September 28, 2008
Paradox and the Turkish Seaside
I first heard it when we were walking down the red brick path that separates the sand from the beachside bars and restaurants (Full English Breakfast, anyone?) in Bitez. It was a buzzing, wailing sound, undulating and crackling. "That's the adhan, the call to prayer," Emre told me.
Perhaps I've listened to too much NPR and my mind has become too attuned to the cross-cultural juxtapositions that are meant to be thought-provoking to the conscientious citizen of our globalized world. Perhaps I'm just a flaneur. But I couldn't help but file away as a key moment the dissonance between what I was seeing and hearing. If I was going to write about this trip, I was going to write about this.
And, well, here we are.
But it wasn't all nearly so revelatory as that. This leg of our Turkish trip was a fairly standard beach vacation cut through with many moments reminding us we weren't in Fort Lauderdale. It was a beach vacation with an element of surprise.
Lauren and I landed via ferry in Bodrum, the beachy hub of the region, and, met by Emre, took the "crazy bus" to Bitez, a few bays down a long peninsula that is pocked with resorts. Ours was Ambrosia, a pretty standard place save for the mosque-like dome that roofed the lobby.
In Greece, we had done some serious eating, but in Turkey our consumption shifted into overdrive. I don't think we ever saw a menu. Emre and his parents would order for the table in Turkish and then the food would just start coming, course after course in many cases. In Bitez and Bodrum, we would get our first taste of kebap (the preferred spelling of kabob over there); pide, the Turkish version of pita, topped with finely chopped meat or cheese and baked; kadaif, a sweet cheese-filled pie with a top crust of crispy, finely shredded dough; and seafood of many kinds.
And then of course there was the raki (pronounced rok-uh), which was not unlike the Greek ouzo but a touch less sweet and consumed in a rather ceremonious fashion. Also joining us in Turkey were our friends Roland and Heather. Roland and I (and Lauren) went to college with Emre, who became somewhat notorious for introducing his fellow students to this unique Turkish beverage. But the ballet at the Turkish dinner table is a far cry from our college tradition of swilling glasses of raki between beers from the keg.
Like the Greeks and their ouzo, the Turks take their raki with ice and water, but whereas the ouzo, in our experience, was more of a self-serve operation, raki is the domain of Turkey's attentive waiters. First they go around the table pouring a few fingers of raki into each glass. Then another round with a bottle of water -- unless you don't take water, as was the case with Roland and Emre, sometimes to their detriment. Then around a third time with a bucket of ice, dropping a cube or three into the glasses. Upon contact with the ice, the raki (like ouzo) turns a milky white, hence its nickname, Lion's Milk.
The ice and water chill the raki and take the edge off, and you are left with a smooth, anise-flavored beverage. When your glass is empty, the waiter returns promptly with the raki, then water, then ice (if you pour in the water or ice before the raki, the liquor will crystallize), unless of course you don't take water, a fact the waiter is supposed to remember from the first round on. In Turkey, the waiters were plentiful - restaurants sometimes seemed filled with them - and except at the most "modern" places, all male.
Bitez offered ample comforts. One day, we walked along the beach around Bitez's cozy bay, passing many resorts and restaurants to a point of land jutting into the water. At the top of the slope were a few covered bar areas and below were several terraced landings with umbrellas and chairs which led out to a dock and the water, where swimmers occasionally thrashed about.
Emre and his friends played backgammon (I would have to wait until later to challenge him) and we all drank bottles of Efes, the national beer. Later a man came around with a platter ringed with lemons and piled high with glistening black mussels stuffed with rice. We crowded in and he served us one by one around the circle, expertly flipping half the shell off and scooting it under the mussel and rice mixture but above the other half of the shell. You would use the extra shell like a spoon, making it a messy, but incredibly fresh and delicious finger food. We would see these midye dolma vendors several times both at the beach and in Istanbul, but it was hard to imagine eating the mussels anywhere but in that setting.
If the beachside resort was nice, the boat trip we took was amazing. Emre's parents arranged for it: a 70-foot boat, ours for the day, sailing from cove to cove. The Aegaen, once you get into the narrow bays and inlets of the Turkish coast, is so sheltered as to be nearly perfectly calm. It is also crystal clear, very salty, and remarkably fizzy. Splash around and you feel like you're soaking in a glass of soda.
If there is a vacation ideal that I could conjure up, it would very closely resemble the eight or so hours we spent on that boat. Upon anchoring, we would dive from the side of the boat into the sea, floating around, buoyed by the saltiness. Then it was back in the boat as we sailed around a barren cape into another unspoiled cove. At lunch, we each had a grilled, whole bronzino and a selection of mezze. In the afternoon, we had tea time, with pastries and coffee. Emre says you can do this for five days at a time, sleeping on the deck of the boat. I can't even imagine.
Emre has touched on Turkey's complicated politics over the years on this blog. It lay in the background of his series called "Barracks Reading," in which he discussed the books he read during his compulsory army service. Every male in Turkey must serve in the army, though the location and duration varies. Emre's army service was short and kept him out of harm's way, a result of his living in the west, having the means to pay some fees, and having a full-time job that he needed to make sure he got back to. That Emre is, as anyone would be, conflicted about this has come through in his writing as well.
Our bartender at Ambrosia, a very friendly young man who promised and delivered a bunch of green mandarins that grow locally to Emre's mom, had recently completed his military service in the southeast, battling Kurdish separatists. It was hard to imagine the guerrilla warfare going on on the other side of the country as we sat late into the night at the beach-side bar, sipping our drinks.
We would get another reminder that Turkey is at war as we waited for our plane to Istanbul at the Bodrum airport. Heads turned as a well-dressed man became extremely agitated, shouting at airline workers in the small concourse. Emre translated for us. The man had found out that morning that his brother had died in the southeast; he had missed his flight to get back to his grieving family; he was distraught and devastated.
The concourse fell silent as the man yelled. Around him, Turkish and other European travelers looked and then averted their eyes. The ticket agents who were the target of his rage calmed him down. Then slowly, people began talking again, their thoughts turning back to getting home after their vacations.
- C. Max Magee @ 5:51 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
Curiosities
- The Guardian has put together an extensive section called "How to Write" with tips from the pros like Robert Harris, Antonia Fraser, and Catherine Tate on writing fiction, poetry, comedy, screenplays, memoirs, journalism, and books for children.
- David Foster Wallace links: DFW's Pomona syllabus (via) and "The last days of David Foster Wallace" in Salon (via). Very sad.
- Adjust your bookmarks. Pinky's Paperhaus has moved (and gotten a new name).
- Former Millions blogger Patrick Brown got a mention in an LA Times piece about Herman Wouk a couple weeks back.
- Editor @ 11:29 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
September 26, 2008
Going Underground
The train arrived and this happened: A few people piled out and then one person in particular came out of the train and stood face to face with my grouchy colleague on the platform. They began punching each other in the face as if they were sworn enemies, all the while adjusting themselves on the platform so that Grouchy could go into the subway car, and the other guy could come all the way out. It was as if they were doing a dance. Before the doors had closed, and after at least a dozen punches had been thrown as they did their subway ballet, Grouchy was in the car and the other guy had gone up the stairs. I was within earshot - not a word had been spoken, not an insult slung. I guess some people just piss other people off.
So that's my subway story. That and the time I slipped on the top step at an outdoor entrance to Leicester Square tube station in London and tumbled down an entire flight of stairs, to the bemusement (and in many cases, indifference) of London's commuting throngs.
Every commuter or traveler seems to have his own subway story. The front page of a recent Globe and Mail Travel section takes the reader into the subways, undergrounds, tubes and metros of cities around the world. Writer Mark Kingwell, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, is the tour guide, expertly guiding the reader through some of the world's buried treasures. It's a fascinating read, and includes bits by other writers and travelers, each sharing subway anecdotes. All packaged with some fine photos.
All of which leads me to a book I purchased a few years ago - Underground: Travels on the Global Metro - a coffee-table book featuring some stunning work from photographer Marco Pesaresi. The cities explored are: New York, Tokyo, Moscow, Calcutta, Milan, Mexico City, Paris, London, Berlin and Madrid. Each section is prefaced by a short essay. The book even has an introduction by none other than Francis Ford Coppola.
Pesaresi is a remarkable photographer. His camera sometimes conspires with the passenger - causing a pose, an attitude (Mexico city). Sometimes, it is seemingly invisible (Milan) capturing but not appearing to intrude on a pre-existing mood (Tokyo). Sometimes it seems to be lurking, capturing quiet moments that likely would have been shaken off by the subjects, had they been overwhelmed by a more intrusive photographer.
- Andrew Saikali @ 7:18 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post
September 24, 2008
The Millions Interview: Margot Livesey
Margot Livesey's latest novel is The House on Fortune Street, an absorbing, beautiful and sad story told from multiple perspectives. Richard Eder of the New York Times remarks, "Livesey's writing is acutely observant; her psychological algebra is admirable and sometimes astonishing," and Alice Sebold says, "her work radiates with a compassion and intelligence and always, deliciously, mystery." Margot Livesey's previous books include Eva Moves the Furniture and Banishing Verona.The Millions: The House on Fortune Street is split into four interlocking narratives that overlap and echo one another. How did you decide on this structure, and what informed the ordering of these narratives?
Margot Livesey: I wrote the first part of the novel, Sean's section, in the late nineties, hoping that it would be a novella. I sent it to Robert Boyers at Salmagundi magazine. He wrote back an immensely thoughtful rejection letter which made me realise how much I'd left out of Sean's story. I knew, however, that I didn't want to expand the novella in a conventional way, that that wasn't what I was after, and I put it aside first to revise Eva Moves the Furniture and then to write Banishing Verona. But Sean remained on my desk and almost as soon as Banishing Verona was out in the world I found myself sitting down to write the second section of the novel, from Cameron's point of view. So I can't say exactly when I decided on the four sections, but once I did I knew where I was going and that I wanted to write a novel in which, as in life, the story came to you from different sources. I also loved the idea of replaying events from different angles, not in a Rashomon-like way but in a way that expanded or changed your opinions.
TM: At the end of the novel, Abigail says her grandfather always thought "everyone had a book, or a writer, that was the key to their life." This is certainly the case for your characters: Sean refers to Keats, Cameron to Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Abigail to Dickens, and Dara to Charlotte Bronte. For better or for worse, your characters look to the stories and/or biographies of their favorite artists to help them navigate through life. I wonder if this theme, which seems central to the story in many ways, helped in your conception of these characters. Did it shape their destinies on the page? Were there particular challenges to weaving this real life art into your fictional world?
ML: The idea of giving each of my characters what I think of as a literary godparent came to me when I was working on Sean's section. As a graduate student of English he had to have an area of study and I decided that Keats - the poet of erotic love, early death and immortality - was the perfect choice. Then of course it got a little harder with my characters who weren't doing Ph.Ds, but I still loved the idea of how a literary godparent could point to a character's deepest concerns and enlarge the reader's understanding. My rule for picking the godparents was that they had to be well known and nineteenth century and somehow I had strong instinctive feelings about who was right for who - Dickens, for instance, would never have been a good fit for Dara. The biggest challenge was working the necessary information into the plot in a natural way so that the reader could enjoy this aspect of the novel.
TM: It seems to me that The House on Fortune Street is very much interested in how our actions reverberate and affect other people, and how relationships, whether they be familial, platonic, or romantic, are limited by our own solipsism. How did you use the book's central event - a character committing suicide - to express the relationships between these characters?
ML: One of the questions I was trying to explore in Fortune Street was how damage gets passed down in families, or not. Why do some people emerge from traumatic childhoods relatively unscathed while others are irrevocably marked? Dara's suicide, an ultimately mysterious event, is the deepest expression of this question. The other characters don't really see Dara, in part because she is an excellent listener, in part because they're distracted by their own preoccupations, or, in her father's case, by guilt.
I was also eager to examine a long friendship between two women and the complexities of that relationship. I hoped that readers would begin by condemning Abigail for her treatment of both Sean and Dara and end up having a much more complicated response.
TM: In one of these sections you portray a man attracted to little girls, and you do so with such compassion and depth that it's hard not to sympathize with his shameful and secret desire. Your depiction of loneliness and isolation is really incredible, Margot. One of the differences between this narrative and the others is that it's told in first person, whereas the other three are told in close third. Why is Cameron's point of view different from the other characters'? How did you go about creating such a complicated character?
ML: What a generously phrased question. I was very concerned in writing about Cameron, a man who gazes longingly at young girls, that readers might simply condemn him out of hand. One way to make them more sympathetic - or at least more ready to suspend judgment - was to cast his narrative as a confessional. I think we tend to have a soft spot for someone who is telling us the worst about himself. Using a different point of view also fitted with Cameron being a member of a different generation than the other three characters. I decided to make his best friend gay as another way of commenting on his inappropriate desires. Lastly I tried to make it clear that Cameron judges himself quite harshly. He is confessing but not trying to excuse or mitigate his behaviour.
TM: You grew up in Scotland, went to college and worked in England, and, after teaching at an impressive number of universities all over the United States, you now spend much of the year in Massachusetts. How has living in so many places informed your writing - and perhaps more importantly, your narrative voice and style?
ML: I am not sure I know how to answer this question in a broader way. I do think that spending so much time in the States has given me a very particular way of looking at life in Britain. In many ways being here is like living in the future; things happen first in the US and then elsewhere. In the case of The House of Fortune Street I did try to replicate the rather fragmentary nature of my own life in the form of the novel.
TM: And because this is a book blog, I must ask you: What's the last good book you read?
ML: Do I have to answer in the singular? I loved Joan Silber's The Size of the World and Joseph O'Neill's equally cosmopolitan Netherland.
- Edan Lepucki @ 7:54 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
'5 Under 35'
Mostly I wanted to bring this up because two of the five have recently been featured at The Millions in posts arranged/conducted by Edan. Nam Le, whose book The Boat has been garnering much praise, was the subject of a highly entertaining interview last month. And Sana Krasikov, author of the equally praised One More Year, recently penned a guest post for us about reading Andre Dubus in Iowa.
Also on the list is Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, who once made an appearance in the only all out comment war ever to transpire at The Millions. Rounding out the five are Matthew Eck who wrote The Farther Shore and Fiona Maazel who wrote Last Last Chance.
- C. Max Magee @ 7:52 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
On DFW's Death
Mourning the death of an artist I didn't know is not something I've ever done before. I thought of it as an emotion only teenagers felt, and mostly in movies. And when David Foster Wallace died it didn't register like the loss of someone I knew or like the loss of someone I didn't. It was more descriptive. His suicide, like his work, added texture to the world, or revealed it, and even if the resulting picture was not any clearer, at least it was more honest and likely also more true. His death felt to me most directly like the settling of rubble.
I expected a string of emails among my friends about DFW's death. For the last two years we've participated in a Google Group with a steady daily volume of posts. Many of the threads are combative, filled with faux-disputes that make it easier to pass the workday and serve as a proxy for hanging out on weekends, which we cant do as much now that many of us live in different cities. One thing everyone agreed on though is that DFW was the Real McCoy. Soon after news of his death there was a simple post, titled "RIP" that stated matter-of-factly what had happened. After that a few people added links to blog posts and remembrances. I commented after listening to him read from "Up, Simba" on an archived This American Life episode, that I'd never heard his voice before. Our discussion was part the idle chatter of a funeral, and part a notation of the kinds of inconsequential details that are insulating in times of grief. DFW liked The Wire as it turned out, and to be able to say so out loud is almost proof that his death was not so severe.
But the primary sound after his death was silence. We've had people write 1,000-word posts on football players' names, and threads about the US Open that stretched past the horizon, but on an occasion of significance to everyone in the group, very little has been said. It is, I think, an appropriate response. In his writing, and maybe in his head too, DFW battled the cacophonous echo chamber of modern life. In our little corner of the online world, it felt fitting to let the only reverberations be his own.
- Kevin Hartnett @ 9:58 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
September 23, 2008
2008's Literary Geniuses
Chimamanda Adichie is a Nigerian-American novelist who wowed readers with Half of a Yellow Sun. Kevin reviewed the book here at The Millions, writing "Although Adichie devotes almost equal time to life before the war and life during it, it is the war narrative that drives the book and gives it a residual strength that I still feel more than week after finishing it. Her description of civilian suffering is so direct and real, that it's hard to believe she never experienced it herself (Adichie is only 31, and learned about the civil war from her parents who survived it on the Biafran side)." Adichie won the Orange Prize for Half of a Yellow Sun. Adichie's first novel was Purple Hibiscus.
Alex Ross is best known because he brings incredibly accessible prose and a palpable love for music to his job as the New Yorker music critic. (Not as well known: he went to the same high school as me, graduating ten years before I did.) Ross won a Pulitzer this year for his very highly regarded book The Rest is Noise. One of my favorite Ross essays is available on his website. From "Listen to This": "I hate 'classical music': not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. It banishes into limbo the work of thousands of active composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is they do for a living. The phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype. I wish there were another name."
- C. Max Magee @ 7:28 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
Tossed and turned: A literary tempest
A literary storm has been brewing here in Canada in recent weeks over the publication of the Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. (Maybe "literary storm" is pushing it - but there are at least three people weighing in on it). Here's what seems to have happened: Novelist Jane Urquhart, who was asked to edit the anthology, has put more than a few noses out of joint not just over who was or wasn't included, but over what she feels constitutes a "short story."Now, any anthology is inevitably going to leave something out, displease some and enrage a few others, but Urquhart, who by her own admission isn't an expert of short fiction, chose to include excerpts from memoirs, and, apparently, at least one chapter from a novel, all for the sake of pushing the boundaries of the definition of a "short story". Which to my mind would be like taking Act 2 of a three-act play and putting it in the same context as distinctly one-act plays. The length isn't the entire issue, in my mind. A sense of completeness is. A chapter or an excerpt from a novel may indeed have stand-alone properties, but by its very nature as part of a bigger thing, it is incomplete on its own. A finely-crafted short story, however, is complete. And a piece of a memoir? Despite recent memoir/fiction crossovers, a memoir is still a different animal than short story.
Why Penguin, in its attempt to publish a definitive collection, didn't place this editorial task in the hands of a short fiction connoisseur, or, better yet, a panel of connoisseurs who could at least bounce ideas off of each other, is a mystery to me. But, if nothing else, this little tempest has gotten Canadian readers engaged (a few of them fuming, and another leaping to Urquhart's defense). And with the fairly high-profile press given to the backlash, the omitted authors are getting at least some attention. Shame it had to be on the heels of exclusion from a major anthology.
- Andrew Saikali @ 6:29 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
September 21, 2008
Tiny Island
The woman at the information desk scrawled a pair of Greek words onto a post-it and handed it through the window to us. "Give this to the cab driver" she said.
We were in the airport on the island of Kos and we were armed with our ever-present backpacks and a notion, first formulated by Lauren weeks earlier, that we were going to Nisyros. The seed of our vacation had been planted by Emre, our old friend, a native Turk, and long-time contributor to The Millions who was returning to his homeland for a month. What better time to go to Turkey, we reasoned, than when we would have Emre there to show us around?
From this seed grew a more ambitious trip, as we appended a week in Greece on the front end. Emre, meanwhile, had plotted a two-stop Turkish tour, starting with a few days on Turkey's Aegean coast and ending in Istanbul. Weighing our options, Lauren and I decided that the best way to get to Emre near Bodrum, Turkey, was to traverse the Aegean from Athens.
Little remained but to pick an island as our waypoint. Various people recommended Santorini, Mykonos, and Rhodes, but Lauren embarked on her own research and settled on Nisyros, its prime attribute being that there wasn't much information available about it.
We weren't even sure if we could get there. We booked a flight to Kos, a medium-sized island just a few miles off the Turkish coast with a reputation as a package destination for British tourists, with the hope that we could figure out a ferry to little Nisyros, located about 25 miles from Kos' main harbor. The Greek ferry websites, being that they were, of course, Greek to us, were little help.
After scrutinizing the post-it we handed over, the cab driver nodded and set off. We passed strip malls and tourist traps of every variety along Kos' main road before we were dropped off beside a ferry in Kos Town. It was pleasingly old looking, with a light patina of rust. Our Greek Island Hopping guide book had explained that older ferries in the Aegean typically get shifted to the less frequently used routes. Our ferry fit that bill.
The boat was filled with locals, or in the case of an older couple from Australia, expats returning for a visit. The couple was Greek originally, and the husband John grew up on Nisyros and returns with his family to his home on the island every year. As he told us about the island's unique charms, the old ferry shouldered its way through water that was calm when in the lee of various small islands on the way and became choppy in the wind tunnels that formed between them.
The ferry landed and within a few minutes its several passengers had dispersed. If Nisyros is known at all, it is because it is a dormant volcano. The island's main town, Mandraki sits in a spot where the volcano's slope gently reaches the water.
Mandraki is like a city in miniature. It's streets are narrow and can be navigated only by tiny vehicles and motor scooters. The town, somewhat comically, has a single taxi, which you might presumably take the 300 yards from one end of Mandraki to the other. When the ferry boats arrive daily, they bring supplies to the island as well, and an elfen truck or two, which must have been custom made for the place, zip around dropping off deliveries at Mandraki's shops and restaurants.
Along Mandraki's length, on the water's edge, were a dozen or so restaurants. The menus offered foods falling into three categories: Greek standbys like souvlaki and eggplant salads; seafood - on one of our strolls around town we saw the tentacles of recently caught octopus strung out on a line, which later that night we had in a hearty octopus stew; and bastardized British fare to appease the occasional stray tourist. The most popular menu item we would see in the various beach towns that we passed through in Greece and Turkey was "Full English Breakfast," often accompanied by grotesquely oversized photos of rashers and eggs.
Everything on Nisyros had this spectacular washed out look to it. The buildings were bleach white and the brilliant sky was tinted by a dusty haze. Walking through Mandraki's narrow streets we came upon old Greek women dressed all in black and sitting in doorways, their smiling faces creased and tanned from decades in the sun. Strung overhead between houses were vines dangling bunches of sweet green grapes and clotheslines laden with laundry.
The labyrinthine streets carry Mandraki up the hillside, narrowing to the width of a person in some places and turning into staircases in others. Coming around a corner we might find a bakery selling spinach pies or a newsstand with two-day old newspapers. There was a square overlooked by the town hall and another filled with tables and chairs and ringed with cafes. Black, gray, and white stones were inlaid into the plazas to create designs featuring loosely maritime motifs.
Our hotel, Porfyris, was in Mandraki's upper portion rather than along the water, and from our spartan room we could look down across rooftops and out to the shimmering Aegean. We toyed with some mildly ambitious plans for our one full day in Nisyros, perhaps trekking to the volcano's rim or seeking out the island's hot springs, which are apparently served by a run-down spa. But instead we gave into the Nisyros' intoxicating quietness and settled for a morning stroll to the clifftop monastery overlooking the town and an untaxing hike in the hills behind it. The rest of the day was spent on our balcony, sketching in the little books that Lauren had thought to bring, reading magazines, and dozing heavy-lidded in the afternoon sun.
Saturday morning we awoke to find little Mandraki overrun. All three of the bakeries we had found were out of spinach pies by 10:30, and the town's population had increased by half, with the newcomers bearing cameras and self-consciously beachy garb. The culprits were the three day-boats parked in the harbor.
There are no doubt many residents of Mandraki who live on the largess of the visitors. We met some of them: a Libyan jewelry maker who found his way to Nisyros about 20 years ago and never left; a woman who collects and sells honey and makes jams and soumada, an almond-flavored drink; and our waitress both nights we were there, whose mother cooked us mousaka, souvlaki, and that octopus stew. But we had easily convinced ourselves that we had found a place, if not empty of tourists, than at least not so accessible to the majority of them.
Our ferry back to Kos was a newer model, a sleek, fast, and comfortable catamaran, that seemed an appropriate conveyance in which to return to civilization. Back on Kos, surrounding Kos Town's harbor, young men whose job is to harangue passersby into sitting at their streetside restaurants were again trying to entice us with the delights of the Full English Breakfast.
Instead we secured our ticket to Bodrum, braved Greek passport control, waited in several lines, and boarded another boat - our oldest, hottest, and most crowded yet - for the 40 minute ride to Turkey, which for our entire time in the islands, though a continent away, had loomed on the horizon.
- C. Max Magee @ 8:59 PM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post
September 17, 2008
The Travelers Get Their Bearings
After a day of bleary-eyed wandering, sitting in a crowded bar on a crowded square in Athens, the trip felt like it had finally begun. The waitress presented us with a bottle of ouzo, two slender glasses, and a bowl full of ice, and we sipped the cloudy, anise-flavored spirit.
Much of that day, our first full day in Athens, had been spent at our hotel, the Intercontinental, a big, "luxury" affair on a smoggy boulevard stretching south from the historical center of the city. We had initially been lured there by an impossibly good deal on Priceline, but our thriftiness was tinged with regret at not being closer to the action. That the hotel had become something of a prison thanks to our jetlag wasn't helping matters.
It's funny how when you travel - particularly when you've left your days unscheduled - you begin to see yourself as a latter day explorer, venturing into parts unknown. Your clothes are sweaty, you are miming to a native for an iced tea, and the next thing you know, you're Ponce de Leon or something. Any explorer worth his salt has had to turn back before reaching his goal, hampered by shipwreck or angry locals or the freezing over of the Northwest Passage. We had had a similarly aborted mission when sleeplessness combined with the pungent Mediterranean heat of Athens to foment in me a bout of intestinal distress.
Thankfully, Lauren is an extremely understanding traveling companion and supported my decision to spend the day recuperating by the pool.
But, like good explorers we ventured out again (after all Columbus didn't discover America in his first go) and were rewarded with a terrific meal of mousaka and lamb at a restaurant in one of the labyrinthine side streets of the Psiri neighborhood, after which we followed the swelling crowds to a bustling square ringed with bars and, ultimately, our ouzo.
And, not to reveal myself as too much of a boozehound, but from the moment we started sipping the beverage it was like the trip had clicked into place and we were on our way. More than just the ouzo (which was undeniably tasty), it was that we had found the people. Crowded Athens is of course filled with people, but sitting in the square they were no longer just background. We were among them.
We first entered Athens in a way I've never entered another city. Athens' airport is well outside the city and more or less separated from it by a mountain or at least a tall set of hills, but is nonetheless well connected to the city center by public transportation. On our arrival, I hadn't really gotten a glimpse of Athens (though after the 10-hour overnight trip, we could have landed atop the Acropolis and it would have taken me a good while to take notice of it), and our train ride into Athens was almost entirely underground.
And so with our first glimpse of the place we were thrust into the middle of it, emerging in a daze from the Monastiraki station at around 10am, surrounded by throngs of people in this bustling shopping district. It's not unlike arriving in New York City by train and emerging from Penn Station, except you've never laid eyes on New York City in your life (and maybe never even seen a picture of it).
Thankfully we traveled light, with just a small backpack each and a pact to do our laundry in hotel sinks as needed over the course of the two-week trip (a pact that was upheld pretty much entirely by my resourceful wife - but of course laundry has never been a strong suit of mine) and were free to wander only lightly encumbered. All the better since we had no clue how to get to our hotel.
Almost right away we discovered a Greek peculiarity, one that appears to be true both in Athens and in the islands. Unlike in America, where restaurant waitstaff tend to keep things on a tight schedule, ushering diners out the door the moment forks hit the table, in Greece, once you have been served you are on your own, and they don't bug you again. In fact, the ball is then in your court to let them know when you want to pay and leave. Not only that, it seems like they try to avoid your gaze, as though they want you to sit there as long as possible. After we got used to this, we were tempted to test waiters in some establishments to see just how long they would let us sit there, food and coffee long since consumed, but we feared that the Greeks would win that particular game of chicken and we would end up missing a flight or something.
One of the interesting things about emerging from the bowels of Athens upon first arrival was that we hadn't gotten our bearings on the city's very visible landmark until our eyes happened to alight upon it. "Is that the Acropolis?" I asked Lauren, catching sight of a colonnaded ruin perched atop an improbably massive stone plinth. It was.
We had been told by many, many people to visit the Acropolis either very early in the morning or at twilight. Only at those hours was there a chance of avoiding the massive crowds and the punishing Athenian sun. We reflected on this advice as we scaled the Acropolis at close to noon and judged it to be right on.
But despite the heat and despite the thousands of tourists, the Acropolis is undoubtedly a sight to behold. A better tourist than I would have done his homework about this archaeological gem, but much as I eschew all reviews before going to see a movie, sometimes it's useful to see one of the world's great historical sites without any preconceived notions.
The cab driver dropped us off amid the throngs at the main entrance to the grounds of the Acropolis, and we began our ascent of the steep outcropping, buffeted by tour groups, some of which required their members to don matching t-shirts. Along the path upward, children hawked water and knickknacks, scurrying away when the occasional security guard happened by.
Soon, the Propylaea, the huge gateway to the Acropolis site, came into view. Much of the Acropolis site, and most notably the Parthenon, was badly damaged in 1687, when the gunpowder that the Ottomans, then in control of Athens, were storing there blew up. In their defense, they were under siege by the Venetians, but one wonders if there wasn't a less historically valuable place available for the storing of combustible materials.
The result is that the Propylaea, the Parthenon, the Porch of the Caryatids, and much of the rest of the site is a mishmash of original structure in various states of ruin and reconstruction, performed at various levels of verisimilitude, that continues up until this day. There was ample scaffolding and dozens of workers scurrying around the site, and we could hear stone being cut and even saw a large block being slid into place on the Parthenon. (Just now, looking at pictures of the Parthenon online, I am amazed to see how much of it has been rebuilt in just the last four years.)
I have no insight into any argument about whether the current curation of the Acropolis is in keeping with best archaeological practices or is in fact controversial, but I will say that from the perspective of the North American tourist, used to the locked-down, behind-the-glass, "stay-on-the-marked-path" approach to historical sites, there was something refreshing about the controlled chaos of the Acropolis.
Case in point, with no one keeping us on a path through the grounds and no real path discernible, we eventually scampered down a pebbly track along the side of the big hill, avoiding the tour group herds, and wandered into the Ancient Agora, over a bridge, and into one of Athens' bustling cobblestone streets, where we sat for iced coffee (Nescafe and milk, shaken to a froth in the Athenian style) and Greek salads at a table outside one of the city's innumerable restaurants. By then, our last full day in Athens, we had grown accustomed to this haphazard way of traveling, wandering down paths, finding food, and sitting amongst natives and tourists, trying our best to embody some third way - certainly not locals but hopefully not too obviously tourists.
In the end though, it didn't matter. We were off in the morning, headed somewhere new.
- C. Max Magee @ 7:05 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post
September 16, 2008
Last Chance to Appear in the Last Book
The book, which will be displayed in the library's entry hall, is projected to serve as both a paean to the golden age of reading, and a reminder of what it is we stand to lose every time we choose the TV over a book. The book itself (if the installation ends up being one...) will incorporate visual and written elements from contributors famous, infamous and unknown and serve as "a stimulus for a possible reactivation of culture in case of disappearance by negligence, catastrophe or conflagration." Presumably, the book will also come in useful in the event of subjugation by damn, dirty apes.
Although I am far from convinced that books (or human civilization) are in danger of extinction, I intend to contribute something just in case. If we're taking a mulligan on human civilization, after all, I can think of a few things I'd like changed. Contributions to the book are being accepted through October 15.
- Ben Dooley @ 6:58 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
September 14, 2008
David Foster Wallace 1962-2008
It seems fitting to begin a reflection on the late David Foster Wallace in a fit of anxiety about reception - about the propensity of words, sentences, personae, to falsify or to be misunderstood.
For example: I know this seems fraudulent and fanciful and like the scratching of some deep narcissistic itch, to write publicly about a famous person's death. And also: I want you to know I know, and to make sure you know I want you to know I know, so that you don't mistake me for someone less intelligent, original, precise, and self-critical than I am. Because I am terrified of the ethical misstep, of solipsism, and above all of getting things wrong.
So, I think, was my subject, for whom the vicious regress sketched above could go on infinitely, each new confession forcing a confession about the rhetoric behind that confession. Indeed, in his later work, as in the short story "Octet," David Foster Wallace found a way to make the regress feel infinite. Some readers saw in this a kind of heroism - a commitment to representing philosophical truth, no matter how ungainly. Others saw it as evidence that Wallace had hit some kind of aesthetic cul-de-sac. Some even saw it as both: a heroic cul-de-sac. But it seems to me that Wallace's manic sincerity was merely the obverse of our age's reflexive irony. Each was an expression of deep suspicion of abstractions like "trust" and "faith."
Which makes Wallace's achievement even more impressive. Ultimately, his characters and narrators managed to push beyond paradox and to risk saying something about what used to be called the human condition. In honor of those risks - and with the preliminary apologiae more or less in place - let me try here to risk saying something about David Foster Wallace.
II.
David Foster Wallace was a large, shaggy, uncomfortable, funny person who once held me and 75 other people hostage for over an hour in a basement room in St. Louis. He was reading from his new book, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I was 19, and when the reading was over I squeaked out something like, "Infinite Jest really meant a lot to me," and he said something like, "Do you want me to sign your copy?" and I said something like "I checked it out of the library" and then I ran away.
That is, Wallace was a person I did not, in any respectable sense of the word, know, though I am currently feeling a dreadful temptation to pretend otherwise, to insist on a connection between reader and writer, to assert some rights over the body, and over the life, and over the work. Then again, in another sense, I knew him - I did. I heard the critic John Leonard say one time that the great writers, the ones who matter, are "friends of the mind," and David Foster Wallace was mine. Simply put: his work has mattered more to me, and for longer, than any other writer's, and when he killed himself last week at age 46, I felt like I had lost a friend. His voice is still in my head.
I came to that voice in high school, when I first read Infinite Jest. This was immediately and not incidentally prior to my discovery of literature per se. I read the thousand-page book more or less continuously for three weeks (as would be my habit every few years) and I felt like someone was speaking to me directly, in my language, about people I knew, or had been. "Like most North Americans of his generation," Wallace wrote, in a passage that hooked me early on, Hal Incandenza
tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.The secret power of this voice, as Wallace would discover in his essay "Authority and American Usage," lay in its immense ethical appeal. Although his descriptions of Hal's life at a tennis academy, and of pharmaceutical habits or Eschaton, did not stint on arcana, Wallace was perfectly willing to admit that certain things were "hard to say." Moreover, there was the seeming correspondence between the authorial persona and the real person I glimpsed through the interstices of the fiction, and, later, nonfiction.
That person was like an extreme caricature of many generational traits: polymathic, ironic, brilliant, damaged, and under intense pressure to perform. The difference was that DFW (as I came to think of him) had performed. Unlike so many of the other great minds of our time, he had made good on his promise, less by virtue of talent than through moral courage and hard work. I still think the elucidation of Gerhard Schtitt's tennis philosophy in Infinite Jest is some of the best writing about writing I've ever read: "How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away." Wallace somehow managed to pay attention to everything.
III.
Of course, nothing is so unforgivable in postmodern America as an assertion of one's own value, and in various large and small ways, Wallace's critical reception would be dampened by schadenfreude. The surest way to marginalize the literary high-water-mark of the 1990s would be to exaggerate its (considerable) length and difficulty. "Sure Infinite Jest is great," the logic went, "but does anybody actually read it?"
Similarly, I think, it would be both inaccurate and reductive to blame the burden of following up a masterpiece for driving Wallace to his death. In the 10 years that followed Infinite Jest - which might have been a perfectly reasonable gestation period for another long novel - Wallace published five books, for a more than respectable average of one every two years. The short stories "Church Not Made With Hands" and "Good Old Neon," and the essays on the porn industry and John McCain in Consider the Lobster would be among his best work.
Furthermore, was impossible to read about the Depressed Person in "The Depressed Person" and not to understand that the author had known depression on the most wrenching and intimate and long-term terms. The suicide that now hangs shadelike over the Wallace corpus in fact predated it, at least as a potentiality; think of The Sad Stork and Kate Gompert and "Suicide as a Sort of Present" and the narrator of "Good Old Neon."
Or don't, because revisiting Wallace's work is liable to offer more questions than answers. E.g.: How can someone with so much going for him have felt so bad? How could such an ambitious communicator have settled for this final muteness? And what, in the end, can we say about it?
IV.
We can say, first of all, that David Foster Wallace's death is a historic loss for readers. To me, the self-annihilating qualities of "Octet" and "Mister Squishy" and "Oblivion" didn't read as fictional dead-ends, but as attempts to solve, once and for all, the preoccupations of Wallace's youth, prior to some astonishing new novel.
And we can remember that that book would have reflected a side of David Foster Wallace his critics didn't often acknowledge: the metaphysician. In retrospect, Wallace's belief in something larger than logic is everywhere: in Schtitt's philosophies, in the prayerful ending of "The View From Mrs. Thompson's," and in "Good Old Neon," where a suicide suggests that "all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life [turn] out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward." Indeed, it offers some solace to recall that Wallace imagined death, in Infinite Jest, as a restoration, a
catapult[ing] home over fans and the Convexity's glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues.This lovely image of connection posits death as the antithesis of depression, whose cause and effect, as Wallace diagnosed them, was the ontological problem of aloneness. Wallace revisited the proposition again and again, most recently in a soon-to-be-minutely-parsed commencement address at Kenyon College:
I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of what your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.But on this point, Wallace, who got so much right and saw so much so clearly, fell prey to a junior-grade fallacy, which now deepens into irony. As he himself put it in Infinite Jest: "sometimes words that seem to express really invoke."
Even as Wallace's darkest images expressed the anguish of existential solitude, the act of writing fiction, of writing it so well, was itself an invocation of community. His finest creation, Don Gately (the Leopold Bloom of Infinite Jest) bodies forth the possibility of true empathy, and we learn, through a series of hints, that he will try to lead Hal Incandenza out of the prison of the self.
Gately's secret? He has come to understand that there is no proof, that some things one simply takes on faith. And as Gately observes, it works. David Foster Wallace's death looks, from where I'm sitting, like a failure of communication. But his life, and his work, are an affirmation of it. Death is not the end.
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 4:36 PM ~ comments: 8 ~ Links to this post
David Foster Wallace, A Great American Novelist, Dead at 46
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 10:18 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post
September 10, 2008
Reading Andre Dubus in Iowa
My first January in Iowa City, I rented a house from an elderly artist couple who were spending the winter in Spain. I'd been looking for a cheap place to live, and they needed someone to keep their house heated so its hundred-year-old pipes didn't freeze up and burst. A few days after meeting with them, I moved into an antique, three-story Folk Victorian with a painting of a human-sized demonic cat in the entry hall. The house was a writer's paradise - its wide windowsills were crowded with giant spider plants and birdcages. The rooms were divided with sliding wooden doors which disappeared inside the walls. Canvases of psychedelic dreamscapes lay piled in the corners. Upstairs, I found a studio that still smelled of turpentine, with a drafting table perfect for setting up a laptop. In the kitchen, cords of red Christmas lamps shaped like jalapeño peppers hung from the ceiling. The first few weeks, I awoke every morning to the light from the giant bay window, still not believing my luck. I invited friends and cooked dishes with herbs the artists had planted in their window-boxes.
Then the first hail storm hit and the sewage pipe in the storage room froze and burst, flooding the whole basement. Because the house's ancient heating system was also in the basement, it became impossible to warm the rooms without drawing up the smell of rot through the iron vents. In the end, I found myself relegated to a single room of my giant mansion -- the kitchen, which I could heat by turning on the stove and opening the oven door. And so, I spent most of the winter at a round breakfast table with my back to an oven, reading. On the artists' shelves, I had found the Selected Stories of Andre Dubus, whom I'd never read before. The first story I turned to was titled, "The Fat Girl."
"Her name was Louise," it began. "Once when she was sixteen a boy kissed her at a barbecue; he was drunk and he jammed his tongue into her mouth and ran his hands up and down her hips. Her father kissed her often. He was thin and kind and she could see in his eyes when he looked at her the lights of love and pity."
The pleasure of discovering a new writer can quicken your senses. My feet were cold and my back was hot and I had never read anything like this. The prose was practically weightless but as direct as a lance. Here was Louise - a girl who couldn't escape seeing herself as men saw her: the object of a boy's careless, drunken lust and of her father's love and pity. Between these two extremes, one already sensed the gaping chasm, the romantic love for which Louise secretly yearns and which she believes she'll never have.
I read on. Louise's high school years are spent going on and off diets. "When she was out of the house," Dubus writes, "she truly believed she was dieting; she forgot about the candy, as a man speaking into his office dictaphone may forget the lewd photographs hidden in an old she in his closet." She chooses a girls' school in Massachusetts for college and when her parents discuss it, "everyone so carefully avoided the word boys that sometimes the conversations seemed to be about nothing but boys." When her roommate, Carrie, discovers Louise's midnight snacking, she tells her in the dark that should eat chocolates in front of her, whenever she feels like it, and Louise, initially mortified that her "insular and destructive" vice has been exposed, finally agrees. The moment of intimacy between the two friends in the darkness of their dorm room is as poignant as any you'll read in literature. When Carrie finds a boyfriend and Louise grows depressed, her friend decides to help. "I want you to be loved the way I love you, Louise," she tells her, and begins cooking all of Louise's meals on a small stove in their room, serving her black coffee and scrambled eggs every morning, and documenting her weight loss in a journal. Surrendering to her friend's help, Louise begins to see the world in a new way. "The campus was pretty, on its lawns grew at least one of every tree native to New England, and in the warm morning sun Louise felt a new hope." So complete is Dubus' empathy for Louise that a reader senses that he loves her the way God might love mortals - for all the vices that cause them shame, and all the flaws they try to eradicate in themselves. But there is another side to her journey. From then on, Dubus tells us, "Louise entered a period of her life she would remember always, the way some people remember having endured poverty."
There's a moment when as a reader you pause and discover that the author has brought you much farther into his vision than you imagined. Louise's ritualistic relationship to food, her battles with her urges, her vowing to set herself along a more abstemious path are like the struggles of a person grappling with her faith, trying to be good in the face of being human. Dubus never resorts to the pseudo-medical language of "dysfunction" and "disorder," never turns to the too familiar vocabulary of "recovery." Instead, the territory he charts is a distinctly religious one. For Dubus, a lifelong Catholic, fiction was first and foremost a moral form. In an interview, he'd once said he didn't know how somebody without a religious or philosophical background could exist in the world without despair. His isn't the sort of writing you can compliment by calling it "impressive" in that it doesn't try to impress on the readers its author's own intelligence. It offers something better than that: a spiritual inquiry into being human that's free of sanctimony.
In one of Dubus's most famous stories, "Killings," Frank, the son of a small-town doctor and a music teacher comes home from college to spend the summer working on the boats of their fishing-village and falls in love with an older woman whose ex-husband eventually shoots him. When the local authorities declare the murder an accident, Frank's father, Matt, decides to kill his son's killer to spare his wife the pain of seeing the man walk free. He knows that what he does is both wrong and necessary. He carries out his plans quietly, while his wife Ruth sleeps. When he returns to their bedroom the next morning, Ruth is up, waiting for him. She asks simply, "Did you do it?"
If there was ever a story that's evidence to what the short story form can accomplish, "Killings" ought to be one. What novels can't always make immediate, the compression intrinsic to the short story does. The intensity of reading a great story is a little bit, I think, like sitting with your back to an open stove in a cold kitchen, feeling its heat grow hotter against you as you sit still. It's something almost physical, an act of intimacy between you and the writer's words. Dubus reminds me of why I can't bear to be in a room where thirty other people are reclining on folding chairs, listening to a writer read out loud from his work. When reading becomes a communal activity, it's too tempting to treat prose as spectacle, to set people up for punchlines or to feel a need to deliver the kind of redemptive moment we've become so used to from watching TV and the movies.
The impact of great fiction is delivered slowly and cumulatively. Of all the arts, fiction concerns itself the most not with what is visible, but what is invisible. It raises the question of who we are underneath the complex mess of our observable qualities: age, IQ, sex and social position.
After Louise becomes skinny, she marries a young associate from her father's firm, a man who takes her on foreign vacations and holds her hand on the plane, where she thinks herself "cunning," as if the life she is living isn't really hers. When she tries to recount for him her youth as a fat girl, he gets bored as though she were telling him about a childhood illness. Louise believes that if she can only "command the language" to tell the story of her inner life, her husband "would know and love all of her and she would feel complete." When she begins to gain weight after the birth of their child, her husband treats her with uncomprehending contempt. In turn, she tests the limits of his frustration by getting bigger. Beneath their arguments, Dubus writes, "lay the question of who Richard was." Her husband, Louise knows, can see her only as the slender girl he courted at the wheel of his boat. He cannot love her the way her friend did, and his efforts to help Louise do not approach the "compassion and determination and love," that she remembers on Carrie's face. And so, shedding her disguise as a skinny girl, Louise drives the wedge in further.
It is often amusing for me to hear interviewers asking an author about his background or personal life. Readers naturally want to draw connections between the art and the artist and the fascination personal detail is understandable. But reading Andre Dubus, a middle-aged war veteran who was able, with such clarity and compassion, to convey the girlish longing and the steely single-mindedness of an overweight teenager, also reminds you that an author's personal history is possibly the least interesting thing about him. Artists create from a far deeper place than their personal selves, something Dubus probably understood better than anybody.
- Edan Lepucki @ 1:10 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post
September 08, 2008
Curiosities: Inside and Outside the Beltway
- From one muckracker to another: Thomas Frank on Mailer and Miami.
- Fear and Loathing at Build-a-Bear Workshop
- The folks at n+1 on Obama and the culture war redux
- Sarah, the book, nibbles at the edges of Amazon's Top 10, sparking its own kind of culture war in the reviews section (scroll down)
- Can Palin! The Musical be far behind?A new tool for mapping bookstores, chain and indie
- For Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya, politics are a genetic burden
- Frank O'Hara...yeah, New York will do that to you
- Jonathan Yardley on the venerable Elements of Style
- Don't blame me...I voted for Kodos
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 10:13 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post
September 04, 2008
Adam Kirsch, A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to You
Under the editorship of the poet and critic Adam Kirsch (who has two books out this year), The Sun has become, for my money, the best newspaper book section in the country. Kirsch resembles James Wood in his donnish regard for literary tradition, but, more importantly, he shares with Wood an appreciation for the notion of writerly sensibility - and has been willing to assign books to writers whose well-honed sensibilities diverge from his own. Recent pleasures include Kirsch on canonical German Adalbert Stifter, Benjamin Lytal on contemporary master Marilynne Robinson, Otto Pinzler on the varieties of crime fiction, and Caleb Crain on the evolving English language. This breadth of interest and commitment to excellence (in reviewer and subject) are the key ingredients in the kind of book reviews worth reading. It would be sad, after such a promising start, to see The Sun go.
[Correction: An attentive reader informs us that, although Adam Kirsch is "the book critic for The New York Sun", and is, in some sense, the book section, he is not the section's editor. That title, and presumably the role of assigning reviews, belongs to David Wallace-Wells.]
- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 11:35 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post
September 02, 2008
Life Imitating Art (Or, At Least, Taking Notice of It?)
It would not be the first time in our history that art has given life - and particularly public opinion and national politics - a little push. There is the famous (and quite possibly apocryphal) story of Abraham Lincoln meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Or, Life Among the Lowly, in 1861, and greeting her with words, "So this is the little lady who started this Great War." Apocryphal stories aside, Stowe's novel from 1852, sometimes considered a direct response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 but more likely the result of Stowe's lifelong belief that slavery was a sin in the eyes of God, sold 300,000 copies in the US in its first year and went on to be the first international American bestseller, and the best-selling book of the century, after the Bible. While the novel's sentimentality and deeply Christian worldview can be alienating to some modern readers, its vivid narrative - by turns realist, gothic, and melodramtic - is undeniably haunting (though its perpetuation of black stereotypes has become proverbial). Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been credited with capturing the national imagination, raising national consciousness, and giving the issues of slavery and emancipation a national urgency that precipitated the Civil War.
Stowe's work - not that of the freed slave turned orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass - is more often assigned the role of cultural catalyst in the American move toward abolition. Douglass' work, both for its status as a first-hand account of life as a slave, and for the power and intelligence of Douglass' narrative voice, is far superior to Stowe's, but it is Stowe's - the more melodramatic, the more imaginative, the more comparable to television drama - that sold 10,000 copies in its first week, while Douglass' best-selling 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave had 11,000 copies in circulation only after three years in print. Also suggestive of a television-esque quality, Stowe's Uncle Tom was originally published serially in a magazine - in episodes.
If popularity in fiction is any indication of a country’s readiness for a historical change in fact, it would seem that America is ready for a black president but perhaps not quite ready for a female running mate who stands a decent chance of ascending to the presidency (given McCain's age and history of skin cancer). It’s all much more complicated than this, of course, but I find the idea that the imaginary can give shape to the real (in a non-Don Quixote-ish way) quite captivating.
- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 9:22 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post
