© F.X. Tobin
I’m published!!! My short piece, “The Anarcho-Libertine Manifesto, 2nd Iteration” (page 31) has been published by Paraphilia Magazine. In a nutshell, I call for the arts to be dangerous again and to not be afraid to use lush and opulent language.
Posted in The Internet
Tagged aesthetics, culture, economics, fiction, film, literature, manifestos, maximalism, non-fiction, Paraphilia, philosophy, poetry, politics, pop culture, religion, science fiction, sex, the internet
What inspired you to write Isaac: a modern fable?
The story of Isaac and Abraham is a compelling story that I must have dwelled upon a thousand times, and I doubt I’m alone in this. Of course there’s a multitude of interpretations. It’s a big topic. I didn’t tackle it until I developed sufficient naiveté to think I could do it justice. This took many years.
I once heard a rabbi say the story means God was teaching us not to sacrifice human beings. Clearly this is bullshit. There were a lot easier ways to teach this lesson, and if that was the message, it could have been much clearer, as are the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s wife. No wriggle room there.
Finally it occurred to me that if a superior power could send an angel and a ram up there to give the story a happy ending then that power could also have granted Isaac eternal youth. Then I knew I had a story. But I quickly realized Isaac would have to be mortal. Otherwise it’s a Superman story. Bullets, swords, falls from high places, etc. can kill my Isaac, and he knows it. But he won’t grow old or be afflicted by disease. Also, Isaac, though he stepped out of a bible story, has no more knowledge about where we came from, where we’re going, or what is our purpose here than anyone else. He’s just as baffled.
Did you base Lenny’s immortality on any existing Jewish folklore?
I’m a very poor source of existing Jewish folklore, but as far as I know, his immortality is based on nothing like that.
Have you had any experience in the “academic underclass” like Ruth?
I’ve had experience both as a privileged tenured brat and as a member of the stepped-upon “adjunct” lecturer proletariat. I gave up tenure to go off and work as an editorial writer in Seattle for a while. There are, of course, excellent, hard-working professors. Unfortunately, I ran into too many tenured creeps who were so immune from the consequences of their actions that they were basically spoiled children with facial hair. I once sat on a committee that had to adjudicate a grievance filed by a professor who was furious that his department chair tried to schedule him for more than two days a week. Honest. For this, he earned full-time salary.
I wanted to give Ruth, the novel’s co-protagonist, the opportunity to rise from lecturer hell, off the tenure track, to the top. Consequently, she gets a job at a think tank. Most of the professors I worked with would consider a think tank the very top because there are no students there.
Boxing is a motif in your work. What attracts you to the sport?
It’s a difficult sport that demands courage, grace, strength, agility, quickness, and conditioning. Other athletes tend to admire boxers. Fighters tend to be angry people who overcome their anger through the intense training and fights inside the ropes. That makes them strong, gentle people, for the most part — the epitome of gentlemen and gentlewomen. They’re likable. Also, I was bad at ball sports because I have no depth perception.
Can you tell us about any new upcoming projects?
I’m working on another novel. But I once tried to sell a joke to the Tonight Show, got a gentle rebuff, and later saw Carson do the joke. Consequently, I am a paranoid lunatic and don’t discuss my ideas until the work is sold.
Who are your favorite authors?
Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Heller come to mind. I also loved Updike’s “Rabbit” series and some of Philip Roth, mostly stuff he did later. He got better with age. I find that encouraging.
How does a writer survive in this economy?
The economics of it won’t work for most of us. You can’t even sell your soul to TV that easily now that they’ve replaced sitcoms and soaps with scripted ‘reality’ and gruesome ‘contest’ entertainment that pays writers miserably. Life is an unfair lottery. I try not to let it bother me. I wouldn’t trade my life with an investment banker whose mission is to own a more ridiculously expensive watch than the other investment bankers. I was in basic training with guys who were sent to Vietnam while I got orders for California. Some of those who shipped out never got a chance to come home and be shit upon. I was privileged to be shit upon with the rest of us.
Posted in books, Interviews, TV
Tagged academia, bankers, books, boxing, capitalism, culture, economics, fiction, folklore, god, Isaac, philosophy, pop culture, religion, tenure, The Tonight Show, think tank, TV, Vietnam
The Art of Reviewing explores reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society and profiles specific reviewers of merit.
“Criticism does not always demonstrate its customary incisiveness: it often ignores the most worthless ephemera.” – Karl Kraus
“I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a skeptic to the last.” – Oscar Wilde
Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) was a theorist, literary critic, and semiotician, but most importantly, he expanded the field of reviewing. In addition, he reinvented the ways in which things could be reviewed. He looked at old works in new ways. This installment of the Art of Reviewing will explore how Barthes reinvented and reinvigorated the concept of reviewing. (This article is not meant to function as purely biographical or theoretical, but more as a means to show nascent reviewers the potential of Barthes’s ideas and continually evolving philosophy.)
One of the great things about Barthes was his ability to deconstruct his own philosophical perspective. He began his career from the vantage point of orthodox Marxism, amplified with some semiotic theory taken from linguistics. In the end, his philosophy became more personal, intimate, and autobiographical. One of his last works was Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. He was too inventive and too passionate to remain affixed to any particular philosophical or ideological box. As reviewers get older, their ideas change. The slow evolution from the ideological Marxist to contemplative individual makes for a useful case study in the importance of changing one’s mind.
Barthes represents an important bridge between the complicated Marxist mysticism of pop culture critic Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault’s large-scale deconstructionist archaeologies of institutions. Barthes’s writings are a Rosetta Stone of pop culture studies and how cultures manufacture ideology with its ephemera.
Mythologies (1957)
Written in 1957, Mythologies has tautly written dissections of French pop cultural artifacts and is an indispensible educational tool for aspiring pop culture observers. The first half has a collection of newspaper articles, most no longer than two pages, examining a specific item. The selection is incredibly diverse and disregards arbitrary barriers like High and Low Culture. It examines everything from TV wrestling matches (of the WCW variety), cuisine, science fiction, and museum exhibits. A veritable Whitman’s Sampler of cultural detritus, a monument to the mundane and commonplace. The second half of the book is an expanded explanation of semiotics (connotation, denotation, signifier, signified, etc.), along with its linguistic roots, and the accusation that the bourgeoisie is a “joint-stock company.”
Barthes takes the position of an orthodox Marxist to dissect and examine the cultural products of the postwar French bourgeoisie. His status as an ideological outsider gives him a much-needed critical perspective. The semiotic background gives him the intellectual apparatus to read the artifact. More specifically, to read against the grain of the status quo. In academic parlance, the “queer the text,” since Barthes was gay, like Foucault (and those contemporary Fifties bulwarks of American conservatism, Whittaker Chambers and Roy Cohn).
The book is a must read for cultural critics and curators of museums and historical societies. Less for the Marxist readings per se, but for the book’s illustration of how to read material culture. Material culture is a means of passing along our culture’s mores, codes, and traditions. While these things are important, anyone tasked with writing exhibit labels should understand how these things are socially constructs manufactured by humans. As such, each embodies a specific ideology and point of view. Whether that is good or bad depends on the individual’s interpretation. But one needs to understand that this manufactured ideology is present within the object. In the book, Barthes gives the example of the black child soldier in a French military uniform saluting on the cover of the weekly magazine Paris Match. On the surface, it is a poster that glorifies the patrie and the republican “us.” Dig a little deeper and one realizes that the poster operates as a legitimizing force for colonialism and imperialism. Mythologies was published shortly after France’s disastrous Indochina War (1946 – 1954) and amidst the brutalities of the Algerian Revolution (1954 – 1962). This explains the vituperative passion Barthes had as a Marxist and utilizing the tools of linguistics as an intellectual means of exposing the oppressive agendas buried beneath seemingly innocent pop cultural artifacts.
On a more mundane level, the miniature shopping carts kids push around the grocery conditions them to become consumers. Whether this is a horrifying example of mental abuse against a developing child or business as usual depends on the individual’s specific interpretation. But to say that this social conditioning is not taking place seems like a particularly weak example of willful ignorance. The recent rebooting of the GI Joe franchise and America’s Middle Eastern foreign policy seem like something far more ominous than tiny shopping carts. “Go Joe!”
Sade Fourier Loyola (1976)
Sade Fourier Loyola explores the works of three major innovators of language: the French philosopher, pornographer and atheist Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814); the French utopian socialist François Marie Charles Fourier (7 April 1772 – 10 October 1837); and Basque Spanish theologian and founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) Ignacio López de Loyola (Saint Ignatius of Loyola) (1491 – July 31, 1556). Barthes goes on to illustrate how each writer in this superficially blasphemous trio transformed language. How the three writers reflect off each other displays Barthes’s unique take on the subject, transcending the standard academic category of “comparative literature.”
Everybody has heard of DAF Sade, yet very few have read his works. In the opening sections of Sade Fourier Loyola, Barthes reflects on the contradictory accusations leveled against Sade: His works are boring and his works are shocking. How can one be both? Mythologies dissected pop cultural artifacts while Sade Fourier Loyola examined well-known works in a different way. The comparative literary criticism Barthes achieves is reminiscent of the ad slogan, “Think different.”
He examines Sade’s work, seeing it in mathematical terms, with each carnal atrocity building upon each other until they reach a séance, a kind of Enlightenment clockwork made of frenzied bodies. Sade’s writing exemplifies what Barthes terms “a contamination of discourses,” with extended speeches championing reason and rationality suddenly broken by curse-laced shouts and blasphemies involving orgies, murder, and torture. One of many things bedeviling critics is the inability to place Sade within a neat framework of periodicity. Sade is simultaneously a Gothic writer, embracing the darker strains of Romanticism, an Enlightenment philosopher, and a literary satirist. Furthermore, his work continually champions crime over law and power over morality. Those who are more powerful are thus because of Nature.
The theme of subservience is picked up in his analysis of Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises bears resemblances to Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Each work appears like a glorified outline. While both writers come from completely different backgrounds, Barthes brings our attention to the meticulousness and concentration involved in writing these books. Loyola even has a section where the success or failure of the spiritual retreat’s practitioner can be measured on a graph. Loyola and Sade also have their practitioners in severe isolation and endure physical hardships.
Fourier, the utopian socialist, uses language that combines aspects of both Sade and Loyola. His utopia is spiritual in nature, but man’s perfection is attained by the release of bodily passions that have been repressed by civilization. Barthes also explores the playfulness of Fourier’s brand of utopia, especially regarding his notorious phrase about turning the sea into lemonade. The treatment of Fourier as a literary figure to be celebrated shows how Barthes has evolved from an orthodox Marxist to a non-ideological literary critic. Marxists shy away from Fourier because of his wild eccentricities and the non-scientific basis for his utopian vision. Barthes embraces him as he does Sade and Loyola.
The Pleasure of the Text (1975)
Barthes approaches reviewing and criticism as joyful acts, hence the title of the small book, the Pleasure of the Text. Inspired by Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, a novel about a Cuban drag queen who transforms into a Tibetal bardo during an orgy with leatherclad biker studs, Barthes wrote down mini-essays in alphabetic order. The essays focused on how a text can bring pleasure to the reader. He elucidates the much-misunderstood concept of the Death of the Author. The concept, maligned by the likes of Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia, does not involve turning a literary work into an amalgamation of social forces, thus negating the author. The explanation is much more prosaic.
The Death of the Author is thus: After the Author has finished his or her work; he has no control over it. The Author’s interpretative power is negated. This is because the Reader is not consuming the Author’s Interpretation, but simply a Text. (Barthes’s book can be seen as a precursor to the current discipline of Reader Reception Theory.)
The book also focuses on the concept of pleasure as it relates to the practice of reading. He asserts that literature does not require a moral component to be pleasurable to the reader. As an American subject to High School English classes, there was the tendency to examine works with a Major Moral Lesson, whether it was Grapes of Wrath or Heart of Darkness. Literary consumption became analogous to an annual teeth cleaning: painful, tedious, and instructive. But knowing the Moral Lesson made one feel good, or at least pass the quiz. What became a rarity was how to enjoy the texts as objects of pleasure. (Unfortunately, Americans have a schizophrenic relationship with pleasure and morality.)
When reading a text, this usually is administered to the skull.
Readers should be able to enjoy the language of the narrative without having to endure horse pills of morality. An appreciation can be made on how the author formulates the language in the same way art can be appreciated once one becomes aware of specific brushstrokes and manipulation of pigments. Appreciating books just on their moral level is stunningly pedestrian.
Roland Barthes was revolutionary both in what he reviewed and how he reviewed. He began as an orthodox Marxist but evolved a personal philosophy that embraced many things. Ecumenical and joyful, his approach to the review showed a writer both erudite and expansive.
FURTHER READING
Susan Sontag raised awareness of Barthes’s value to a well-rounded intellect. The closing line of her seminal essay, “Against Interpretation” (1964) reads, “In place of a hermeneutrics we need an erotics of art.” Barthes provides this much-needed erotics of art.
Sontag wrote two major essays on Barthes:
WORKS BY ROLAND BARTHES
At present, many of Barthes’s lesser-known works remain hard to come by. Except for Mythologies, his critical work remains unknown to lay audiences. This is unfortunate, especially since the Internet has provided the perfect medium for discussions about pop culture. The publisher Hill & Wang have volumes of Barthes more notable volumes in print. So long as one isn’t averse to scouring used bookstores and Internet shopping sources, one can also find his lesser known works in English translation. Despite his untimely death, Barthes remained prolific.
His instrumental work in the interpretation of pop cultural artifacts and Susan Sontag’s relentless championing should be reason enough to bring his works back into print.
Posted in book reviews, books, The Art of Reviewing
Tagged artifact, barthes, book reviews, books, bourgeoisie, capitalism, child soldier, cobra, communism, conservatism, consumerism, cuba, culture, curator, drag queen, economics, fiction, gay, GI Joe, historical society, imperialism, interpretation, LGBT, linguistics, Marxism, museum, non-fiction, paris match, philosophy, politics, pop culture, sarduy, science fiction, semiotics, series, shopping, sontag
A new series dedicated to literature in translation whether classic or contemporary.
Originally published as De verwondering
Translated from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim
Archipelago Books (2009)
Wonder is a strange book. By turns sarcastic, hallucinatory, satirical, and dreamlike, it relates the misadventures of one Victor-Denijs de Rijckel, a teacher of English and German at a secondary school. He is a teacher so anonymous he lacks any nickname usually given by students. The novel follows Victor in his picaresque journey, an obsessive quest to find a woman. Along the way, he acquires a Sancho Panza in the form of a bratty student named Verzele. His journey ends when he and the student find themselves in a small town named Almout. It hosts a meeting of former Nazi collaborators. At the meeting, we learn about their devotion to Crabbe, a messiah figure they believe will return to Belgium.
The novel switches between third person accounts and a first person narrative (Victor’s) during his incarceration in an insane asylum. The Castilian proverb used by Claus reveals the Wonder’s strange and cruel nature. (Unfortunately, the proverb remains untranslated in the Archipelago Books edition. The publisher did manage to get Goya’s illustration of the proverb, Los Caprichos no. 42, with donkeys riding their masters.) The translated proverb reads, “You who cannot, carry me on your back.” Further commentary by R. Stanley Johnson states the men’s eyes are closed representing ignorance along with a cruel donkey that controls a man with spurs. Goya used this topsy-turvy image as “one of the strongest condemnations of contemporary Spanish society.” The novel condemns contemporary Dutch society, the corrupting nature of Nazi collaboration, and the banal puritanical mysticism of fascism.
Submission and subservience play out among the various characters and the geopolitical background. The reader absorbs the still-fresh wounds inflicted (and self-inflicted by the Second World War.) An accretion occurs from the various strata of submission, tragic and cancerous, until it overwhelms every character. Victor submits to the charms of a mystery woman he follows with obsessive passion. He also follows Verzele, the roles of imperious schoolteacher and obedient pupil reversed. The individual’s capitulation to the totalitarian State meets with ironic reversal in Belgium. While resisting the lure of domestic fascist groups, Belgium came under occupation from German forces on their way to conquer France. But Belgium was hardly a naïve innocent. Even though fascism did not thrive there, the nation let a conservative Catholic authoritarianism thrive and flourish. Belgium’s Catholicism provided the rich potting soil for the les fleurs du mal to bloom, aided by one Leon Degrelle.
While this may strike one as cheap anti-Catholic bigotry, one has only to look at Spain, Italy (fascism’s birthplace), Austria (Hitler’s birthplace), and the Vatican. The Holy See may have saved a few thousand Jews during World War 2, but could have been more effective if they had bothered to excommunicate Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and other dictators who used Catholicism to further their tyrannical aims and countless atrocities. (The Vatican would finally abolish the accusation of deicide in 1965, three years after the publication of Wonder, albeit a few decades late of the death camps.)
Leon Degrelle founded the conservative authoritarian Catholic Christus Rex movement and later fought on the Eastern Front as a member of the Waffen-SS. Claus presents Crabbe as a thinly veiled version of Degrelle. After the War, Degrelle fled to Spain. Later on, he became active in various neo-Nazi movements. The group devoted to Crabbe only looks more pathetic with the light of historical developments shining a light on the mendacious piety of these walleyed fanatics.
Claus weaves together a rich tapestry, presenting an array of memorable characters: the hackneyed anti-Semitic Buick salesman Teddy Maertens, the vicious schoolboy Verzele, the eccentric fascist sculptor Sprange, and many others. They are planets revolving around Victor, a human void impersonating a scholar whose specialty is the life of Crabbe.
Unlike a realist or neo-realist piece, the novel reads like a New Wave film, a bastard-hybrid of L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) and Week End (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967). This is a quest narrative as black comedy, populated with cowards, traitors, and fanatics. Peopled by characters willing, by various degrees, to exchange their individuality for collective security and willfully ignorant of the crimes occurring right under their noses.
Wonder offers up brutally damning portraits and wildly farcical set pieces as evidence of his nation’s culpability in World War 2. Claus’s indictment arises less from a lawyer’s accumulation of evidence but through a visionary dream-logic. He presents the reader with both the allure and the horror of fascist collaboration.
Posted in book reviews, books
Tagged Belgium, book reviews, books, catholic, catholicism, Christus Rex, culture, Degrelle, economics, fascism, fiction, politics, pop culture, religion, world war 2
From the Onion.
A limited-run series where I review three books about the Supreme Court of the United States, exploring its historical and ideological conflicts, and the transformations it wrought upon law and society.
The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong (1979)
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin (2007)
Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices, by Noah Feldman (2010)
I. INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF THE SUPREME COURT
The Supreme Court of the United States is one of several institutions in our country that radiates majesty, secrecy, and opacity. Like the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, it is shrouded in secrecy, periodically issuing decisions with great import to the daily lives of American citizens. It also possess similarities to the Federal Reserve with a group of unelected individuals commanding great power. Furthermore, Supreme Court Justices, like Federal Reserve Governors, have a tendency to speak in opaque terminology. Discovering the importance of a Supreme Court decision sometimes involves digging through mountains of legalese and knowledge of the case’s labyrinthine history up the ladder of the US Justice system.
Supreme Court Justices possess a federal position unlike any other. While Federal Reserve Chairmen must be re-appointed, once one is on the Supreme Court, one is given a lifetime appointment. It makes it a hotly contested position, coupled with the small number of seats on the Supreme Court (only nine, despite the best efforts of FDR). Appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, the average voter has little direct influence in the process. In the past, the voter had even less, since US Senators were not elected via direct election. (The 17th Amendment, passed in 1913, worked to change the deliberative, glacial, and otherwise necrotic institution.)
These three books under review, The Brethren, by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, The Nine, by Jeffrey Toobin, and Scorpions, by Noah Feldman, work to remove the secretive veil that covers the Supreme Court. Each book attempts to reveal to readers a “secret history.” (Similar secret histories have included James Bamford’s series of investigative works on the National Security Agency and William Greider’s exploration of the inner workings of the Federal Reserve. One can also add the vast, albeit dubious, literature associated with secret societies, and the equally vast literature associated with detailing the histories of the world’s numerous intelligence agencies.)
The books refract off each other in fascinating ways. One can read punctuated biographies of specific justices. In The Brethren, President Nixon appoints William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court from his previous position in the Justice Department. The Nine follows his ascent to Chief Justice following his appointment by President Reagan. Scorpions explores how Rehnquist, working as a clerk for Justice Robert Jackson, wrote a memorandum affirming Plessy v Ferguson’s segregationist policies. The memorandum would come back to haunt Rehnquist during both confirmation hearings. Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas were both appointed by FDR (as recounted in Scorpions) shuffle off the mortal coin in The Brethren in its detailing of the Court during the Nixon and Ford years.
The Brethren by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong was the first expose of the inner workings of the Supreme Court. The book covers the Supreme Court terms from 1968 to 1975. Justice Potter Stewart’s dissatisfaction with Chief Justice Warren Burger’s shenanigans prompted the authors to interview justices, clerks, and other personnel working with the highest court. On the surface, one would assume the book is a tawdry exposé, but in actuality, Woodward and Armstrong wrote a limited-scope institutional investigation, exploring the personalities, protocol, and positioning that made the Supreme Court a uniquely American civic organization. One reads about the factions, horse-trading, and decision writing. The intellectual and ideological components that go into the construction of the finalized Supreme Court decision make for fascinating reading. Instead of wrangling the necessary votes in Congress, one has to contend with only nine votes, or, at minimum, five votes in order to create a judicial majority and possibly overturn legislation.
The Brethren’s major accomplishment involved making the reader see the Supreme Court as simply another American civic institution. The Court is an institution with its rivalries and it reaches decisions every bit as partisan and shady as those made in Congress or the Oval Office. Woodward and Armstrong helped de-mythologize an institution deadly serious about preserving its autonomy, prestige, and authority, even if that involves wrapping itself in quasi-religious pomp and circumstance.
If one deigns to call him or herself an “informed voter,” it helps to know what our alleged representatives are doing, especially at the highest echelons of power, and how the power structure operates. Responsible citizenship involves more than parroting back empty slogans befitting a bumper sticker and preening about with an “I Voted” sticker like you just won the Congressional Medal of Honor. The fact that voters cannot elect Supreme Court justices should prompt more people to read books relating the zenith of the Judicial Branch.
Posted in book reviews, books, Mondays with the Supremes
Tagged Armstrong, book reviews, books, capitalism, catholicism, communism, culture, economics, FDR, Feldman, hippies, hollywood, Hugo Black, law, non-fiction, philosophy, politics, pop culture, Rehnquist, religion, SCOTUS, series, Supreme Court, Toobin, William O Douglas, Woodward
Posted in book reviews, books, CCLAP Fridays
Tagged architecture, book reviews, books, communism, culture, economics, maximalism, non-fiction, photography, politics, pop culture, science fiction, Soviet Union, Taschen, USSR
The first coins, the first hamburger, the first military motor vehicle. These are but a sampling of Robertson’s Book of Firsts. Researched and compiled by Patrick Robertson as a culmination of a lifelong passion, the book aims to chronicle not invention, but innovation. This means a look at social and technological development and some surprising entries. Robertson approaches this collection of firsts from a unique position. A former government employee and a former chairman of the Ephemera Society, he also owns the largest private collection of vintage magazines in Britain. Firsts are ephemeral, since once a first is achieved, social and technological change will prompt more firsts to occur. Just look at the developments of the cell phone and the demographic make-up of the United States Supreme Court.
The alphabetically arranged articles vary in length. For example, the article on blood transfusion covers nearly two full pages. To break it down, there is the first blood transfusion done on June 12, 1667 by Jean-Baptiste Denys, the personal physician to Louis XIV, for “a boy of fifteen suffering from a severe fever.” The first U.S. blood transfusion took place in 1795 by Dr. Philip Physick. The first panel of blood donors occurred in 1921, being four volunteers “from the Camberwell Division of the London Branch of the British Red Cross Society.” The Red Cross established the first blood donor panel in the United States in August 1937 in Augusta, Georgia. In 1931 the first blood bank was established by Prof. Sergei Yudin “at the Sklifosovsky Institute, Moscow’s central emergency service hospital,” but Bernard Fantus “coined the term” in 1937 for Cook County Hospital’s centralized blood storage depot. Finally, the first pre-natal blood transfusion was performed by Prof. George Green and Sir William Liley in Auckland, New Zealand on September 20, 1963.
The Book of Firsts is chock-full of such information. The first antique automobile movement happened on July 12, 1925, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Allgemeiner Schnaufer-Club (“Tin Lizzy Club”) in Munich, Germany. The year 1623 saw the first publication of a hymn book containing original matter by George Wither, although the first hymn book in a vernacular tongue was “published in Prague by Severin for the Hussites of Bohemia on 13 January 1501.” The first naval vessels to be equipped with radio-telephone apparatus were the USS Virginia and the USS Connecticut in 1907. The lists go on and on, from the first legal abortion to the first women’s track and field events.
Whether reading a single entry with all developments chronicled or searching for a specific “first,” The Book of Firsts will captivate and infuriate readers. Expect to have your pre-conceptions about certain “firsts” refuted. As with any book of this kind, it is subject to the winds of change. The entry on gay marriage has quickly become obsolete, the last sub-entry on U.S. gay marriage ending with the passage of Proposition 8. But that is hardly a demerit in terms of the sheer wealth of information and entertaining factoids one can harvest from this book, whether casually browsing the pages or capturing a “first” for research purposes. This is a good book to have on the bookshelf next to the dictionary, thesaurus, Schott’s Miscellany, and the Meaning of Tingo.
Posted in book reviews, books, cars, miscellaneous
Tagged book reviews, books, culture, economics, firsts, non-fiction, politics, pop culture
My introductory essay to my themed essay series, “On Being Human” has been posted at CCLaP.
Posted in books, CCLAP Fridays, film, nature, The Horus Heresy, The Internet, TV, Warhammer 40K
Tagged books, capitalism, culture, economics, fantasy, fiction, film, horus heresy, philosophy, politics, pop culture, religion, RPG, science fiction, series, the internet, TV, UK, UK fiction, warhammer 40K
What inspired you to write The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Super Girl?
I was working on a paper in graduate school when I started reading a pair of books called The Steel Drug and Cocaine Changes. As the titles suggest, they were about cocaine, and they included case studies of people who had used and abused cocaine. Some of them were very compelling, but due to the nature of the books, the stories were also very fragmentary. With The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl I wanted to flesh out some of the details in a fictionalized forum, to try to come up with a more fully imagined version of the scraps I had read and started to piece together.
Tell us about your blog, Small Press Reviews, and the appeal of reviewing the works of small presses.
I started Small Press Reviews in November of 2007 after sitting in on a discussion of small presses at a local writers’ conference. One of the speakers was an author named Curtis Smith. I bought his book The Species Crown and loved it. Between his talk and the book, I was sold on small presses. Part of the appeal is that I feel like small press readers and writers share a strong sense of community. I had lunch with a small press author named Christian TeBordo a few weeks ago, and though we’d never really met before—aside from running into each other once or twice when we both taught at Temple University—we found that we shared a common language, so to speak, as we dropped names of small presses we really admire like Featherproof and Atticus Books, as well as small press books we both enjoyed like The Universe in Miniature in Miniature by Patrick Somerville. Being part of the small press scene is a little bit like belonging to an exclusive club, but one that’s—ironically, I guess—open to anyone who’s interested in joining. All you need to do is read a few books and join the conversation.
What’s the premise of Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum? What is the “Consumer Conundrum” and how is it reflected in the works of DeLillo, an American novelist, and Baudrillard, a French social theorist?
The book basically looks at the problem of consumerism in the western world. Early in his career, Jean Baudrillard wrote a book called The System of Objects in which he argued that humans have surrounded themselves with commodities which no longer serve any real purpose other than to signal status. This observation in itself is nothing new, but Baudrillard’s argument was that by surrounding ourselves with objects, we’ve taken on the status of objects ourselves—that our sense of self-worth is bound up in the constellations of objects we arrange around ourselves as signs of value. This is a bit of an oversimplification of his argument, but the conundrum I talk about in the book is that of figuring out how to overcome the inertia of commodification, how to stop being objects and, instead, become subjects, become human again. Baudrillard offered a lot of commentary on this predicament over the course of his career and eventually decided that it really couldn’t be done. Don DeLillo, on the other hand offers a more hopeful view of our species’ potential to regain its humanity—through art, though language, through doubting the logic of accumulation that surrounds us. It’s been a long time since I wrote that book. I’m a little fuzzy on the details.
Is there a link between capitalism’s need for gain (profits, acquisition, expansion, accumulation) and an addict’s need for increased dosages just “to maintain”? (“Wonder Mom” seemed to touch on this indirectly, albeit from the perspective of a Drug Morality Tale. Audrey’s inevitable crash late in the novel and the global economic cataclysm aren’t too dissimilar. Or am I reading too much into it?)
No, you’re not reading too much into at all! In fact, a part of me always hoped that readers would draw a similar parallel. Look at the publishing industry, for example. John B. Thompson wrote a book a couple of years ago called Merchants of Culture, and in it he talks about the publishing industry’s need to make 10% more money in any given year than they did in the previous year. That’s why you always see a glut of crappy, gimmicky books just before the holiday season. The publishers are gambling that people who don’t generally read might buy these books as gifts, that they’ll be good for a laugh or will look good on a shelf in someone’s house somewhere. Yet another reason, I suppose, to favor small presses over big conglomerates. The same thing, as you note, happens to Audrey as she continues to fall deeper and deeper into her addiction. She’s hollowing out her soul as she strives for that extra 10% that will help her keep her head above water, at least until she needs her next hit. I always had consumerism in mind when I was working on that book.
Between your novels, your blog, and your teaching, what’s your work schedule like? Do you ever feel like one area is being neglected while you tend to another?
Hah! Yes! All the time! I teach five courses with an average enrollment of about twenty students each. On any given weekend, I’m grading between forty and sixty papers. I love teaching, but that much grading really takes a toll. Needless to say, I don’t get much time for writing during the school year, but I do try to squeeze it in here and there. On one hand, I wish I had more time to write, but I also wouldn’t want to give up teaching. Not just because of the steady paycheck and benefits, but because I really feel like I come alive in front of a classroom—sharing ideas with students, helping them learn to express their ideas and participate in the wider dialogue not just of academia but of culture at large. Even so, I frequently wish I had more time to write. And blogging? I liken it to punk rock. When I’m working on a novel or an essay or a short story, I’m obsessing over craft and getting the content and form of the piece just right, like Brian Wilson taking months to record “Good Vibrations.” But with blogging, it’s more like the Ramones recording their first album in a day. Get it done, and get it out there. Share it with the world, warts and all.
What projects are you working on these days?
My second novel comes out in May. It’s called The Grievers. I should be getting galley copies this week, so I’ll be proofreading and making notes for any minor changes I want to make before it goes to print. Otherwise, I’m mainly gathering scraps in a notebook and hoping they eventually coalesce into something somewhere down the line.
Who are your favorite authors (novelists and/or academics)?
I like anyone who bridges the gap between “ivory tower” academic discourse and a more down to earth yet intelligent public discourse. There’s a lot in the news lately about the hollowing out of the middle class. I think there’s also been a gutting of the ability to have an intelligent conversation in the United States. At one end, there are academics who speak and write in impenetrable and, frankly, boring prose, and at the other end there’s the bombast and vitriol of the shouting heads on TV and radio, not to mention the histrionics of anyone involved in reality TV. It’s tough for regular people like you and me to have a thoughtful, intelligent, public conversation about the arts or culture or even politics anymore, but it is possible. Authors like Jonathan Lethem and Steve Almond do it in their nonfiction, and a lot of bloggers are doing it, too. Anyone who raises the bar on public discourse is okay in my book.
But if you’re looking for names, I love pretty much everything by Kurt Vonnegut. I was also on a George Saunders kick for a while, hot on the heels of a Chuck Palahniuk kick, a Neil Gaiman kick, and my perennial Philip K. Dick kick. Over the summer, I read Chistopher Moore’s Fool and told all of my friends to read it. More recently, I’ve been reading a lot of short stories. Robin Black’s If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This is amazing, and I really enjoyed Steve Almond’s God Bless America. I also liked Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmerelda. If I’m not teaching or writing, I’m reading.
Posted in books, Interviews, Permanent Press
Tagged authors, books, capitalism, culture, drugs, economics, fiction, interviews, non-fiction, philosophy, politics, pop culture, publishing, small presses, war on drugs
The history of the Atlantic Monthly is also the history of America. Susan Goodman’s Republic of Words: the Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857 – 1925, traces the intellectual and editorial history of the magazine. Conceived by luminaries including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell, the Atlantic began with an adamant pro-Union perspective. Lowell, the first editor, brought together numerous contributors associated with the Abolition and Transcendentalist movements.
Goodman excels at bringing American history to life, charting the course of the magazine and the nation through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the First World War. Throughout the book a cavalcade of the famous passes before the reader. These include novelists, humorists, poets, environmentalists, journalists, and philosophers. With biographies of Edith Wharton (an Atlantic contributor) and William Dean Howells (an Atlantic editor), Goodman has a firm grasp on her subject matter. The history of America proceeds either in lock step or in counterpoint with the history of the Atlantic Monthly. The magazine undergoes periodic transformations with each successive editor. As an example, Howells slowly changed the perspective of the Atlantic from a more East Coast, Boston-area, Harvard-educated milieu to one that looked westward.
The book ends in the Roaring Twenties, the Atlantic battered but enduring in its commitment to act as a purveyor of culture. Two insurgent forces threatened its mission of mass appeal, the Crisis, the militant African-American magazine helmed by W.E.B. du Bois and the elitist New Yorker.
A final note, Republic of Words sports a playful cover by the artist Jonathan Wolstenholme. Wolstenholme’s book-centric illustrations, like Republic of Words, will delight anyone with a passion for literature and American history.
Posted in book reviews, books, nature
Tagged America, book reviews, books, culture, economics, fiction, journalism, non-fiction, pop culture, US history
