jersey, a state in which an "honest politician" is someone who hasn't yet been arrested, I have come to have modest, that's to say realistic expectations about public life. -- Joyce Carol Oates

Ms. Oates seems to be a reasonable leftist, who holds a modicum of insight, and who is, alas, simply suffering from a Pauline Kael moment.

Kerry, of course. He's the candidate whose defeat Osama Bin Laden (if he's alive) is praying for. I trust him not to pour additional gasoline on the fires that Bush has set overseas. Also, since he's a Democrat, I trust him to exercise a modicum of fiscal sanity and to show a little compassion for the unlucky. Also, his wife is hot hot hot. She'd be a first lady for the ages. -- Jonathan Franzen

It takes a mountain of aloof imagination to think that Osama bin Laden wants President Bush to win. How can you trust the insights of a novelist who doesn't understand the fundamental nature of evil?

I'm voting for John Kerry. Not just because the Bush administration has plunged us into an opportunistic war that has needlessly killed thousands, wrecked the economy, widened the chasm between rich and poor, savaged the environment, tried to mess with our Constitution, swatted away the international community, and caused me to wonder whether I really am an American, if being American means having to embrace a man like George W. Bush as my proxy, the avatar of my wishes and beliefs in the wider world—not, finally, for any of those reasons, but because I believe that John Kerry might be a great president. I hope to God he wins. -- someone named Jennifer Egan

You have to wonder what America this woman lives in. It's the alternative United States, call it a-U.S. It's the land of the Philistine's aloof imagination where anything conservative is bad, bad, bad, and everything liberal is wholesome and right.

Go read the rest, and then weep.

It's the reason why these people characterize 5 - 10 thousand-copy sales as a "best seller."

UPDATE: It looks like I wasn't the only one who thought Joyce Carol Oates had a Pauline Kael moment.

Life Imitates Tolkien

I read this at Captain's Quarters today, and it made me think of Aragorn. Not the woosie metrosexual Aragorn of the Lord of the Rings movie, but Tolkien's original character who says this while sitting among the ruins of Isengard:

"It is difficult with these evil folk to know when they are in league, and when they are cheating one another."

This is the reason why any respectable intelligence/law enforcement service should use the bad guys against each other. It produces results.

But if the Philistines have their way, we'll have a kindler, gentler war on terrorism:

“I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history.”

I wish this came from an Onion article and not the Democratic candidate for president.

Happy Bloomsday

Today is the 100th anniversary of the day celebrated in James Joyce's Ulysses. Great book, what I read of it, anyway. To be honest, I got one chapter in and reopened the book to the last chapter and read through that. I had to read Molly Bloom's orgasmic finale, because my professor told us to read it: Yes, I said Yes...etc.

Ulysses is the kind of book people "read." By that I mean they'll read a chapter or two and then put it down, unfinished. In the kind of social circles I inhabit, you'll occassionally come across someone who has the book on an anitque bookshelf in their living room. Once or twice in a blue moon someone will mention it. But as an experienced English major, I'll tell you this, most people have never read Ulysses. It's probably the most lied about book in the world.

"Ah, yes, Joyce. I read Ulysses in college."

Liar.

People don't read Ulysses in college unless it's the only book on the syllabus and they have no choice.

And after college? Forget about it. Unless you have that much time (unemployment) on your hands, you've probably picked it up, read the first few pages and put it down.

Technically, you've read Ulysses, but did you read it?

No?

Don't feel bad. Most people are fudging the truth, and so can you.

This brings me to the point of this post. On the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, a lot of people are praising Joyce and his masterwork. A list of such homages are found at AlDaily. Michael Dirda's exclamation is typical. He calls June 16, "the most famous single day in modern fiction." He describes Molly Bloom's climatic ending as "one of the most beautiful prose arias ever written."

The Economist called it "seminal." Okay, I buy that, the novel did herald a new era in the novel. It created the modern literary novel. That legacy, however, has not been scrutinized as much as it should be. After all, most contemporary literary novels go unread. The genre is haunted by a moribound ghetto of college adjuncts. Is this a good thing?

But several years ago when every major and minor publication in the world was published their lists of the greatest whatever of the 20th century, Ulysses always made it to the top of the list. Philistines loved to put it at the top of the list. If you look back at many elite publications like the NYTimes you will find it on top.

Why? How can a book that is rarely, if ever, read become the greatest book of the 20th century?

It can't. It's just put there by people who like to think they know all about it. To the Philistines the appearance of having read it is much more important than the real thing, and much more interesting.

That's the reason why when Waterstone's readers put The Lord of the Rings at the top of their list of the best novels of the 20th century the Philisitines freaked. How gauche! Quelle huerrer! "How could you put a pathetic little genre piece about good and evil at the top of the list," they said, "when, in fact, as Everyone knows that it must be Ulysses."

The fact is Joyce's Ulysses is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, but the Lord of the Rings is the one that was, and continues to be, read.

A novel shouldn't be a conversation piece on your bookshelf; save that for the Hummels.

Lesson #2: A Gift of Words

From an anthology of the poems of Emily Dickinson (http://www.bartleby.com/people/DickinsoE.html), a GIFT to future readers:

With Flowers.

South winds jostle them,
Bumblebees come,
Hover, hesitate,
Drink, and are gone.

Butterflies pause
On their passage Cashmere;
I, softly plucking,
Present them here!