"For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that?"

Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?”

Claire Messud--and several other writers--respond to the question, "Would you want to be friends with the characters you write about?"

Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff

I don't read works of military history that often, and when I do, it usually is one that focuses more on individuals rather than strategy and troop movements. Frozen in Time is my type of popular military history. The book is split into two narratives, or as Zuckoff tells it, "two true stories, one from the past and one from the present." The story from the past is actually comprised of three closely-connected stories of military planes that crash-landed on Greenland during World War II. The other story is that of the present-day effort to find and salvage these lost planes, and to return the remains of the servicemen to their families in the United States. That may have seemed like a spoiler, but it really wasn't. Zuckoff makes it clear pretty early on in the book that some of the servicemen don't make it off Greenland alive.

In November of 1942, a C-53 military cargo plane crashed on Greenland's expansive ice cap, all five men on board the plane survived the crash. A few days later, a B-17 bomber searching for the downed C-53 and its crew crash on the ice cap, as well. The last plane to crash on the ice cap was an amphibious plane called the Grumman Duck. It was also part of the search effort. The Duck belonged to the Coast Guard Cutter Northland. From one chapter to the next, Zuckoff jumps between the stories of these three military planes, giving the reader insight into what caused the planes to crash, introducing the crew members aboard each plane, and detailing the survival efforts after each of the crashes. Zuckoff takes some liberties here and there, but they fall well inside the realm of possibility. For example, after the co-pilot of the B-17 bomber fell into a crevasse, landing about 100 feet below on a large chunk of ice wedge into the crevasse, Zuckoff writes, "Harry Spencer thought he was a goner." Of course, Zuckoff has no way of knowing what Spencer was thinking back in 1942--there is no mention made of a journal or diary. However, it is eminently likely that Spencer thought he was going to die when the crevasse swallowed him up. Zuckoff takes these small liberties throughout the book. While I was usually quick to recognize them, I took little issue with most.

The present-day--2012--portion of the story involves Zuckoff directly. As he was researching about these downed planes, he came across a man who would not only change the direction of this book but also his life. (I'm taking some liberties there... it's kind of fun.) This man was Lou Sapienza, the owner of the exploration company North South Polar Inc. and runs the non-profit organization Fallen American Veterans Foundation. When Zuckoff and Sapienza meet, Sapienza is trying to raise funds to travel to Greenland, locate the Grumman Duck (and possibly the other downed planes), and return these planes and the remains of their crew members to the United States. Zuckoff accompanies Sapienza to meetings with members of various branches of the United States military, and he eventually becomes
part of the exploration team. The way Zuckoff describes it, it sounds as though he bought his way onto the team. It was mutually beneficial: Zuckoff needed material for his book and Sapienza desperately needed money for his venture.

The book's chapters are relatively short, which means that the focus changes every few pages from one downed crew to the next or to the modern-day hunt for the Grumman Duck, which Zuckoff winkingly refers to as the Duck Hunt. Zuckoff does an excellent job of writing about the crew members of these planes. He developed biographies of each man--their physical traits, their personalities, and the lives they left behind back home in the States. Zuckoff found a riveting true story of survival and adventure, and told it very well.

11/22/63 Stephen King

For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark

Jake Epping is your run-of-the-mill, divorced and disillusioned high school English teacher (Chris?) in a small Maine town before he found the "rabbit hole."  The "rabbit hole" is "bubble" in space-time that allows a person to be transported to September 9th, 1958. Al  Templelton, who owns the burger joint where the rabbit hole is located, introduces Jake to the hole just before he dies. He has only one wish for Jake - stop the assassination of JFK.

Jake, feeling obligated to his dead acquaintance, takes on this task but has to feel out the past first. He goes in a few times for test-runs and eventually commits to the 5 years needed to stop Lee Harvey Oswald. Jake has to wait 5 years because he has to make sure Lee Harvey was responsible for Kennedy's murder (spoiler alert - he is). The strength of the book is not really the story, its plain, slow and boring. The book is around 900 pages, and the reader will space out during most of those pages (and not miss much). The main themes of the book - that the past repeats and is "obdurate" - also inevitably leads to mindless repetition. That does not mean, however, the book is all bad.  King's talent really shows during the tense moments of action in this book.  Also, his portrayal of the 60s is quite interesting, especially Jake's difficulty to adapt to the times.  Overall, if you have a really long plane ride, and a  week's vacation at a beach, maybe you should consider tackling this book (not if you are trying to, for example, get to 50 books...). 

Immortal Bird by Doron Weber

I have struggled with what to say about this book for the past couple of days. It is not that I am having trouble organizing my thoughts, but that my thoughts fall squarely into two categories. I am having trouble rectifying these two, rather disparate, groups of thoughts. To fully explain the quandary that I am in, I have to talk about the book in such a way as to give away some of what happens.

Immortal Bird is a account of Damon, a young boy with serious health problems. I can't fathom the stress and heartache that Damon and his family went through. The author, Damon's father, does an excellent job of conveying the uncertainty of a life lived with such a serious heart condition. He chronicles what Damon went through as he struggled with various disorders and illnesses related to and exacerbated by his condition. The book draws to a close with Damon slowly passing from this earth in an ICU, surrounded by the love of his parents. The last few pages of the book were absolutely gut-wrenching.

It's hard to bring myself to type the next sentence, in light of what I have just described in the previous paragraph. However, I had a number of issues with the writing. All too often there was a self-serving and even pretentious tone to the writing. There were many sentences like this one: "I've written a couple of medical books, I work with top scientists and researchers, and I'm relentless in my digging." There were many places where I found myself thinking that the book was just as much about Doron as it was about Damon. I know if seems ridiculous to accuse a man who has written a book about his son's death of self-promotion, and let me be clear, I am not doing that. I am simply saying that there many points throughout Immortal Bird where I cringed at something I read. I think the problem may have been that editors struggled with the same thing I am struggling with. How do you critique a book such as this? How do you tell this father that he should change this line or that line because it sounds to self-serving? I don't envy the position they were in.

I don't know who among my friends and acquaintances I would recommend read this book. This is not because of the issues I had with the writing, but because of the nature of the story. A book such as this would crush someone like my mom. Its grief would be too much for her to handle. I do feel that this should be required reading for medical students. The experiences the Weber family went through at hospitals and doctors offices could provide valuable instruction for those going into any medical profession that interacts directly with patients.

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

In gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise-rod, and in staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he had meant to do great things.  Within the limits of his short tether he had tumbled about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater singleness of purpose than many of the blatant personages whose company he kept.

I feel like it's been forever since I've been able to review a book.  Forgive me, I've been bogged down with a couple of papers--one of which is on James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which is a fantastic book that I will review here very soon.  In the meantime, here's a review of Charles Dickens' Hard Times, which is also good.  If you find Dickens to be a little overwhelming at times, like I do, it has the virtue of being very short.  (For a Dickens novel that is--I think it is his shortest.)

Hard Times follows the story of Thomas Gradgrind and his children, Tom and Louisa.  Gradgrind brings them up to revere "facts" and shun "fancy"--a burlesque of John Mill's Utilitarian philosophy, which caused a nervous breakdown in his son John Stuart Mill similar to the one that Louisa experiences late in the novel.  Louisa's crippled sense of humanity leads her to accept the proposal of her father's friend Bounderby, who is a satire of capitalist pride and swagger and an even more extreme opponent of "fancy" than Gradgrind:

"Ladies and gentlemen, I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.  Since you have done my wife and myself the honor of drinking our healths and happiness, I suppose I must acknowledge the same; though, as you all know me, and know what I am, and what my extraction was, you won't expect a speech from a man who, when he sees a Post, says 'that's a Post,' and when he sees a Pump, says 'that's a Pump,' and is not to be got to call a Post a Pump, or a Pump a Post, or ether of them a Toothpick."

For his part, Tom's lack of imagination (something explicitly associated with sympathy for others to Dickens' era) turns him into a moral creep: He induces Louisa to marry Bounderby to make Bounderby less bothersome to him, and later steals a hefty sum of money from the bank and pins it on a poor but saintly factory worker.  Louisa, forced by the romantic advances of a cretinous stranger to examine the lack of love in her own marriage, accuses her father of crushing her spirit:

"How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death?  Where are the graces of my soul?  Where are the sentiments of my heart?  What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!"

She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom.

It's a great, touching moment, and it forces Gradgrind to reevaluate his "system," to have his own kind of breakdown.  It's also echoed toward the end of the book, when Bounderby's crony Bitzer (another student brought up in the Gradgrind-Bounderby system) refuses to let Tom off the hook for the robbery:

"Bitzer," said Mr. Gradgrind, broken down, and miserably submissive to him, "have you a heart?"

"The circulation, sir," returned Bitzer, smiling at the oddity of the question, "couldn't be carried on without one.  No man, sir, acquainted with the facts established by Harvey related to the circulation of the blood, can doubt that I have a heart."

When Dickens is at his best, he's really great--few people can match the mixture of humor, pathos, and absurdity that's encapsulated there.  Elsewhere the book is overwritten, and Dickens intrudes on his narrative with abandon in a way that's always bothered me.  And while Hard Times is tightly plotted, and each particular character is indispensable to the narrative, not all of them are equally fun to read.  For one, I didn't have much interest in the working class character, Stephen Blackpool--not because I'm an elitist, but because of his meek proletarian saintliness.  I'm also not fond of the way that his name foreshadows the fact that he literally falls into a giant, dark hole at the end of the book.

But Hard Times has a lot of beauty and a lot of humor, and overall, I really enjoyed it.  Its conviction that imagination and sympathy can be as useful and as powerful as facts and figures remains more relevant today than I think many would like to admit.

Deadly Harvest by Michael Stanley

A little girl goes missing in the city of Gaborone. And then other. Samantha Khama, the only female detective in the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department asks to be assigned to this cases, and starts digging. Khama believes the girls to have been kidnapped for muti, a form of dark magic practiced by some witch doctors. Khama enlists the help of Kubu Bengu, the Assistant Superintendent of the CID. Kubu is an experienced detective, who has a knack for catching things others miss. As the two of them start piecing together what happened to these girls, they realize that it is bigger than they initially suspected, involving Botswana political candidates and members of law enforcement.

This is the fourth Detective Kubu mystery in the series by Michael Stanley. Michael Stanley is actually Stanley Trollip and Micahel Sears, who were both born in Johannesburg, South Africa--about a five-hour drive from where this book is set. Sears lives lives in Johannesburg and Stanley splits time between there and Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the Acknowledgements and the Authors' Note, they indicate they talked with anthropologists who study muti, educators who work in Gaborone, and a former High Court judge of Botswana. The result is a story where the location is just as interesting and important to the narrative as the characters are.

The story is told from a third person omniscient perspective and jumps between a large number of characters. The mystery unfolds slowly throughout the course of the book, with the authors not revealing the identity of the witch doctor until the last few pages of the book. I'm not someone who is always claiming to have figured out the twist in the movie or the culprit in a mystery. That said, I had identified the witch doctor well before his identity was revealed. However, this didn't diminish my enjoyment of the denouement of the story.

I'm definitely going to read the other Detective Kubu mysteries.

Half as Happy by Gregory Spatz

Half as Happy, the newest short story collection from Gregory Spatz, is about choices. Oh, it’s about a lot of other things too, which I’ll get to shortly, but mostly, it’s about people faced with decisions, some voluntary, some not, that impact their lives in ways they don’t foresee. The characters that populate these eight tales often don’t know much more than the reader, and their moments of epiphany, when they occur, are often obscured--we’re left to discern them ourselves.

As with most short story collections, Half as Happy defies easy summation. There’s a pair of identical twins, in love with the same woman; a big game hunter who’s having some marriage trouble; a bowmaker. and plenty of sex and death. In Spatz’s world, sex and death are ever-present spectres, the former to bring together, the latter to pull irreconcilably apart.

And everyone is always disappearing. Some people die. Some retreat so far into themselves that they disappear. One character diets until she almost literally plucks herself from existence. And yet, this world of incorporeal humans, prone to vanish at the slightest touch, is still populated by fully-formed, believable people, people who have a choice to make, a choice that, unbeknownst to them, decides their existence or lack of it.

I realize this review is a little more abstract than usual, but the themes Spatz wrestles with resonate with me. The world of Half as Happy, in spite of its often sad circumstances, is not a deterministic one--the characters often make the wrong decision, but the decision is theirs to make. And the melancholy collection ends--and this may be a very minor spoiler--on a happy note just in case the reader had gotten the idea that bad choices are always the end.

Waverley by Sir Walter Scott

From the minuteness with which I have traced Waverley's pursuits, and the bias which they unavoidably communicated to his imagination, the reader may perhaps anticipate, in the following tale, an imitation of the romance of Cervantes.  But he will do my prudence injustice in the supposition.  My intention is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common aberration from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their own romantic tone and colouring.

Sir Walter Scott's first novel, Waverley, was a huge hit.  Let me repeat that: This book was a huge hit.  That is quite an amazing fact--almost as amazing as the fact that I somehow made it through this rambling, horrid turd of a book.

Why did people love Waverley so much?  It promises a rousing adventure tale: Edward Waverley, a young and diffident nobleman, joins a company of English military dragoons in Scotland, yet finds himself drawn to the charismatic rebel Fergus Mac-Ivor and his beautiful sister, Flora.  Eventually he forsakes his regiment to join with the rebels, who are about to stage a military campaign to put Prince Charles, the heir of the Stuart line deposed in 1688, on the British throne.

The first problem is that the book never really delivers on this promise, preferring interminable passages of exposition and terrible Gaelic poetry to actual battle scenes.  The second problem is that Waverley himself is about as engaging as a plate of haggis.  And yet everyone in this book, Brit and Scott, Whig and Tory, Anglican and Presbyterian, is constantly heaping praise on him, despite his general lack of personality and absence of actual achievement, military or otherwise.

Scott goes to great lengths to depict Waverley as someone who reads too much, and gets carried away in his "own romantic tone and colouring."  That's the reason he gets so caught up in the cause of the Scottish rebels.  But Scott's is a winking criticism, because the novel romanticizes the Scots as much as the protagonist himself does, and Waverley's romantic notions in practice only make people more affectionate toward him.  The earnestness, in fact, that marks the relationship between Waverley and Fergus--and for that matter Waverley and everyone else--is noxious.  Let's call that the third problem. Naturally, Waverley never receives any real punishment for joining the rebels (who Scott's readers would know failed in their attempts to restore the Stuart line) and only comes out of the ordeal preposterously more respected.  Scott even supplies a noble English captain who is captured by the Scots, just so he can blather on about how gallant Waverley is despite what is technically capital treason.

The fourth problem is that Waverley contains sentences like this one:

He was about to proceed, but Callum Beg said, rather pertly as Edward thought, that "Ta Cean Kinne did not like ta Sassenagh Duinhe-wassal to be pingled wi' mickle speaking, as she was na tat weil."

Scott means this impenetrable Scot dialect to be funny, but it's just exasperating, from the first instance to the thousandth.

And yet, people loved this book--even Jane Austen.  It was the Da Vinci Code of its day.  The history and the politics were probably more relevant to them, and even though the dialect would have been just as inscrutable to Scott's English audience, the depiction of the Scottish Highlanders would probably have accessed both some fascination toward their exoticness and a  nostalgia for the outdated modes of gentility they embody, neither of which is available to an American today.  Waverley is, at the very least, a reminder that the past is a very strange country indeed.

Pain, Parties, Work by Elizabeth Winder

When Pain, Parties, Work, a new micro-biography of Sylvia Plath, came up for review, I decided I should introduce myself to some Plath, who I had never read. I owned The Bell Jar and some poetry, and decided to start with the novel. Having read Pain, Parties, Work, I’m really glad I did--although I knew that Plath’s experiences as a junior editor for Mademoiselle had informed her most famous work, I didn’t realize to what extent. A Venn diagram of Plath’s trip and the plot of The Bell Jar would almost be a circle.

For those unfamiliar, Plath was an amazing poet and writer whose suicide has come to define her, unfairly, as the patron saint of depressed teenage girls. Elizabeth Winder, a poet herself, wrote the book as a way to rewrite Plath’s story in popular culture, and, while I’m not sure the book will be enough to change public perception, Winder does a good job turning Plath into a fully-formed human being.

The layout of the book is interesting--it looks something like a magazine itself, with sidebars and images interspersed throughout the text, and the actual chapters vary in structure as well, from oral histories from Sylvia’s roommates on the trip to poetic excursions into the ephemera of Mademoiselle, the fashion world, and other, related topics. This makes for a fast read, but the information is good, and as a transformative tool for Plath, it works wonders.

Plath wasn’t the type to lock herself in a room to write. Instead, she gathered her inspiration from her experiences, particularly, as Winder notes, the concrete details of her experiences. Winder makes the case for Plath as an aesthete, appreciative of beauty for its own sake, one who believed the art needed no purpose but to exist. Not only was Plath a concrete thinker, she was also a social creature. She had a policy of never turning down a date, saying that even the worst of them provided material for her writing. Indeed, several of the dates mentioned here provide fodder for their lightly-fictionalized counterparts in The Bell Jar.

Plath’s fellow junior editors didn’t know what to make of her, and I don’t either, exactly, after reading Pain, Parties, Work. What I can say is that, between The Bell Jar and this book, my perspective on Plath has been challenged and upended. It’s challenged my sometime unintentionally sexist views on literature, and made me more open to trying other female authors who I might have previously dismissed. And I’m sure future readings of The Bell Jar will be greatly enhanced, knowing something about the story behind the story.

A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law by Antonin Scalia

A text should not be construed strictly, and it should not be construed leniently; it should be construed reasonably, to contain all that it fairly means.  
--A Matter of Interpretation

***

No State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

--Fourteenth Amendment

***

Justice Scalia:  We don't prescribe law for the future.  We--we decide what the law is.  I'm curious, when--when did--when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage?  1791?  1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted? . . . I'm talking about your argument.  You say it is now unconstitutional.

Justice Scalia indicates how much he loves originalism.

Mr. Olson:  Yes.

Justice Scalia:  Was it always unconstitutional?

Mr. Olson:  It was constitutional when we--as a culture determined that sexual orientation is a characteristic of individuals that they cannot control, and that that --

Justice Scalia:  I see.  When did that happen?  When did that happen?

Mr. Olson:  There's no specific date in time.  This is an evolutionary cycle.

Justice Scalia:  Well, how am I supposed to know how to decide a case, then--?

--Transcript of Oral Argument, Hollingsworth v. Perry

What does "equal protection of the laws" mean?  How do we decide what it means?  Scalia attempts to explain how federal courts should be construing texts in this book.  His answer is simple: in a democracy, the law means what it says.  Not what the legislature meant to say; not what the legislature intended; certainly not what the legislative history says; but, rather, the words that the legislature used and their accepted meanings at the time the legislation was passed.

His basis for this basic formula is also simple: the legislature writes the law; determining meaning based off of the words used minimizes judges' discretion to write their own law.  Allowing judges to go off of legislative intent frees judges to invent or read into the law an intent.  This kind of freedom is unconstrained because who is to say what the legislative intent is.

Consider the following: at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, drafters of the amendment would have believed that "equal protection of the laws" did not mean "there is a right to gay marriage."  So, at the time of passage, the clause had a specific reading.  Why should we read the clause differently today?  Under Justice Scalia's originalism, we should not.  The Fourteenth Amendment meant one thing in 1868; it means the same thing today.

So, Justice Scalia's point during the Hollingsworth oral argument is that if the meaning of the equal protection clause changes over time, how does he (or any judge) know what it means at the time he has to make a decision?  The point is important because, if the clause does not have a definitive meaning, should judges be the one to decide this important social issue?  Justice Scalia would say no, leaving the decision to the legislature to decide.  As he points out in A Matter of Interpretation, creating a constitutional right prevents flexibility in the legislature.

The book is split up into three parts:  1) Justice Scalia's essay on interpretation; 2) responses by various scholars; and 3) Justice Scalia's reply to the scholars.  To narrow this review, I will only discuss one response that I found particularly poignant.

Ronald Dworkin notes that there are two kinds of originalism: semantic originalism (read the text to say what those who made it intended for it to say) and expectation originalism (read the text to have the consequences that those who made it intended for it to have).  To explain the difference, Dworkin offers a hypothetical.  Boss says to Employee, "Hire the best applicant for this job."  Boss understands this to mean, "Hire my son for this job."  Under semantic originalism, Employee should hire the applicant with the strongest qualifications.  Under expectation originalism, Employee should hire Boss's son.

Applying the distinction to Constitutional provision: under semantic originalism it is clear that the Framers of the Constitution understood that executions would not be prohibited by the Eighth Amendments prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments (because at the time the Eighth Amendment was passed, executions were a common occurrence and the Framers would not have considered an execution cruel).  However, under expectation originalism, it is less clear what the Framers intended--the understanding of what constitutes "cruelty" could change over time.  Under expectation originalism, the Framers could have prohibited "cruel and unusual" punishments expecting that as time changed, understandings of "cruelty" would change too.

Dworkin makes this distinction to point out that Justice Scalia has no reason to accept semantic originalism but reject expectations originalism.  Both are reasonable ways of reading the Constitution.

In reply, Justice Scalia reiterates his commitment to semantic originalism; he adds, however, that his semantic originalism would protect people from a more brutal future where notions of cruelty may be more cruel than today (or more cruel than when the Eighth Amendment was passed).

My own views on this are developing (and, I'll add influenced by Judge Posner), and I'm reluctant to say anything knowing that I'm about to review Justice Breyer's book to contrast Justice Scalia, however I want to note one thought: the way we apply the Constitution could change without necessarily meaning that the Constitution's meaning has changed.  Perhaps instead of saying that the meaning of "equal protection" has changed since 1868, we should say that our understanding of humanity has changed; this new understanding of humanity includes the understanding that gay people are entitled to rights too.  Not because we understand the Constitution differently, but because we understand gay people differently.  The distinction between law and facts is well known within the study of law; perhaps we should recognize that it also applies to Constitutional law.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

He went; and, it being at any time a much simpler operation to Catherine to doubt her own judgment than Henry's, she was very soon obliged to give him credit for being right, however disagreeable to her his going.  But the inexplicability of the General's conduct was much on her thoughts.  That he was very particular in his eating, she had, by her own unassisted observation, already discovered; but why he should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most accountable!  How were people, at that rate, to be understood?

I reviewed Northanger Abbey on this blog a few years ago, and you can read my longer thoughts on it at the link, which I find have changed very little.  The Gothic parody bits, in which Catherine Morland lets herself be carried away by her imagination in the titular residence, are still a lot of great fun.  Now that I know more about the Gothic tradition, I can say with absolute sureness that they're a whole lot more fun than what they're parodying.  (Although, at one point Catherine and her Gothic-loving friend Isabella Thorpe discuss what they thought of The Monk--which proves how negligent their parents really are!)  And the rest of the novel, which is so much about crushes and frenemies that it might be an episode of Gossip Girl, is a lot of fun, too.

Having reviewed it once, I won't make this review too long, but I do want to note one thing that, the second time through, I think the novel is doing: It seems to me that Northanger Abbey is a kind of novel of education, in which Catherine learns to exercise her own interpretive faculty when it comes to what people say.  That is, she learns is that people often say one thing and mean another (you can see her still mystified by it in the passage above);  Sometimes, in the case of Isabella Thorpe, who claims to be in love with Catherine's brother while all the while scheming to "trade up" to a wealthy cavalry officer, this is called a lie.  Other times, in the case of Henry Tilney, who teases her with playful questions and jokes, this is called irony.

I've talked about Austen's ironic sense in the past, and I think that Northanger shows that Austen wasn't merely interested in irony as a tool but as a mode of living.  Henry is Catherine's instructor in this sense:

'I see what you think of me,' said he gravely--'I shall make but a poor figure in your journal tomorrow.'

'My journal!'

'Yes, I know exactly what you will say: Friday, went to Lower Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings--plain black shoes--appeared to much advantage; but was strangely harassed by a queer, half-witted man, who would make me dance with him, and distressed my by his nonsense.'

'Indeed I shall say no such thing.'

'Shall I tell you what you ought to say?'

'If you please.'

'I danced with a very agreeable young man, introduced by Mr. King; had a great deal of conversation with him--seems a most extraordinary genius--hope I may know more of him.  That, madam, is what I wish you to say.'

'But, perhaps, I keep no journal.'

'Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you.  These are points in which a doubt is equally possible.  Not keep a journal!  How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your life in Bath without one!'

It's Henry's gentle ironies, I believe, that teach Catherine to be aware of the grosser, yet subtler discrepancies between what is said and what is true.  That's why Austen sticks in the seemingly incongruous Gothic parody; it is just another example of Catherine needing to see that difference.

In the class I'm taking on 19th-Century Lit, we focused a lot of Henry's character, and his role as an "educator" particularly.  It's a role he relishes, to the diminishment of Catherine, who Austen memorably describes as having an "affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind."  You can let that trouble you if you wish (it did my professor), but Austen's satire here is so light it's hard to get up-in-arms about Henry's mansplaining.  So light, in fact, it's hard to shake the impression that, if not for the parody, Northanger Abbey would be even more heavily overshadowed by toothier siblings like Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

"A groom must expect matrimonial pandemonium / When his spouse finds he's given her cubic zirconium."

Kenji Yoshimo discusses the criticism of Justice J. Michael Eakin's use of the above couplet in his dissent in the case of Porreco v. Porreco.  In general, Yoshimo disapproves, but concedes that the distinction between law and poetry is not cut-and-dry:

But like every generalization, the idea that law is a serious business while literature is an ornamental pastime has some important exceptions.   Given a culture that seeks to drive a wedge between law and literature, we should not expect legal poems to declare themselves as such.   This is not, however, the same thing as saying such poems do not exist.  

The most famous poem in law is the Miranda warning.   More people can recite this quatrain than can recite the Gettysburg address, much less a quatrain from most poets who were intentionally writing quatrains, like the quite catchy Alexander Pope. The broad dissemination of the warning in our culture through television and film has not just given it force, but affected its Constitutional stature.

Three thoughts:

First, I'm saddened by Yoshimo's premise that literature is an "ornamental pastime."  I think he's right, if you substitute the word "poetry" for "literature," and not because I believe that poetry is by nature nothing more than decorative or aesthetic, but because that is probably a fairly accurate description of poetry as it functions in America today.  Novelists, I think, can still claim to be about something far more serious and socially valuable, but the poet is so marginalized it's hard to imagine one claiming a part in the broader political or social debate without laughing.  ("Say, did you hear what Louise Gluck said about immigration reform?")

Secondly, I really love Yoshimo's description of the Miranda warning as a poem.  Here's how I'd do the enjambment:

You have the right to
remain silent
anything you say
or do
may be used against you
in a court of law

Finally, Yoshimo quotes from Robert Cover's 1986 essay that differentiates literature and law because the latter "deal[s] pain and death."  The suggestion is that the stakes are simply too high to play literary games with.   I'd suggest that that is more or less the right distinction; that the problem blurring the line between literature and law is that literature relies too often on purposeful ambiguities and ironies that make interpretation difficult, while the purpose of law is to eliminate those ambiguities as much as possible.  Yet to think of them as obviously distinct is to ignore the way in which law necessitates interpretation, and the way in which interpreting a legal text is not so different from a literary one.  (Stanley Fish has made a career out of mining this overlap, and Justice Scalia's recent book makes this point right in the subtitle.)

Yet I think implicit in Yoshimo's critique, as well as Cover's, is the distinction between texts that do something--here, something as serious as "pain and death"--and texts that do not.  I'm suspicious of this attitude because, a.) I think it's false (all texts are meant to "do something"), b.) I think it neuters the power of literature, reducing it to being "ornamental" and not just describing it that way, and c.) ignoring the fact that law is explicitly textual and without force in and of itself does us no favors.  To put it another way, the great difference in the power of a legal poem and a literary one is that no one puts in you in handcuffs while they read the latter.

Yoshimo ends his discussion by noting that "The Greeks embodied law-like mores in poetry to ensure their broad dissemination in an oral culture."  Sure, but Yoshimo is still thinking of law and poetry as essentially separate activities in a way that might have been lost on an ancient Greek.  He does, however, remind us that there was once a time in which poetry did have the kind of illocutionary power that's lost to it now.

Can poetry deal "pain and death" today?  This might be a logical leap, but Yoshimo's article made me think of Robert Oppenheimer, who commented on successfully detonating an atomic bomb with a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, which is, of course, a poem: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

I assume that if Justice Eakin had said something like that, nobody would have batted an eye.  Maybe next time he should avoid the silly, three-syllable feminine rhyme.

P.S. I am not a lawyer, but some of you (Billy, Randy, Kunal...) are--what did you think about Yoshimo's piece?

Sister Cat by Frances Mayes

Two years ago in April, I tried to do a project on this blog where I blogged about a poem I liked every day of April, which is National Poetry Month, obvi.  (Here are the archives of that project.)  I didn't quite make every day, but I was able to get to 25 poems or so, and I really enjoyed the process, which made me go out and seek poetry I otherwise would never have read and think more deeply about the poems I already loved.  I don't have the time or energy to duplicate that project this year (it's the 12th already, after all), but I thought I might post about a few poems throughout April that I've come to read and love in the past two years.

With that purpose in mind, here's a poem I found recently, called "Sister Cat" by Frances Mayes:

Cat stands at the fridge,
Cries loudly for milk.
But I've filled her bowl.
Wild cat, I say, Sister,
Look, you have milk.
I clink my fingernail
Against the rim. Milk.
With down and liver,
A word I know she hears.
Her sad miaow. She runs
To me. She dips
In her whiskers but
Doesn't drink. As sometimes
I want the light on
When it is on. Or when
I saw the woman walking
toward my house and
I thought there's Frances.
Then looked in the car mirror
To be sure. She stalks
The room. She wants. Milk
Beyond milk. World beyond
This one, she cries.

"Sister Cat" was published on Poetry 180, a compilation of "plain-language" poems put together by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins with the goal of having them read aloud in schools.  (A school year typically has 180 days, which for those of you keeping track at home, means that school teachers spend less than half the year in the classrom.  Lazy bums!)  The poems are meant to be read and appreciated, not prodded and dissected, and for that reason they're mostly highly readable and accessible.

But I saw a lot of students have trouble with "Sister Cat."  Why?  There is a sentiment being expressed in this poem that I have often felt, but which I've rarely seen talked about in literature: that uncanny feeling that, when you get the things you want, you can't shake the desire for them.  That's about more than just being unsatisfied with the fulfillment of your wants and needs, and it's excruciatingly difficult to talk about.  Why are we so lonely even in the presence of friends and loved ones?  Why do we want "Milk / beyond milk?"  There is a feeling--perhaps you've felt it too--that our desires are mismatched to reality, and their only hope of being satiated is a "World beyond / This one."

What I discovered is that this is not a feeling that eighteen-year olds understand.  Perhaps they haven't had the exoerience of the strange disappointment of fulfilmment; probably they still hold on to those tenacious fantasies about growing up, going out, and reaching a state of achieved happiness.  I still hold on to those fantasies too sometimes.  When they find out just how elusive those states can be, I hope they'll remember this poem, but I doubt it.

"In a letter written by Dostoevsky to an old friend sixteen years later, the writer of so many great confession scenes depicted Dickens baring his creative soul..."

“...All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. ‘Only two people?’ I asked.”

Hell of a story, that--almost too good to be true.  In fact, appeared in several biographies of Dickens before anyone noticed that it was certain to be false.  But who invented it, and why?

In The Times Literary Supplement, Eric Naiman traces the history of this hoax.  The truth is, shockingly, even more fascinating than the lie.  What Naiman uncovers seems to be a single disaffected scholar who has created a labyrinthine network of false identities to give his publications--including not only literary criticism but science-fiction, satirical novels, and nipple-themed erotica--an aura of respectability.  Naiman's account seems at first like a story of runaway hubris, but somewhere toward the end, when he writes about how the culprit, using one of his sock puppet aliases, purchased a small brochure for the British Library about his own novel with "no ISBN and held together by staples," it becomes something deeply tragic and extremely fascinating.

Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark

What is truth?  I could have realized these people with my fun and games with their life-stories, while Sir Quentin was destroying them with his needling after frankness.  When people say that nothing happens in their lives I believe them.  But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

Muriel Spark wrote an autobiography in 1992 called Curriculum Vitae.  I haven't read it, but it seems to have been poorly received.  The charge, as I gather from Martin Stannard's biography, is that Spark held her cards too close to her chest; given her prickly reputation and her fetish for authorial control, I believe it.

Loitering with Intent was published eleven years before Curriculum Vitae, but it seems that Spark was already thinking about her own autobiography, and autobiographies in general.  Two of Spark's favorites, those of Cardinal John Henry Newman and Benventuo Cellini, recur throughout Loitering, which is all about the way people write about themselves, and the way that writing, as life, can spin out of control.

Fleur Talbot, trying to support herself while writing a novel, takes a job as a secretary for the Autobiographical Society under the patrician snob Sir Quentin Oliver.  Her task is to edit the memoirs of the Society's members, which are dull, delusional, and poorly written.  Fleur begins to add embellishes to them, turning their lives into fictions.  Spark's accounts of the Society Members are some of her best comic passages:

"Indeed, you have made some very interesting changes.  Indeed, I wondered how you guessed that the butler locked me in the pantry to clean the silver, which he did indeed.  Indeed he did.  But Nanny on the rocking-horse, well, Nanny was a very religious woman.  On my rocking-horse with our butler, indeed, you know.  It isn't the sort of thing Nanny would have done."

"Are you sure?" said Sir Quentin, pointing a coy finger at him.  "How can you be sure if you were locked in the pantry at the time?  In your revised memoir you found out about their prank from a footman.  But if in reality..."

"My rocking-horse was not at all a sizeable one," said Sir Eric Findlay, K.B.E., "and Nanny, though not plump, would hardly fit on with the butler who was, though thin, quite strong."

"If I might voice an opinion," said Mrs. Wilks, "I thought Sir Eric's piece very readable.  It would be a pity to sacrifice the evil nanny and the dastardly butler having their rock on the small horse, and I like particularly the stark realism of the smell of brilliantine on the footman's hair as he bends to tell the small Sir Eric-that-was of his discovery.  It explains so much the Sir-Eric-that-is."

But Sir Quentin has something nefarious up his sleeve, and soon the manuscript of Fleur's novel goes missing, and then the lives of the Autobiographical Society begin mimicking its plot.  Spark keeps the mechanism of these events ambiguous--clearly Sir Quentin is manipulating them to some extent, but even Fleur admits that the members of the Society bear a remarkable likeness to her characters, who were created before she even took the job.  The line between recording a life and creating it through writing is never clear, and Spark seems to be wondering which of the two we are actually doing when we write about ourselves.

It is tempting to read Fleur as the author's stand-in and Loitering as a kind of autobiography.  Stannard points out how many of the details of Fleur's life are adapted from Spark's own.  Fleur's discovery that (spoiler alert) Sir Quentin has been feeding the members hallucinatory Dexedrine mirrors Spark's own issues with the diet pill, which caused her to believe, for a time, that T. S. Eliot was subliminally threatening her through his works.  But such a reading never coheres, and Spark seems to be daring us to fall into this trap.

Yet, Loitering is a fascinating glimpse into Spark's thinking about writing.  I am certain that, on that subject, Fleur and Spark are the same.  "No matter what is described," Fleur tells us, "it seems to me a sort of hypocrisy for a writer to pretend to be undergoing tragic experiences when obviously one is sitting in relative comfort with pen and paper or before a typewriter."  That explains so much of the Muriel-that-was.  And: "I've come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little."  And then there's the last sentence of the passage I opened this review with, which I'm going to repeat, because it's just so, so good:

But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.