The Millions Interview: Daniel Radosh

Daniel Radosh's Rapture Ready! is a sociological experiment of sorts. What happens if the liberal leaning, Jewish New Yorker embarks on a hands on exploration of the parallel world of Christian pop culture, one that takes him to Midwestern Christian Lollapaloozas, Bibleman appearances, and Christian themed pro wrestling matches? The result is a book that is by turns funny, bizarre, and thoughtful, as it looks for the "darkest corners of this parallel universe" but more often than not finds common ground. Radosh is a contributing editor at one of my favorite magazines, The Week, and frequent contributor to another, The New Yorker. He also pens a funny and eclectic blog.

The Millions: A lot has changed in the country in just the last couple of years since you started working on Rapture Ready!, with the politics associated with born-again Christianity falling out of favor to a certain extent. Do you think that the change in the political climate will change the way Christians express themselves through pop culture?

Daniel Radosh: I wonder if to some extent you don't have your cause and effect backward. That is, the political power of the religious right is starting to wane at least in part because of some of the changes within evangelical culture that I document in the book. Young Christians, expressing themselves largely through pop culture forms -- music, magazines, books, web sites -- have been challenging the conservative leaders of the church. Even younger Christians who may themselves have conservative politics don't believe that such politics ought to be linked to faith, or that being a Christian means you must be a Republican. Rank and file Christians' dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and the response to Katrina, in particular, weakened the ability of the more gung ho leadership to continue to rally people in support of the Bush administration.

As the political scene in general has shifted, more and more progressive Christians have been liberated to speak up. And I think we'll see more of that. On the other hand, there has also been a backlash -- an attempt to protect "Bible-based Christianity" from the "grace" or "red letter" movement. This rear-guard action also takes pop culture forms, such as the insanely militaristic Battle Cry rallies. So I also wouldn't be surprised to see a return to militancy in some Christian rock, for example.

TM: You focus a lot on Christian music in the book. Is this because that is what most interested you or do you think this is the most important segment of Christian pop culture?

DR: More the latter. Modern Christian pop culture pretty much began with the Jesus people movement of the 1960s and 70s, and its earliest manifestation was Christian rock. So it's been around the longest, developed the largest audience, and, perhaps most importantly, the scene has grown big enough to reflect the diversity of evangelicalism.

TM: In the book, you recount some episodes that offended and angered you during your exploration of Christian pop culture. Was it hard to keep yourself from writing something "angry" as opposed to the funny and reasoned book you produced, or did you find that the reasonable, humane impulses of Christian culture outweighed the aspects of it that offended you?

DR: Can't I have it both ways? There are definitely aspects of Christian culture (not to mention individual Christians) that I came to respect, admire and simply enjoy. But they didn't make me hate the offensive stuff any less. Rather, they simply made me realize that the offensive stuff, while it demands and usually gets the most attention, isn't representative of the entire church, so that maybe made me less angry. Also, I'm not a particularly angry guy, so that helped.

TM: How much of the book got left on the cutting room floor? Were there any episodes that you wish had made it in?

DR: Early drafts of the book were crammed with every strange or funny thing I encountered. But it got repetitive and slowed the narrative down, so I don't really miss it. Some of that stuff ended up in the multimedia appendix on my web site. I do miss a chapter on geocentrism, which got reduced to one paragraph at the end of the creationism section. It was a lot of fun, but didn't fit the pop culture theme of the rest of the book. I'm hoping to turn it into a magazine article at some point.

TM: Now that the book is out, what are some of the things you've heard from born-again Christians who've read it? Do they resent it or find it refreshing?

DR: Judging from the Christian blogosphere, there's definitely a lot of interest in it, though most of these folks haven't actually read it yet and I'm not sure what they'll think of it when they do. Of those that have, many have really embraced it. I've gotten some very nice e-mails, done a lot of Christian radio interviews, and was even asked to write an article about my experiences for a pretty cool Christian magazine called Relevant. More conservative evangelicals have found it entertaining, but are a little put off by my liberal perspective. I'd be worried if they weren't.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:15 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• Author Elaine Dundy died last week. Terry Teachout excerpted his introduction to her book, The Dud Avocado. Edan mentioned the book not long ago in a "staff picks" post.
• "The One-Room M.F.A. Program"
• For John O'Brien, "Three" is not the magic number.
• Car names deemed "too academic:" Dodge Dissertation Defense V8, Chrysler Course Calendar Convertible, etc.
• AbeBooks' online symposium on book burning.

- Editor @ 10:39 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Scarification: Ondaatje in the Library

As I watch a crowd build for readings at the public library, it is always with some anxiety that I survey my strange companions - chess geeks there for Gary Kasparov, decomposing leftists to hear Lawrence Wright on Iraq - and worry about my place among them.

Last Thursday, when Michael Ondaatje came to the Philadelphia public library to read from Divisadero, there was no such trepidation however. It may set me on edge to share politics with a room of people, but it is intimate to share a story. While we waited for Ondaatje to appear, a library staffer poured water into a glass beside the lectern and I chatted with the woman sitting next to me. Neither of us had read Divisadero, but we had The English Patient between us. She had finished it well after midnight, in bed on a Tuesday. I was on a train headed for Albany, pulling along the Hudson, when I put my copy down.

Ondaatje took the stage in standard touring author attire, a loosely cut gray suit over a white dress shirt, open at the collar. He had a puff of thinning white hair and a beard to match and a round of middle age paunch drooping over his waist. Never having met the man, I could have picked him out of a room of strangers.

Ondaatje explained that he began his writing career as a poet and
that tonight, before he began Divisadero, he wanted to read a few stanzas. I could not tell if this was routine, or if he'd been grabbed by an impulse on the way over. Either way, the room was rapt as he read "The Cinnamon Peelers Wife" which contained the question, "what good is it to be the lime burner's daughter/ left with no trace/ as if not spoken to in the act of love/ as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar." There was ample nodding as he went along, and some affirmational sighing at the end. It was reassuring to feel that out of this monotonous book tour, there might be some live pleasure in tonight's performance. That, I think, was at least half the enjoyment of the poems, both our own, and what we hoped he gained by reading
them.

Book readings, particularly of literary fiction, often have an awkward quality. Athletes and actresses practice their craft in public and we consume it in the company of other people, but books are private affairs from start to finish. Ondaatje read a considerable amount from Divisadero, which is written in three parts and plays with time and memory much like The English Patient does. His prose has the same impressionistic, scattered quality as his poetry and subsequently Ondaatje talked about learning to write as if creating a collage. He was affable and warm and seemed genuinely happy to be in a basement auditorium with a room of people who had filled the interstices of their lives with his work.

When it came time for questions, a man of approximately Ondaatje's same age alluded to Henry James and Evelyn Waugh and asked Ondaatje to comment on the miscegenating effects of his work. Ondaatje answered he was glad if his writing had that effect, but that it was not really on his mind when he wrote. I raised my hand next. I wanted to know why he thought it was that it takes time before tragedies and wars yield themselves to art, such that the first efforts are rarely as good as later ones. He answered that he was not really interested in writing about political themes, and preferred to take the perspective of small characters with peripheral relationship to big events. I don't think he meant to elide the question. It was more that from the perspective of his own creative experience, my question did not make any sense. As more questions followed, Ondaatje seemed a little befuddled by the inquiries and connections people drew from his work. They were clearly not the same provocations which had spurred him. It is possible for two people to love the same thing for different reasons and that was the space which developed between Ondaatje and the crowd as the event neared its finish. He had the pleasure of writing his stories, and we had the pleasure of reading them, and the limit of that relationship was like the pleasure of a scar.

- Kevin Hartnett @ 8:56 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Welcome Kevin

Join us in welcoming our newest regular contributor at The Millions:

Kevin Hartnett lives in Philadelphia with his fiance Caroline. He works as a community organizer for public education reform and enjoys his days most when they are full of people. He spends his off hours running along the Delaware River, and wafting from cannisters of loose tea at a store that recently opened near his apartment.

You may remember the two reviews Kevin penned for us earlier this year. His next offering will be up shortly.

- Editor @ 8:35 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

That Button Doesn't Work

Yesterday in a crowded elevator, I watched a man punch furiously at the door-close button, trying to guard his territory from further invasion. And I thought back to the April 21 New Yorker, in which Nick Paumgarten dropped this bombshell:

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn't work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button's power. It's a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception.

For me, this was a Lewinski-sized revelation. Granted, Paumgarten phrases it as a kind of aside (much as Lawrence Wright broke the news in the January 21 issue that he's been the subject of FBI wiretapping.) Still, I expected this news to spread rapidly - and to lead to a sharp decline in door-close-button pushing. Of course, my assumption that hundreds of thousands of Americans share my enthusiasm for Nick Paumgarten's writing about just about anything appears, in retrospect, to have been misguided. I'll be curious to see whether The Millions, with its vast readership among elevator riders, can finish what Mr. Paumgarten started. The Door-Close Button Doesn't Work - pass it on!

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 3:53 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Alas, Poor...?

Reuters' "Oddly Enough" column ventures this week into the realm of literary history and intrigue: The mystery of Schiller's skull. When he died of tuberculosis in his forties, Friedrich Schiller, the eighteenth-century German Romantic poet, playwright, and philosopher, was buried in a mass grave. Several decades later, the mass grave was dug up and Schiller’s skull identified by comparison with his death mask and its size, and placed in a more distinguished tomb in the city of Weimar. In 1911, the mass grave was turned up again and another skull found that was claimed to be the real memento mori. This second skull was also placed in Schiller's tomb.

Now, DNA researchers attempting to tell the true skull from the false by comparison with DNA samples taken from Schiller’s relatives, have discovered that neither is a match.

In one of Lucian of Samosata's second century Dialogues of the Dead, Diogenes tells Pollux that in death, "man and man are as like as two peas... when it comes to bare skull and no beauty."

So it would seem.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 6:53 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Shop Around the Corner

How does an independent bookshop not only survive, but remain vital amid the encroaching chains? How does a tightly-knit community bolster its authors in a cut-throat industry? Independent bookshop owner Heidi Hallett has tackled both these issues by doing what the best independent shopkeepers do - opting for the intimate, the local.

As this recent Globe and Mail article explains, Hallett's Halifax bookshop, Frog's Hollow, has its fortunes interwoven with that of her community. By hosting book launches and in-store author appearances of regional scribes, Hallett keeps her dream alive: "Local literature is a vital part of our culture here, and I am concerned that if more independent bookstores like mine start going under, we risk losing that history and heritage forever."

- Andrew Saikali @ 8:57 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Reading List: A Tale of Comp Lit Disillusionment

Bryan Miltenberg is 22 and he lives in Brooklyn. This is in reply to Emily's post from earlier today.

Emily,

I loved your response. You have written an aesthetically competitive post about competitive aesthetics. Remarkable. And it's a good one, too. I admire your meta-oneupmanship there. Let me see if I can elaborate on my original comment.

Reading back over your post and my own comment on the original post, I'm pretty surprised at what I wrote. I've never been someone who's cared about cultivating high art sensibilities (I have little patience for film; I eat mostly cereal and plain pasta for dinner) or projecting my literary tastes as a reflection of myself. And yet there I was, sitting at my desk, agonizing over whether someone would recognize my name and realize that I had read not one but two Oprah's Book Club books, and that I had been about seven years late to the Dave Eggers party, one long left by anyone with any literary respect for themselves. Why did I care? What had happened?

I had started out with so much potential. I arrived on my first day at college proudly toting my On the Road and HOWL (sure to be found buried deep in the closet of any "serious" comp. lit. major - far from the sightlines of any potential visitors), ready to set the world on fire with my "I don't give a f---" attitude. I wanted to find a community of literary encouragers, rather than competitors, in terms of both reading and writing. And I don't think I was alone in this. I was one of many wide-eyed suburbanites (I'm originally from Long Island - there goes my literary credibility...) who had signed on to meet others to start the next great literary movement.

Well, of course, we didn't. And we still haven't. So what happened? How did a legion of idealistic poets become an embittered group of literary critics? Let's see if I can explain it.

As a freshman sitting in an upper-level comp. lit. class, one thinks he may have found that "vibrant discussion" that he read so much about in a college pamphlet. But soon he starts to notice something a little different happening. His passionate, reader response-ish discussion answer on a novel is met with crickets (maybe even a snicker). Meanwhile, somewhere else in the room, a grizzled senior has peppered his lengthy dismissal of the novel with only the obscurest Lacan and Derrida references, the professor has fallen out of her chair, and the admiring eyes of every female in the room are on him. One starts to get the idea.

On college campuses today, the obscure literary theory expert is the new high school quarterback. His field is the lecture hall; he captures the crowd not with touchdown passes but with high-flown theoretical sparring sessions with professors who, of course, see in him a younger version of themselves, and are willing to endlessly heap praise. And that is the ultimate currency on the college campus, is it not?

And so the race is on. Who will bring the most obscure texts to the discussion? Who will wow the world with their feats of Foucault and Spivak? The question becomes not "How can I find the text that will change me?" but rather "How can I find the text that will change the way others view me?" The literary snobbery of academia is vicious, and one can only exist in that environment for so long before succumbing to it.

And that's what went through my head when my reading list was aired to the world. I pictured Margaret Vandenburg reading it aloud in 3000 level Postmodernism, to the cruel laughter and pointing of hundreds of prematurely bald soon to be Ph.D. candidates.

So even though I try my best to live in opposition to aesthetic snobbery, you can understand my knee-jerk response. The high school quarterback had just pulled my pants down in front of the whole cafeteria.

- Editor @ 4:15 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Competitive Aesthetics

Reading our recent graduate's response to our book question #59 post, I've been thinking about taste and literature. Why is it, with bookish people especially, that taste (in books and film, and music, and other variables like visual art, food, wine, beer, architecture, interior design), is such a sensitive matter?

Our reader seemed somewhat aghast at having his reading list exposed - as aghast as I might have been, some time ago, had someone inventoried in public the contents of my kitchen while I was studying for my university orals (gin, red wine, coffee, Equal, macaroni and cheese, chocolate pudding, soy burritos, cigarettes, Xanax, multivitamins), or my video rental history from the summer I took my qualifying exam (Mandy Moore's A Walk to Remember - oh, how I wept - Britney Spears' Crossroads, Blue Crush, How High, The Skulls). Granted, my response to the culture of aesthetic oneupsmanship in which I live is to wallow in what many of my peers would call - with a slight grimace of distaste or a shiver of disquiet - mass culture. I think it's alright, myself. Some of it. (There's plenty of shit too.) And I think a diet of only "great books" and auteurs - Wagner, Goddard, von Trier, Proust, Marx... pick your poison... leaves one a bit milquetoast-y.

I've read Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, subtitled "Notes from Damaged Life", in which he, a German Marxist intellectual living, at the time, in Los Angeles, reflects with pungent horror on modern popular culture and the deceptive comforts and conveniences of modern life. Adorno's fragmentary pensées are one of the most visceral, moving portraits of alienation you'll ever encounter. I look at the book sparingly and seldom because its sense of horror and melancholy is infectious. It's also insane: how could anyone so full of despair and repulsion not have shot himself four or five fragments in? The wonder of the book is that the consciousness that produced it was able to survive itself for several hundred pages. While the book moves me, it is also a cautionary tale about psychic price of absolutist snobbism.

Since Milton's epic invocation to the muse in Paradise Lost

Of Man's first disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden

Taste has come to mean much more to us than what we like to eat. For Milton, salvation hangs in the balance. As Denise Gigante, the author of Taste: A Literary History (and my advisor), has written, Milton's sense of "taste is more than a physical sensation or appetite (though that is critically implicated too): it is a highly freighted philosophical concept with serious consequences for the creation of selves in society." Eve's eating of the apple was more than metaphor, and since her - or at least since Milton's description of her - we have all been a little uneasy about what we consume. What if we are what we eat - and what we read? What if my watching all of the "O.C." (not the fourth season - I do have some standards) has had moral - and mortal - effects? And has it just had its way with my aesthetic soul or my immortal one as well?

An 18th century moral philosopher whom I'm quite fond of - Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury - believed that our capacity for morality is like aesthetic taste, and that beauty in nature and art is aligned with goodness. He believed that goodness is beauty of a moral sort, and that in the same way we recognize beauty in the proportions of a statue, or harmony in the colors of a painting, we recognize moral goodness in human actions. While he claimed that this faculty was innate in human beings, he hedged his bets a bit in insisting on the need for a good education. And the troubling suggestion he leaves us with is that those who aren't properly educated in art and the classics and history, might be a little morally iffy as well.

If you're around people with babies, it's sometimes easier to notice this conflation of food for the body and food for the mind and soul. Only organic home-made baby food, no TV, carefully selected books and toys. The underlying idea is that the care the parents take in maintaining the quality of what the baby consumes will ultimately make it a better person. Smarter, stronger, more coordinated. Sadly, David Shipler's The Working Poor suggests that this caution is well-founded. The lack of micro-nutrients in the diets of children raised in poverty often affects cognitive development. A child who starts life malnourished can become a child who's behind in math and reading several years later; just as a child who suffers from emotional neglect in infancy is more likely to suffer from emotional and behavioral problems in later life.

I am far afield from my original point, I fear. Having meant to soothe our reader with a meditation on the universality of his anxiety about taste, I find myself in baby food, by way of Milton and Adorno. My own feeling is that the game of competitive aesthetics is a wicked one. One I have played - one I will likely play again - I cannot help myself - but an unwholesome one nonetheless. It can give an electrifying surge of self-satisfaction, when you know the good things better than anyone else. But it won't save your soul:

A now-lost friend of mine, when he visited San Francisco a few years ago, went straight for my CDs. "You've got some good stuff here," he said (pointing specifically to some Cat Power and Chet Baker), and he seemed to relax once he'd seen that, taste-wise, I hadn't "lapsed." His attitude towards people had always seemed to suggest that the people worth knowing were exquisite objets, and I was still up to snuff. (I'm not exempting myself - It takes a snob to know a snob: Or, at least, when you've known one too many aesthetic moralists, you, if not become one, often develop an inner one and don't mind praise from an outer one.) The thing that made this visit more interesting as a case study for an aesthetics vs. morals debate is that my friend had just been excruciating rude to my roommates (one of whom was letting him sleep on her couch; the other of whom had just offered him a glass of whiskey). My visitor, while my roommates were watching "Will and Grace" had described its stupidity in detail: The word "crap" was used a lot and there was a sort of sneer employed in his disquisition on its crappiness. Many people, I think, would keep their mouth shut in such a situation: So, "Will and Grace" is dreadful: these people are putting me up for the night, I can keep my opinions to myself. But he couldn't - as though there was, in the religious sense of the word, a moral imperative to condemn the damnable.

A bigger lie was never written than this: De gustibus non est disputandem.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 7:31 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

PEN World Voices Report: A Tribute to Robert Walser

After four World Voices events in as many days (scaled down from a perhaps overly ambitious six), I was about ready to hang up my spurs. Nonetheless, I dragged myself back into midtown's London-style drizzle for Saturday afternoon's "Tribute to Robert Walser" - and was glad I did. Twentieth century German-language literature produced some of my favorite novelists (Mann, Musil, Broch), but I've never read either the Swiss Walser (1878 - 1956) or the Austrian Thomas Bernhard, the subject of another World Voices panel. (German-language cultural institutions like The Goethe-Institut, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and Deutsches Haus seem to have poured resources into this year's festival.) I attended both events hoping to discover what the Wirbel was about, and though "Bernhard: The Art of Failure" struck me as uneven, the Walser tribute delivered.

Instead of a straight panel discussion of Walser's work, the Morgan Library arranged for a set of short readings by writers who admire it. This may have been more risky than it sounds; even listening to authors read their own work (I was learning) demands a certain level of stamina. Walser, then, is lucky to have had novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, translator Susan Bernofsky, and especially polymath Wayne Koestenbaum and short story writer Deborah Eisenberg give voice to his fiction.

The sumptuous auditorium - an ideal space for this event - was packed with at least 100 audience members. Edwin Frank, the editorial director of NYRB Classics, introduced the readers - plus the German novelist Michel Krüger - and then Krüger took over. The author, most recently, of The Executor, Krüger is to German publishing roughly what George Plimpton was to American letters (or would have been, if Plimpton had run Random House in addition to his other activities)... and it was easy to see why. Working entirely without notes, in limpid English, he delivered a rigorous yet accessible introduction to Walser's life and work.

Then Bernofsky, who has translated Walser's novels for New Directions, read excerpts from The Assistant and the forthcoming The Tanners. Her delivery was crisp, and I was impressed by the way her translations captured the delicacy (to borrow one of Walser's favorite terms) of his prose. The second excerpt was a bit long for my taste, but toward the end, it opened out into a radiant vision of the urban everyday, in which I caught a glimpse of a familiar-feeling, yet completely original, sensibility.

(Susan Sontag attempted to sketch that sensibility in her introduction to Walser's Selected Stories: "Anyone seeking to bring Walser to a public that has yet to discover him has at hand a whole arsenal of glorious comparisons." Hers include Paul Klee, Robert Musil, Leopardi, and Kafka (natürlich); I would add Frank O'Hara, Peter Altenberg, and Italo Svevo to the list. "But any true lover of Walser," Sontag continued, "will want to disregard the net of comparisons that one can throw over his work.")

Deborah Eisenberg read next, weaving together three pieces from Jakob von Gunten. "I adore this novel," she said, and it showed. As at Thursday's "Something to Hide" event, Eisenberg proved to be as remarkable an interpreter of other writers' work as she is of her own. She managed, with her idiosyncratic delivery, to capture the quality of dreamy bemusement in Jakob's account of life at the Benjamenta Institute for Boys:

For me our classes in dancing, propriety, gymnastics, seem like public life itself, large, important, and then before my eyes the schoolroom is transformed into a splendid drawing room, into a street full of people, into a castle with old long corridors, into an official chamber, into a scholar's study, into a lady's reception room, it just depends, it can be anything. We must enter, make formal greeting, bow, speak, deal with imaginary business matters or tasks, carry out orders, then suddenly we're at table and dining in a metropolitan manner and servants are waiting on us.

By this point, the audience was palpably spellbound.

Eugenides followed, tackling a short, feuilleton-style piece called "Trousers" with amusing mock-seriousness. ("I am thrilled to be writing a report on such a delicate subject as trousers.") And Koestenbaum, who in both his passion and his urbanity seems like an ideal dinner guest, rounded off the reading. He began with a list of six reasons why he loves Walser, and then treated us to three more feuilletons. Like Eisenberg, he seemed harmonically attuned to Walser's temperament.

In the question-and-answer session that followed, Bernofsky talked about the "microscript" - millimeter-high writing - Walser perfected, and about his eventual institutionalization. Eight and a half volumes of his work have been translated into English, she said, and nine and a half more remain. She suggested that the evening's readings had demonstrated the diversity of Walser's output, but I found exactly the opposite: I had been immersed, throughout, in a consciousness I found intoxicating. Twenty-four hours later, I'm halfway through Jakob von Gunten, and, grateful to PEN for introducing me to this most wonderful writer, I look forward to 17 more volumes.

Bonus links: For more on Walser, try Ben Kunkel's intelligent essay in last year's New Yorker, or J.M. Coetzee's NYRB piece from 2000.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:16 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Early Days of Big Money: A Review of A. Alvarez's The Biggest Game in Town

The poker craze may have peaked, but it was a big thing there for a bit. About five years ago, ESPN's prominent televising of the World Series of Poker and the emergence and proliferation of online poker sites where amateur card sharps could test their skills against other players around the globe fueled an explosion of interest in what was once a back-room pastime. To a lesser extent, a pair of books fanned the flames as well: James McManus' Positively Fifth Street, a journalist and amateur poker player's tale of parlaying an advance for a Harper's piece on the World Series (and other related topics) into a miracle run to the final table and Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House, an apparently substantially apocryphal tale of MIT geeks who used their considerable mathematical abilities to bilk millions from Las Vegas casinos using card counting schemes. (Yes, the latter is about blackjack, but it seemed aimed squarely at the suddenly booming poker market and tapped into the same "get rich quick" bravado.)

So, for the many poker novices who have taken up no-limit hold'em over the last few years, whether via a neighborhood game, or more likely online, the earlier, though not to say more innocent, years of no-limit hold'em and the World Series of Poker will be surprising in many ways.

Such was my reaction to reading The Biggest Game in Town, a journalistic account of the 1981 World Series of Poker by New Yorker contributor and accomplished essayist, novelist, and poet A. Alvarez. On the one hand, it is interesting to know, some twenty years before ESPN began broadcasting poker seemingly every day, that the World Series, held annually since 1970 at Binion's Horseshoe Casino, was a notable event even back then. Alvarez describes "television teams trail[ing] their cables around the room," major newspapers carrying the results, and spectators "packed against the rails." At the same time, these early years seem almost impossibly quaint compared to the madness that is described on TV now. In 1981, there were 75 entrants competing for $375,000 in prize money. In 2007, it was 6,358 going after $8.25 million (and that was down from 8,773 and $12 million the prior year). Alvarez's description of the players' introductions sums up the scene:

Jack Binion climbed onto a chair at the back of the room... He motioned for quiet, did not get it, then introduced the players over the babble of the casino: name, place of origin, a word or so of praise. His favorite description was "plenty tough."

This familial atmosphere allows for Alvarez to paint compelling profiles of a dozen or so of the participants. Unlike the online moonlighters and poker tourists that you might find at the World Series nowadays, these are hard-bitten bunch, and more candidly hooked on gambling than any drug addict and as prone to peaks and crashes. From the likes of Amarillo Slim, Johnny Moss, and Nick "the Greek" Dandalos emerges Doyle Brunson, a survivor in the poker world, thanks both to an uncharacteristically even-keeled demeanor compared to most of the poker pros that Alvarez meets and to a popular and highly technical poker manual he wrote, Doyle Brunson's Super System: A Course in Power Poker. It's not uncommon to see Brunson on ESPN still today, revered as a poker god among the hordes of newcomers. Even his children have become celebrity poker players.

While Brunson and his small-town Texas bonhomie are at the heart of the book, his colleagues provide the color. What's particularly interesting is that this book, far more than McManus' Fifth Street, is a book about addicts. It just happens that these addicts are incredibly good at what they do and so can improbably make a living at it, albeit one that sometimes has them losing hundreds of thousands in a matter of hours and opening a line of credit with a casino (or some shadier operation) in order to get back on track.

The World Series, we surmise, is just an attempt clean up poker and market these latter day cowboys for the tourists. It's telling that the World Series itself isn't particularly interesting to the participants, Alvarez, or this reader, rather it's the numerous "cash games" that spring up when the world's top poker players occupy the same zip code. In these games, which Alvarez describes with something like awe, the $375,000 that World Series participants spend a week competing for might be lost (and won) in a single hand. Members of the top-tier poker fraternity compete ruthlessly, and have no qualms about absolutely cleaning out the deep-pocketed amateur who gets in over his head. It's an ugly world, lived in windowless rooms with smoky air, and trailing lost jobs and broken families. There's glamor and excitement in the sums involved but, Alvarez's book makes clear, never satisfaction.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:43 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

PEN World Voices Report: Something to Hide - Writers and Artists Against the Surveillance State

Among the core missions of International PEN is "the defense of writers and of freedom of expression around the world." In the last two decades, as Salman Rushdie has been both its beneficiary and its champion, this mission has become increasingly visible. However, the artistic defense of freedom of expression is a tricky thing; political self-satisfaction can impinge on the creative writer's various commitments to silence, cunning, and exile, not to mention irony. There have been events in the past where the celebration of PEN's core mission has seemed out-of-sync with circumstances. (Should we really be congratulating ourselves for mingling on a cruise ship?) And so, on Thursday night, when I headed to the velvet-draped precincts of Joe's Pub for "Something to Hide: Writers Against the Surveillance State," I was a bit nervous. I don't want to be told what a hero I am for drinking my $7 beer, any more than I want to be told that I can do my part for the Global War on Terror by going shopping.

I needn't have worried (except, perhaps, about my own incipient cynicism). Both in its intelligent planning and in the sensitivity and humility of its participants, "Something to Hide" focused attention on victims of the surveillance state, rather than flattering the good conscience of the audience.

The key to the evening's success, I think, was that writers were asked to read from work other than their own. After quick introductions from PEN president Francine Prose and ACLU director Anthony Romero, a surprise guest took the stage: Wallace Shawn. My pleasure at seeing a favorite writer perform quickly faded into absorption in the performance. Shawn delivered a dramatic reading of Acting U.S. Attorney General James B. Comey's testimony before Congress, in which White House Council Alberto Gonzalez and Chief of Staff Andrew Card attempt to harass a hospitalized John Ashcroft into signing off on the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. Shawn is as passionate and idiosyncratic an actor as he is a playwright, and the reading was surprisingly moving. It was a reminder that, despite the excesses of the last eight years, dedicated civil servants still remain the backbone of our government. (Or remained - Comey resigned shortly after the scene at Ashcroft's bedside.)

The evening's poets, Chenjerai Hove of Zimbabwe and Irakli Kakabadze of Georgia, recited political poems by friends and colleagues, and perhaps because of the translation, the work itself seemed more strident than beautiful. That said, these are two writers who have felt first-hand the corrosive effects of government surveillance, and their introductory remarks provided a much-needed international context for the evening's theme.

Conceptual artists Hasan Elahi and Jenny Marketou explored the dimensions of surveillance at home. Elahi, who spent time on the FBI terrorist watch list, showed slides from a project in which he keeps the FBI constantly updated on his whereabouts. "If they want to know what I'm doing, that's fine, but they're going to know everything. If I go to the toilet, they're going to go with me." Marketou read an FBI transcript in which two G-men follow Andy Warhol to New Mexico for the shooting of a porn film. They complain about lascivious dancing cowboys and the lack of character development. Thirty-odd years later, audience laughter at Joe's Pub was both loud and anxious. La plus ça change...

The Hungarian Peter Esterhazy reprised Wednesday's triumphant appearance at Town Hall, here reading from the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal. It's a testament to Esterhazy's charisma that his reading, in a language I don't speak, was more evocative than the reading by his translator that followed. Ingo Schulze of Germany (whose latest novel, New Lives, will be published this fall), read from Through the Looking Glass, making Lewis Carroll sound positively Orwellian.

Finally, the evening's second surprise guest, Deborah Eisenberg wrapped things up with a reading from the Argentine writer Humberto Constantini's The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis I've heard Eisenberg, one of my two or three favorite living American writers, read from her own work before; what was remarkable was the way she inhabited the sentences of another writer. I was half-convinced she'd written the excerpt herself. (I would have the same feeling on Saturday afternoon, hearing her read from Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten).

Eisenberg and Shawn have for years been vocal critics of the excesses of the American defense establishment; it speaks to the power of their artistry that each is able to write explicitly about political themes without sacrificing aesthetic power. In the end "Something to Hide" served not only as a primer on the iniquity of state-sponsored surveillance, but as a reminder that art and politics need not be mutually exclusive. Indeed, given sufficient humility and tolerance for ambiguity on the part of artists, each can be made to further the interests of the other.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 3:01 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

PEN World Voices Report: The Art of Failure

Late Thursday night, after several PEN events and many drinks, a European friend and I succumbed to the temptation to make sweeping generalizations about the state of literature in America and abroad. Most of our aperçus wouldn't withstand scrutiny in the sober light of morning, but I liked his epiphanic declaration that one of the worst things a piece of writing can be is "harmless." By that standard alone, the work of the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931 - 1989) is high art. As Horacio Castellanos Moya put it at "The Art of Failure," an evening panel on Bernhard at the Austrian Cultural Forum, "Bernhard is a snake. He has rattles. He has poison."

Castellanos Moya knows whereof he speaks. He is the author of Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, as well as the recently translated Senselessness, which adapts Bernhard's long, rhythmic sentences into a Spanish-language idiom. The other "Art of Failure" panelists - scholar Fatima Naqvi, LIVE from the NYPL impresario Paul Holdengräber, and novelist Dale Peck, - had their own insights into Bernhard's misanthropy. Naqvi has made a career out of studying it, Holdengräber is the scion of a Viennese family forced into exile during World War II, and Peck has raised hackles with his poison-pen reviews of fellow writers.

It was odd, then, that "The Art of Failure" started off on a lethargic note. Moderator Jonathan Taylor, author of a recent Bernhard article in The Believer, was a soft-spoken, even phlegmatic host, and the panel's format - in which each guest spoke for ten to fifteen minutes before conversation began - seemed ill-suited to its subject. Both Naqvi and Peck seemed to have over-rehearsed their opening remarks. And though Castellanos Moya - "This guy is writing because he doesn't want to go out killing people!" - added some verve to the proceedings, Holdengräber concluded the first part of the discussion with an apt question: What would Bernhard think of us?

Not much, apparently. Bernhard, according to Naqvi, was a strident opponent of bourgeois cultural institutions like PEN World Voices and the Austrian Cultural Forum. He looked contemptuously on all forms of dilettantism and groupthink. Indeed, part of what Bernhard meant with his frequent invocation of the word "failure" and its synonyms was the condition of dilettantism. Like his countryman Wittgenstein, (whose nephew appears in one of Bernhard's novels), he held himself to standards few writers are capable of observing.

If the Bernhard panel failed to achieve rigor or purity, though, it did, in its second half, grow into something more involving. As monologues gave way to actual discussion, the panelists began to explore Holdengräber's proposition that "there is something hygenic in [Bernhard's] misanthropy." Postwar Austrians, according to Naqvi, worked so hard to efface the strain of National Socialism in the culture that they often risked harmlessness. In novels such as The Loser and Correction, Bernhard made a place in postwar Austrian literature for a modernist aesthetics of opposition.

Dale Peck, whose critical writings I find both embarrassingly self-involved and hostile to the seductions of literature, proved to be surprisingly eloquent on Bernhard's aesthetics. He spoke of the importance of "[giving] yourself over" to Bernhard's totalizing sensibility and the anxiety it produces. And perhaps Bernhard didn't always live as he wrote; Taylor offered evidence that Bernhard listened to Prince.

Ultimately, questions about the merits of Bernhard's Weltanschauung remained unresolved. Those panelists who have flirted professionally with dilettantism seemed almost intimidated by Bernhard. And perhaps the novelist's shade was hovering above us, watching in disgust. Still, in an age when literature too often flirts with harmlessness, the value of a room packed with Bernhard enthusiasts (and neophytes like myself) seemed beyond dispute.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 1:54 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

PEN World Voices Report: Public Lives/Private Lives

A crowd representing all ages, income brackets, and nationalities basking in the brilliant comedy of a Hungarian literary genius: isn't this why one moves to the big city? Seduced by movies and periodicals (here Woody Allen and The New Yorker deserve much of the credit and/or blame), I came to New York a few years ago in search of a writer's paradise. What I found more often resembled the galley of a Roman ship - rows of freelancers in the cafes hammering away at their laptops. But every so often, as at last night's Private Lives/Public Lives reading at The Town Hall, the dream city breaks the surface of the everyday.

The house seemed a little less packed than it did at this event last year, which may have been a tromp l'oeil brought on by my marginal seats (thanks, PEN!) The draws in 2007 were Steve Martin, Don DeLillo, and Salman Rushdie; this year, the big names included Annie Proulx, Ian McEwan, and Michael Ondaatje. Perhaps the festival organizers should have added George Carlin to the bill to spice things up. The brilliance of the PEN World Voices festival, however, is the chance to encounter new writers from abroad. This year was no different.

Among my favorite discoveries last night were the South African writer Rian Malan - whose lovely reading voice has affinities with Ondaatje's - the Mexican poet Coral Bracho - and especially the Hungarian Peter Esterhazy. In what I believe is a new twist, writers read in their first language, with a translation projected onto a screen behind them. I applaud this, in theory; in a festival that prides itself on a global outlook, it seems questionable to force readers into English. That said, the projectionist's manic-depressive speeding-up and slowing-down of the scrolling text added a rather surreal dimension to the evening.

Part of what made Esterhazy's and Bracho's readings stand out was the rhythmic richness of their delivery. Though my Hungarian is worse than my Spanish (which is to say, nonexistent), these writers' attention to the sonic qualities of language kept me up-to-speed with the translation. In Bracho's case, a meditation on the qualities of water became a sexual rhapsody, all languorous vowels. By contrast, Esterhazy's reading - from his massive novel Celestial Harmonies - had the tempo of a drunken machine gunner. Oddly enough, his conversational rapidity made his long, contortionist sentences easy to follow. What emerged, above all, was the book's surreal comedy - what Joseph Mitchell called "graveyard humor."

The owlish Annie Proulx, with her reading of Aidan Higgins' Langrishe, Go Down, may have outdone Esterhazy in polish, but Celestial Harmonies was the book I walked away burning to read.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 3:26 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question (#59): Books for Recent Graduates

Bryan wrote in with this question:

I'm a 2007 graduate of Columbia. I majored in American Studies with a concentration in 20th century American literature. I'm a huge fan of the Millions. I'm attaching a recent reading list, if there's any chance you'd be interested in giving a book recommendation [based on it], that would be totally awesome. Here goes:

Currently reading:

• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Recently read (sep 07 - april 08):

• Elementary Particles by Michel Houllebecq
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
• Man In The Dark by Paul Auster
• Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
• What We Should Have Known - n+1
• The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
• Look Back In Anger by John Osborne
• The Road by Cormac Mccarthy
• Pages From A Cold Island by Frederick Exley
• Ultramarine by Raymond Carver
• The Unbearable Lightness Of Being by Milan Kundera
• The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forche
• Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles Bressler
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor
• Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• Meditations In An Emergency by Frank O'Hara
• Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
• The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner
• Life Studies and For The Union Dead by Robert Lowell
• For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
• Incidences by Daniil Kharns
• Journey To The End Of The Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Bryan's recent reading list is an interesting one, and in discussions among Millions contributors, several interesting observations were made. Emily noted, for example, that it is a "very testosterone-y" reading list and added, "I think all testosterone diets are bad for the soul. (as are all estrogen diets)." Her prescription? Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Ben, meanwhile, noted several "upgrades" that Bryan might consider to the books above. Instead of Goodbye, Columbus, read Saul Bellow's Herzog. If you're going to read Exley, read A Fan's Notes, and "Infinite Jest should be on there, probably the greatest work of 20th century literature," Ben adds. Garth said that Bryan "needs urgently to read is Mating by Norman Rush, which is like an amalgam of Conrad, Roth, Proust, F. O'Hara, and Hemingway," all authors featured on Bryan's list.

In thinking and discussing Bryan's list, we also hit the idea of a "staff picks" for recent grads - a year out of school, Bryan qualifies, and with another round of graduates set to be expelled from academia, we figured that it might be both timely and useful. Below follows a handful of suggestions. This list is woefully incomplete though, so we ask you to help us out with your own reading suggestions for recent graduates in the comments.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson recommended by Edan

This novel-in-verse is a contemporary retelling of the myth of Geryon and Herakles. In the original myth, Herakles kills Geryon, a red-winged creature who lives on a red island; Carson's version is a kind of coming of age story, in which Geryon falls in love with Herakles. If the form intimidates you, don't let it: this is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams recommended by Edan

Three teenage girls, a bitch of a ghost, and the apathetic desert. The Quick and the Dead is an odd and very funny novel that has pretty much no narrative drive but is nonetheless a joy (no pun intended!) to read because of its wondrous prose.

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey recommended by Edan

This is a fun collection of essays that will feel far more entertaining than any criticism you read in college (though maybe not as mind blowing). The best piece in the book, I think, is Hickey's argument for why Vegas (where he lives) is so terrific.

George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London recommended by Andrew

So you're holding your degree in one hand and, with the other, you're untangling a four-year growth of ivy from your jacket. All the while maintaining that cool, detached air that you've been carefully cultivating. Well, before you join the real world and settle into the routine that will destroy your soul bit by bit, each and every day FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, take a breath, find a copy of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, and shake your foundations one last time.

Orwell was probably about your age - mid-twenties or so - when he found himself out of the army and living in the underbelly of Paris and then in London, living in poverty, working as a plongeur and doing other assorted subsistence-level jobs, and scraping by. A largely autobiographical account of those years, Down and Out in Paris and London exposes Orwell's social soul. "I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny."

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway recommended by Max

To me, the post-college years are characterized by two often warring desires, to become a contributing member of society despite the horrifying drudgery of those first post-college jobs and to extend the second childhood of undergraduate life for as long as possible. Lucky Jim riotously encapsulates the former, as junior lecturer Jim Dixon finds himself surrounded by eccentric buffoonish professors and overeager students at a British college. He wants what many of us want: to escape the dull life before it traps us forever. The Sun Also Rises famously depicts the pitfalls of the other path. Brett and Jake and their burned out gang live life in a perpetual day-after-the-party fog. The Pamplona bullfights, aperitifs, and camaraderie may be tempting, but the attendant spiritual weariness gives pause.

- Editor @ 7:39 AM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post