Drugs--and why I'm looking forward to caring for my daughter

Sometimes I think taking drugs, which I don't do, except for alcohol and advil, is--if you bracket out the tragedy of true addiction--a really important part of human experience. Other times I don't. Other times I think you should be like the eagle that knows only the sun.

Anyway--this is one reason I'm looking forward to my baby. She's kind of drugs and eagle at the same time. She'll be stinking of poo and she'll have really bad manners but simultaneously it'll just be a three of us, in a little relatively uncomplicated cocoon, within whose fibers Nadia and spend our time and attention attending to her needs. What better use to put our life skills to?

No running away from life. Making the quotidian miraculous. Kind of like sex, except with diapers and no orgasms.

In that post about Stardust

Where I was bitching about adolescent hero fantasies?

This is the sort of shit I was thinking about.

I was thinking of this whole chunk of hero narrative psychology I like to bitch about in terms of the shift for which Byron's transition from romantic to ironic is sort of emblematic

But then I'm like--Tristran the shop boy or Manfred the idealist?

They're not in the same league motherfuckers. They're just fucking not.

And another goddamn thing while I'm feeling misanthropic

Murdering people? Totally horrible! Why do you murderers do it? What the hell are you thinking? You're just adding to the garbage. It's like this murderers. Say you're going up the sidewalk and you step in some dog shit that someone didn't scoop. Well that's the shit you're pulling on everyone except vastly more severely. Stop it.

I shouldn't even make light of it and I'm not sure I am. I just . . . try to think about it simply.

Also--institutional crime. I think I blogged about below. Why? Why can't we a) be more self conscious about the possibility that the systems we set up can have injust consequences for people who don't deserve to be injustly treated?

In England they're giving people degrees in yacht crewing.

I guess this is okay--it's not like they're majoring in english, right--but it also kind of sucks. People's instinctive inclinations toward one craft or another are sound compass I think for life decisons, but somehow I wish these english cats were getting degrees in business.

I went to the french laundry once. It was fine until we started talking about our policies vis a vis giving money to the homeless.

Why did that happen to me? How did I get here?

(I love you, donkey--it's just that everything can't be perfect.)

Whatever. Like I said, I'm an eagle. None of this shit really bothers me.

I am a fucking Eagle

And I'm soaring over all this humanity bullshit and I just dipped my sinewy wings into the ocean, freeing them of lice.

The only thing I know is the sun and the rumbling in my eagle tummy.

Watchout fish.

I'll fight the osprey and fucking hunt in his territory. And I'm different from the osprey. I'm a fucking glutton.

If you're lucky you'll know to hide in the kelp. I hate that shit. It stinks too much of life, like when I ate that snail. I cracked that fucker open with my beak and all this fucking rubber shit oozed out.

I prefer mammal meat. I eat the tenderest parts and leave the rest for the turkey vultures.

Some birds don't dig the turkey vultures, but they're all right with me.

Fuck this shit. I'm going to fly into a cloud.

Stardust

What are stories? It's an old question but Stardust, which I saw last night, has me speculating. The reason is that it's utter hackwork yet the audience I saw it with was rapturous, especially the girl sitting next to me, who kept repeating lines of dialogue, mimicking emphatic gestures, and saying to her companion, "I love this movie."

That's great stuff. That's what stories, as far as solaas goes, are supposed to do.

(Presuming we're not cultural theorists or scientists, in which case you can frame the idea of what stories are "supposed to do" in vastly more rigorous terms. Of course, I do believe in a qualified way some of the ontological claims you can derive from the chaos of conventional human lore. I find them vastly more reliable as a compass for understanding myself than I do cultural theory, though cultural theory has its good points too in this respect.)

But I did not find myself rapturously transported. I felt, as I watched, that we were going through the motions, that neither Neil Gaiman nor the collective producers of this film, excepting the actors to an extent, had put anything in this movie that was not formulaic.

Formulaic is sort of a pop-critical term and one that's often expressed without supporting argument, but it applies to Stardust.

• Story teller voice over performed in the first person plural? Formulaic.
• Young boy with limited prospects hoping to win the love of a popular girl? Formulaic.
• Romance between two people thrust together by circumstance and initially loathing each other? Formulaic.
• Princes competing to become king given an impossible task to determine the heir? Formulaic.
• Helicopter shots rotating around people riding on horseback over grass-covered ridges with mountains in the distance? Maybe not formulaic, but at least derivative. You've seen it in more than one film since Lord of the Rings.

The movie is rife with examples like this, but there's one which is particularly telling:he cameo by Ricky Gervais, who plays a merchant with whom all three of the plot's contending parties, the witch, the evil prince, and the hero/heroine, barter for one thing or another. He's dressed in a sort of bizarre costume and he's got long hair, but it's basically a reprise of the character Gervais improvises in the office. It was, to me, reminiscent of the scene from Man on the Moon where the college students are chanting at Andy Kaufman to do some famous routine., maybe the mighty mouse thing, I don't quite recall.

In this case, because it was a character and an actor imported without elaboration from some other work, and because that character/actor is so much a part of the present cultural moment, it stood out particularly as a crib, but to me the film, as I elaborated above, was full of such thefts.

Which would not in most cases doom a film, but in Stardust, there's a near total absence of enthusiasm for the material in the production work. For instance, the primary villain, a witch played by Michelle Pfeiffer, starts of the movie riding around in a cart pulled by two goats. To me, this is one of the few opportunities the narrative provides to do something weird and original. They could have made the goats look menacing or something. But they just made a cart pulled by two goats. And then that's what she traveled around in for a while. That's it.

There are other instances of a failure of imagination. The market town that stands as a sort of transit point between the film's two worlds, ordinary England and mystical Stormhold, is supposed to be a sort of hotbed of orientalist exoticism, but its wierdly sterile. There's a tiny two-headed elephant in a cage and a jar full of eyeballs that actually look at things, but otherwise, it's just a bunch of cages and buildings and a few undistressed curtains slapped together. No real detail.

But the worst thing about the film is the fascism.

That's hyperbole, obviously, but there's this weird innocence about the pleasures the film seems intended to provoke.

It starts with the protagonist's name. It's Tristran. I hate this name. It's just a few steps short of Prince Valiant. And its a variant on a name that's used throughout fantasy novels. I don't have examples, so you'll have to take my word for it. But it's the sort of name given to the sort of strapping but mildly effeminate name given to the sorts heroes that movies like Shrek seek to pillory. Because its the convention, he starts off bumbling and earnest, but by the end of the film, he's got beautiful hair a great outfit and is a master swordsman.

This is the guy were supposed to identify with. Think about the Pirates of the Caribbean films and how there's this sort of id/superego battle in the film's consciousness between the Orlando Bloom character, who is noble and chased, and Captain Sparrow (a much more evocative name than Tristran, btw), who is lecherous, androgynous, unreliable, self-interested, and vastly more interesting. And that franchise, at least in the second film, acknowledges the appeal of the antihero, when the Keira Knightly character makes out with Jack Sparrow and then, almost in an act of homage, betrays him. However psychosexually unhealthy you might deem this, it was mature and knowing. Stardust is neither of those things. In it, every infantile fantasy is fulfilled. The hero defeats everyone and he doesn't just get the girl, he gets to become king, he gets his mom back, and he gets the opportunity to live forever. It's all gold and castles and immortality.

This just isn't material I can wrap my heart around.

The audience I saw it with was entirely in love. And it ives me pause that what produced this response was a combination of deeply formulaic plot construction and some naive and uninhibited wish fulfillment. It makes me wonder about why I respond the way I do to better work than this.

From "Why Are So Many Americans in Prison" by Glen Loury in the Boston Review:

We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

This country is as rife with institutional and moral crime as it imagines it is with criminals, conventionally understood. Obviously, it's a complicated issue, but the magnitude of the phenomenon and its connection to race should trouble us greatly. I can't help but think of Madness and Civilization and wonder if we are just adding the concept of minorities to the series that, Foucault posited, started with lepers and moved on to insane, thus deepening our own madness.

750 Words

He fucked a cat. Then he fucked another cat. Then a cat came along and he fucked it. Then he fucked the first cat again. Then the cat fucked him. Then he and the cats fucked a dog. Then the dog fucked the cats. Then he fucked the dog alone. Then he went to the store, the grocery store and fucked everyone in it, including his grandma and his grandpa. He started in the milk aisle. He didn’t fuck the toddlers and the grade schoolers but starting at age fifteen he fucked everyone. Then he went out of the grocery store and into the parking lot and let the dogs and the cats from before out of his pickup truck and he fucked each one of them again. They were used it, so they just stood in a peaceful obedient line. Then he fucked the pickup truck. It hurt a little bit but he mostly liked it because everybody likes fucking everything to some extent. He went to the police station and fucked all the cops. The cops were like what the fuck but he fucked them all anyway. Then he went to the gazebo in the park. Nearby, there was a large bird on a wire, a pheasant, and he went up to the top of the wire, and hung from the wire without touching any of the other wires because he knew that would get him electrocuted, and then he grabbed the pheasant, who could talk and was like, “oh shit, it’s that guy again,” and he fucked the pheasant in the air hanging from the telephone wire. Then he let go and landed in a ninja crouch. These ninjas saw it and they jumped out and guess what happened? The ninja crouch was just a ruse and he fucked one of the ninjas who was like, “yeah, actually that’s not bad, that’s pretty good,” and he walked away and turned the corner, and the left-out ninjas were like, “whoa,” and then he reappeared and fucked all the ninjas because when he left he was just fucking with them. He rested for a week because occasionally you have to rest.

Then he went to Washington and developed a theme system where he’d organize his fucking patterns by theme, like only fucking certain nationalities, like all swedes one month. Or another pattern slash theme would be fucking people without them knowing it, or just blowjobs, which he felt sort of dissatisfied about and went back and fucked those people again. These are the little games you have to come up with to keep yourself motivated when you’re trying to accomplish something special.

Then it was the national badminton championships and during halftime he fucked eighteen people and then a security guard, Jane Fonda, Elijah Wood, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, yet another Alpaca, your dad, you, your mom, your sister, you uncle Craig, Pat Sajack, the skeleton of Abraham Lincoln, then he did that thing where you stretch your penis around and fuck your own self up the ass, and then he fucked Philip Roth, who LOVED it, and then he fucked Shamu 7 and Jessica Tandy at the same time. Then he cyber-fucked that exact list of people over the internet.

Then he went on this wilderness jag where, as a result, he eventually fucked every moose in Canada, all of which he filmed. That catalyzed another theme month, where he went around with a video of him fucking mooses and wolverines and shit in Canada and showed it to people and fucked all the people that were aroused by the video. That was a really cool month, he thought. He was pleased. Then his appendage fell off and he had to have it surgically reattached and he fucked the surgeon. Then he went to the oval office and the people he found there were the first ones he couldn’t bring himself to fuck.

Then, to purify himself, he went to New York and made achingly sweet love to Michiko Kakutani in her drab apartment. He felt they shared something important because she was so beautiful even when she complained about how you can’t do things justice in 750 words.

The Diminishing Returns of Critical Self Consciousness

It's probably impossible to establish a perfect justification for a particular critical method for approaching a work of literature.

Would an acceptance of this impossibility and a willingness to conduct criticism in a less formal way make it more interesting?

I've always sort of felt that the self-conscious pursuit of a perfectly virtuous and unimpeachably correct political perspective is an impediment to justice, or at least justice in this place/time/greater historical era. Literary criticism and other veins of thought, say philosophy, aren't, as systems, as dynamic and complex as physical/social/political reality, so they would seem a good field in which to spend time establishing a better foundation for the arguments and narratives they support, but there's a limit to the value we derive from examining and/or restating the context and history of our ideas.

I have no idea what that limit might be.

Picking their spots

I was at a fourth of July party today talking with someone about the MSM's weakness for the false equivalence trap. Blogger's complain about this all the time. They complain that instead of researching the facts, interpreting them rigorously, and then defending or amending them as necessary, a lot of journalists who cover politics simply repeat a talking point and then quote someone they perceive as being in opposition to the party producing the talking point and consider their job done.

Journalists who fail to do more with their reporting then a smattering of he-said, she-said are bad for the nation.

But reporters sometimes do abandon false equivalwilling to represent as fact or consensus understanding what are in truth ill-considered opinions. This was tragic in the case of the Iraq war when television reporters--there is blood on their hands whether they know it or not--didn't bother to have their producers do any research into the quality of evidence vis a vis Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. As long as enough people in Washington or New York say something is true, the case, in the minds of these reporters, seems to be closed.

However, there are exceptions to this rule and the one I've most recently encountered is pretty infuriating. Read the passage below from "Clintons Adjust to Her Turn in His Old Role" by Patrick Healy (the article is labeled "A Political Memo") and ask yourself why it was that this report chose to abandon the he-said, she said protocol :

No matter how much he tries to blend in, Mr. Clinton is one Oscar-worthy supporting actor who can sometimes upstage his leading lady simply by breathing. The Clintons’ political stagecraft — and their goal of shifting the spotlight to her — has been a work in progress since her presidential campaign began in January. This week, her husband’s first campaign jaunt on her behalf showed him in stages of adjustment — relaxed and jokey at times, a bit unpolished at others.

Oscar worthy. Actor. Leading Lady.

This language is full of scorn and it's not a good way to talk about politicians. Not because it's necessarily inaccurate and not because they're actually extremely noble people, but because it's an extremely subjective judgment. And even if you grant it, the sort of acting that Bill Clinton does when he's campaigning cannot be distinguished from the kind of acting that all other politicians do when they are campaigning. It is also something that politicians must do.

Therefore, reporters, if they want to do something with their work besides draw a paycheck, should do their best to identify the traits and characteristics that will govern a politician's policies and decision making in whatever office they happen to be seeking.

If Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton is performing more than another politician does that mean that we can't believe what they say? Does the reporter have information that suggests Hillary Clinton would push policy or ideology radically at odds with the policies she's pushing as a campaigner? This is the kind of "acting" by a politician that might be worth a front page (on the internet anyway) article. But that's not what we're getting in this lazy material from Patrick Healy. What we're getting is a record of one journalists gossamer impressions of the Clintons on the campaign trail tied in with some vaguely attributed gossip. And it's not as if they're insightful. Take this passage for instance:

He plays good cop and, deftly, bad cop as he tries to elevate Mrs. Clinton by praising her rivals for the Democratic nomination while at the same time putting some of them down. For instance, he has described second-tier opponents like Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico in more generous terms than her immediate foes like Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

So Clinton criticizes Hillary's chief rivals and praises the presumptive also rans? What a scoop!

These are the insights and judgments that the New York Times sees fit to meet the public eye without the fig leaf of false equivalence. No counter quote from a Clinton admirer who says, "actually he looks me in the eye and I know he cares about what I'm saying."

Why? I can only imagine it's because they are arrogant enough to believe that when the story is about the personal and when they themselves are their sources, they have the expertise (because all humans make shallow judgments about one another) and the authority (because they know they are not deceiving us about their shallow judgments) to tell the story without defending it or qualifying it or justifying it.

They're wrong.

Journalists have a responsibility to write stories that, to the best of their knowledge are true, even when the story is about nonsense like the one quoted above.

They also have a responsibility to prioritize the material they cover.

So I don't know. Maybe Patrick Healy and his editors at the New York Times think this stuff is significant enough to outweigh other news about the Clintons, or the presidential candidates.

If that's the case, my own personal subjective assessment is that their work falls does not deserve the level of prestige that adheres to it based on their paper's illustrious name. It deserves our contempt.

Statement describing a small change in my own personal sentiment toward something

So there's a post below--which I think I might have written while drunk off a glass or glass and a half of wine--about a small passage of fiction I wrote and which I felt good about:

A line from the novel

Well, guess what?

(I just prefer that phrase as an interrogative, okay.)

I don't like it anymore. Maybe that bit at the end about her wasting away is good. And the rhythm is nice, but otherwise I diagnose that it does not, as I had previously supposed, manage to transcend the limitations of its genre. I deleted it from the pages of my novel in progress weeks ago.

Giuliani is just a dick

Bracketing out the randomness of the universe and the effect of events on the political landscape, I don't fear Guiliani in the general election. Given his troubles in the primary, he won't generate any fervor with the republican base, whose evangelical component--to grab one example out of the air--seems to be showing signs of disillusionment/fatigue with their adventures in politics, regardless of the ideology of the republican candidate.

Hillary and Obama, except in terms of rhetoric on the war, haven't made any sort of committed leftward swing, so should be ably to nimbly make the classic push toward the center in the general election. And then it seems to me that Guiliani's centrism, which he'll have to emphasize to court persuadables, will make the democratic candidate more palatable in the eyes of republicans and independants. It's not that an immoderate republican would actually vote for a dem, but that they'd be much less motivated to vote against one. Sort of like all those moron democrats who saw little difference between Gore and Bush.

More important than the above considerations, though, I would say that Rudy's primary campaign slide has less to do with his ideology and a lot to do with what people are learning about both who he is and his track record. A candidate's nature is obscured in the general election by the white noise of so many media representations, but Rudy's gaffes and his checkered past seem to me to have a flavor that punches through that veil. The rhythm of his speech is part of this. W, based on some sort of primitive instinct I think, is much cagier about not ever letting a real emotion come out. Guiliani, on the other hand, seems much more prone to feeling justified in his borishness in a way that a) he can't control and b) is personal in a way that transcends ideology.

Compared to a campaigner as blandly conservative (in approach) as Hillary Clinton, I think it would be difficult for Rudy not to come off as an erratic and generally disagreeable figure.

A line from the novel

Amy went all the way out the door and lit a cigarette and started smoking. The smoke of the burning tobacco smelled cheap and there was a thrill for her in not caring about hastening her own death in exchange for a cheap thing, like she, whatever she was, was dissipating as quickly as the smoke into the atmosphere, like she was as thin and temporary as that, but also as weightless.

Self-conscious commentary (not in the novel): Cigarette scenes as a concept, but not necessarily in the execution, frequently strike me as the result of impulses felt by inexperienced writers. It's the same thing as why teenagers smoke--there's some truly significance romance attached to it, a sign signifying something you know does not exist once you've emerged from the state of massive ignorance we, many of us anyway, and I certainly, occupy in adolescence. Another way it's a tic common too teenagers and writers just starting out is that both often don't know what they want to do with their time and feel the act of smoking a cigarette gives purpose to a moment that is, in truth, purposeless. I'm not sure that's not what's happening here, except that it does say something about Amy's character. And also I write purposeless scenes all the time, or used to back when I was writing more and sucked more, but I like this one.

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Here is a test image. It's a three and a half megabyte jpeg.

Venal Beyond Words

While reading this analysis of Adam Cohen’s NYT piece on Debra Wong Yang, and the role Harriet Myers played in her firing, it occurred to me that this pattern of populating government posts with people who will do the administrations bidding without consideration for the law, professionalism, or precedent (or common decency) explains better than anything else the laughable and politically damaging nomination of Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court. You can imagine them asking themselves, “Why not give it a try? If she gets in there, we can do anything.”

Given that the president seems so blatantly to have been using his power to get his friends off the hook for offenses of naked political corruption and is willing to drag important and noble institutions into the mud and slime in order to accomplish his childish and narrow-minded goals—I mean we’re not even talking about pushing a conservative agenda—the only just legacy for this administration (if you bracket out the tragedy of Iraq) would be universal contempt, scorn, a reputation for giving new meaning to venality.

Also, I would love to see a TPM piece speculating about what happens legally if enough evidence emerges that the administration did what they so obviously did. Say some documents emerge that the president consciously ordered the replacement of US attorneys to prevent corruption prosecutions? He’d have to be impeached, no?

If you go Clementine, a restaurant in San Francisco, you totally owe it to yourself to get the french toast

That's really all there is to say.

What saddens me

What saddens me about the attorney purge scandal is that it wasn't until Bush administration efforts to establish loyalty to republican party operatives (as distinct from republican party traditions say) as the sole criteria for evaluating people and adherence to republican party priorities the sole criteria for evaluating a theory, idea, or policy within the Justice Department that they came up against any forceful resistance.

Neither the media nor the military nor the congress resisted them. With the exception of McLatchy and a few marginalized congressmen and senators and some parts of the state department, these institutions allowed the administration and the republican party the last word on everything, WMDs, troop levels, in the run-up to the Iraq war. When Katrina happened and commentators were presented with the easiest judgement to make--that the gov't had failed in every way--they did not say so.

Only the justice department asserted loyalty to something (anything) other than the administration when the time came.

There's an irony in this, in that there's this sort of meme out there that beuracracy is terrible in a sort of metaphysical, "kafka-esque" sense, yet it was only the strength of the justice department as an institution that repelled the efforts of an administration whose political power was to some extent achieved by professing an ideology whose core tenents include the idea that government and government professionalism are almost always bad, and certainly inferior to some extent to the commen sense of ordinary citizens (forgetting for the moment that republican party leaders in the bush mold are anything but ordinary citizens).

It was the speech and actions of Republican prosecutors that brought to the fore a standard for political action that transcends even the soft-politicization of everything behind which many mindless conservative commentators are trying, or were trying, to obscure the Stalinesque abuses of political power perpetrated by the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States.

Test

Test for work.

I am chauvinist

Interesting.

I've learned that Elif Batuman is a woman. I had assumed, as the post below makes clear, that she was male.

This is not the first time I've done this. A few years ago, I spent a lot of time on the craigslist writers forum and found out that one of the people there I had assumed was male was actually female.

What do the two share? Obviously formidable intelligence. And a certain forcefulness of style.

Interesting.

Two passages

from James Woods's review of Terrorist:

1.Ahmad "is the product of a red-haired American mother, Irish by extraction, and an Egyptian exchange student whose ancestors had been baked since the time of the Pharaohs in the hot muddy fields of the overflowing Nile." (Ah, those Egyptians. This lofty genealogy is an extraordinary example of airy Orientalism, which, because the sentence combines baking and mud, clumsily manages to imply that the ancestors were somehow baked in mud. Egyptian bog people! Does Updike reread his own prose?)


2.This is preposterous, of course--Jack Levy smells of Jewishness!--but more interesting than its preposterousness is the inept way, again, in that last sentence, that Updike surrenders any pretense that he is capturing Ahmad's own manner of thinking, and just sails off, pleasing himself, wreathed in familiar silks.

Later in the review, Woods quotes some dialogue spoken by the Ahmad, the central character and it's awful. Or at least, I thought it was. Strange speech that's distractingly inhuman. Here, I'll reproduce it:

"I think recently my mother has suffered one of her romantic sorrows, for the other night she produced a flurry of interest in me, as if remembering that I was still there. But this mood of hers will pass. We have never communicated much. My father's absence stood between us, and then my faith, which I adopted before entering my teen years. She is a warm-natured woman, and were I a hospital patient I would gladly entrust myself to her care, but I think she has as little talent for motherhood as a cat. Cats let the kittens suckle for a time and then treat them as enemies. I am not yet quite grown enough to be my mother's enemy, but I am mature enough to be an object of indifference."

The posture of the first passage I quote above is that the clumsiness of Updike's writing here is obvious and indisputable. I don't think that's the case. The rhythms of the sentence are such that its easy to miss the slipperiness of meaning in the conditions in which Ahmad's ancestors were "baked." I suspect that Woods is being deliberately literal-minded here in order to feel superior to a much venerated figure. If a reviewer was generally sympathetic toward a novel, would he or she say, "Well, yes, as lovely as this book is, there are a number of distracting slip ups such as..." I suppose its possible, but I doubt it. We are quick to ignore flaws of little significance in our allies and to emphasize them in our enemies. The orientalism is the better point and it should stand on its own. Of course, Updike is more-than-seventy-year old American, so I, personally, forgive him for succumbing to an imperfect, outmoded, and racist trope when it takes as subtle and understated and literary a form as it does here.

The posture of the second passage is that ineptitude is not a relative designation that has to be elaborated and/or argued for. My feeling is that it does. I mean, I think Woods is right to say that Updike is writing over his character, but I have no trouble living with a non-impressionist translation of Ahmad's thinking. If we grant that my comfort with this technique or manner of writing is universally applicable, it hardly seems fair to characterize this moment in Updike's writing as inept. Even if we don't grant that, I think Woods would be disengenuous if he were to say that he was using the word in a narrow, literal way and withheld judgment with respect to the surrounding text. He must know that in a review, the sentence, especially when it contains a bold and confident and distinct judgment, will stand for the book, and to some extent the man.

I feel better about Woods drawing our attention to the quoted dialogue above. In that passage, someone reading the review will have a much better sense of the feeling we'll have while reading the book. In my mind, I imagine a certain detachment and lack of pizazz, a dry earnestness of purpose.

Can you not be more specific?

To an extent, I call bullshit on Elif Batuman, who, in the pages of N + 1 (I know of no better literary journal by the way), bitches at great length about various stylistic commonalities of contemporary short stories--this seen through the lens of 2005's America's Best Short Stories. Bullshit because he never really gets past a few non extensive examples in support of his generalizatoins. Although I shouldn't say bullshit. I should say something more moderate. But that's what I thought as I was reading.

Anyway, Batuman's--I have no idea who he is, but it's a really good essay, however much I disagree with the points it makes--complaints are that contemporary american short stories are so consistenly full of specificity. I have a problem with this conclusion. The problem is that specificity is, yes, ubiquitous and sort of compulsory, but that doesn't mean its worthless. I can't really speak for anyone but myself, but for whatever miniscule meaning it has, I derive consistent pleasure when a carefully chosen name in a story pricks my imagination into a non-routine mode of narrative consumption. I suppose you can fill a story with unconventional abstractions or generalities, but it would be a different beast from the sorts of short stories--short stories that tell stories--that Batuman praises in the essay. As for conventional abstractions, man, child, sadness, family, doctor, my mind just glides over them, filling in the most conventional images and meanings available in the library of television and newspaper tropes. (It's actually an interesting game to activate one's imagination in response to an abstraction, and flesh out the image on your own; of course, it's more fun when the author meets you half way.)

On the other hand, I acknowledge that the prevelance of the "specificity" technique likely drowns out its effect. Back to the original hand, though, you've got a grotesquely severe baby/bathwater problem when you bring the issue up at length in an essay whose second and third sentences are these:

And yet I think the American short story is dead form, unnaturally perpetuated, as Lukacs once wrote of the chivalric romanc, "by purely formal means, after the transcendental conditions for its existence have already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic." Having exhausted the conditions for its existence, the short story continues to be propogated in America by a purely formal apparatus: by the big magazines, which, if they print fiction at all, sandwich one short story per issue between feature sand reviews; and by workshop-based programs and their attendant lilterary journals.

The essay delves in its second half into the psychology that renders the contemporary literary scene , as Batuman sees it, less good and suggests that a fear that the authentic is uninteresting leads authors to hitch their character's lives in primary, first order ways to history, as opposed, I guess you could say, history seen from television or via a pink slip. I think this is true, but isn't it inconsistent with the claim that stories should contain more of the general and less of the local then is the case?

While I'm not sure that contemporary novelists are as ashamed of their profession as Batuman suggests, I am entirely in agreement with his admonition to authors to "write with dignity, not in guilt."

In fact, its greatly encouraging to read such encouragement. But it pissed me of that the essay starts with a Seinfeldian riff on literary pet peeves that Batuman mistakes for an important part of a real problem.

*I should say also that I'm not sure this little blog post was worth writing. The act of putting together a short assesment like Batuman's pretty much guarantess that someone will have problems with it that are not unlike the problems he has with choosing Nissan over "sedan." Of course, it would be foolish to give up on the conversation for such a reason.