If you’d asked me yesterday who was America’s greatest living writer, I probably would ultimately have come down for John Updike; as the Wikipedia article on him puts it, “Updike was widely recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his highly stylistic writing, and his prolific output, having published more than twenty-five novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children’s books.” He seemed to do everything, as a writer, and if not always brilliantly, he consistently managed to do it with insight and wit. I particularly appreciate his willingness to be unfashionable in his opinions (as seen for instance in his piece “On Not Being a Dove”). Like the rest of his contemporaries, he was no longer at his best as a writer, but his death today of lung cancer is a great loss to the republic of American letters—with his independence of mind, I think, being the greatest loss of all.
Category Archives: Books
The Great Books perspective on Harry Potter
There’s an interesting article up on Touchstone by a chap named John Granger, the author of several books on Harry Potter who’s a graduate of the University of Chicago, analyzing Rowling’s books as “the ‘shared text’ of the twenty-first century.” This is a more significant statement than it might seem, coming from a former student of Allan Bloom, who argued “that ‘shared books’ are the foundation of culture, politics, and individual thinking; as such, Granger is arguing—quoting Chuck Klosterman in Esquire—that
Over time, these novels (and whatever ideas lie within them) will come to represent the mainstream ethos of our future popular culture.
Klosterman thinks that’s a bad thing, but Granger strongly disagrees:
Before meeting Allan Bloom and, through him, the Western canon, my friends and I were a sarcastic and self-absorbed, if good-hearted lot, nourished on stories that were only diversion and dissipation. I have to think my children are better prepared and more willing to embrace that tradition than I was because of their years of instruction at Hogwarts castle. . . .I struggle to think of any fictional work of the last two or three centuries that had the potential to shape the cultural and political agendas of its time as this one does. Dickens’s crusading social novels? Uncle Tom’s Cabin? The Jungle? Harry Potter differs from these in that the others ignited a latent Christian conscience. The Potter novels help foster one into existence. . . .From this text, we can build a conversation about virtue and vice, and about what reading does to the right-side-up soul. From it, too, we can take an invitation to go on to even better books—ones that our grandparents’ great-grandparents had in common, and others that our children may one day write. Hasten the day!
It’s an interesting argument, and I think he may be on to something. It’s certainly worth considering seriously.
Wise words on pride
Pride is a blossom of ashes—bitter in the mouth, sharp to the nose, stinging to the eyes, and blown away on the first wind from the mountains. Plant no pride, lest you harvest shame.—Proverb of AltiplanoThis proverb (and the whole society of Altiplano) comes from Elizabeth Moon’s novel Once a Hero; Moon’s one of the better writers of military science fiction around, and this is one of her best. I note the irony of posting a proverb from a fictional society so soon after posting the title sequence for a non-existent sitcom, but for all that it was created in the service of a Secondary World (to use Tolkien’s term), it has the ring of old truth, and is well worth remembering.
On the limitations of computers
This is Bill James again, from his comment on the Oakland A’s in the 1984 Baseball Abstract; the essay was republished in This Time Let’s Not Eat the Bones: Bill James Without the Numbers under the title “On Computers in Baseball,” which is where I have it. Nearly a quarter-century after he first wrote this, it still seems to me to be as true as ever.
The main thing that you are struck with in the process of learning about a computer is how incredibly stupid it is. The machine simulates intelligence so well that when you accidentally slip through a crack in its simulations and fall to the floor of its true intelligence, you are awed by the depth of the fall. You give it a series of a hundred or a thousand sensible commands, and it executes each of them in turn, and then you press a wrong key and accidentally give it a command which goes counter to everything that you have been trying to do, and it will execute that command in a millisecond, just as if you had accidentally hit the wrong button on your vacuum cleaner at the end of your cleaning and it had instantly and to your great surprise sprayed the dirt you had collected back into the room. And you feel like, “Jeez, machine, you ought to know I didn’t mean that. What do you think I’ve been doing here for the last hour?” And then you realize that that machine has not the foggiest notion of what you are trying to do, any more than your vacuum cleaner does. The machine, you see, is nothing: it is utterly, truly, totally nothing.
And you think bureaucracy is bad now
I’ve been reading David Hamilton-Williams’ book Waterloo: New Perspectives: The Great Battle Reappraised, which I picked up used some time ago on a flyer; it’s a controverted work and I’m no expert in Napoleonic history, so I don’t claim to pronounce on the accuracy of the author’s conclusions, but it’s an interesting read. One of the things which struck me was his account of the screwy bureaucratic structure under which the British army labored, and the ways in which it hampered military operations. I don’t think one needs to know much about the Peninsular War (the 1807-13 war in Portugal and Spain; Arthur Wellesley took command of the British forces in 1809 and was eventually created Duke of Wellington for his success) to understand this letter from Wellington to the War Office which the book quotes:
Gentlemen: Whilst marching to Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your request which has been sent by H.M. ship from London to Lisbon and then by dispatch rider to our headquarters. We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents, and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, spleen of every officer. Each Item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg you your indulgence. Unfortunately, the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstances since we are at war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall. This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government, so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of the alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue one with the best of my ability but I cannot do both. 1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London, or perchance, 2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.
From the library
A couple days ago, I pulled The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract off the shelf for a little light reading, and was interested to run across this item (the title is original):
YOU’D HAVE A HECK OF A TIME PROVING HE WAS WRONGIn 1960 Jackie Robinson went to visit both of the presidential candidates, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. He endorsed Nixon. In 1964 Robinson worked for Barry Goldwater. He felt that Lyndon Johnson, by politicizing the race issue, would ultimately undermine support for civil rights—as, of course, he did. Robinson realized that civil rights gains could not continue without the support of both political parties. “It would make everything I worked for meaningless,” Robinson told Roger Kahn, “if baseball is integrated but political parties were segregated.”
Make of that what you will, but Jackie Robinson was nobody’s fool. I’m reminded of the question someone asked recently (I don’t remember where I read it), would Americans have been so ready to elect Barack Obama to the White House if they hadn’t grown used to seeing first Colin Powell and then Condoleeza Rice on the news every night as Secretary of State?
A geopolitical reconsideration of the Council of Elrond
Have you ever wondered whether it was wise of Elrond to commit the Elves to the coalition fighting the Global War on Sauron? Given the results for the Elves, might it not have been better to hold themselves back from the GWOS and seek a negotiated peace? After all, unlike those hasty, testosterone-poisoned Men and militaristic Dwarves, the Elves had the historical perspective to understand Sauron’s rightful grievances; shouldn’t they have accepted their duty to meet with Sauron without preconditions in an effort to hear his concerns and reach a solution with which everyone could be happy? Certainly, the Elves had the historical perspective to see the longstanding racism and other deep-seated sins of their coalition partners, and of their own community as well; how could they commit themselves to such bloodshed for the sake of such a thoroughly flawed set of societies when the path of peace was available to them?If these considerations have ever bothered you, or if you’re sufficiently open-minded to give them their proper weight, know that you are not alone; a distinguished panel of geopolitical experts recently sat down to discuss them. Their conversation merits serious attention from all thoughtful students of international relations and the history of warfare.
Tolkien, story, and the incarnation of virtue
Doug Hagler is, as he says, in the process of spinning down his blog Prog(ressive)nostications, which is too bad; but he’s still posting some good stuff. In particular, I appreciate his recent post of a paper on “Tolkien and Virtue Ethics,” which is well worth reading if you’re interested in either Tolkien or ethics, or the meaning of virtue, or in the power of story to communicate truth, or any combination thereof. It’s an academic paper, and thus a bit more formal, but don’t let that deter you—Doug has some important things to say. Here’s his beginning:
Aquinas, Keenan and others offer modified versions of Aristotle’s system of virtues, but they do so outside of the context of a narrative. Their virtue systems are presented and applied to various problems and subsequently analyzed, but life is not breathed into them. In order to do that, one requires a story. (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 121)One might argue that for Christians, that story is salvation history as expressed in scripture, but this is not quite the narrative that a virtue ethic requires. A virtue ethic requires a story of ennoblement, wherein the virtues espoused are demonstrated to function. Scripture, on the other hand, is a wildly various collection of ancient genres of writing, usually seen as whole but not composed as a whole. Aristotle’s culture, in contrast, was steeped in these heroic and epic stories (Ibid, 122-125) constituting a rich storytelling tradition, the surviving fragments of which we still treasure thousands of years later.It is my contention that, despite the great interruption in the development of virtue ethics, which MacIntyre identifies as the entire experiment of modernity, this storytelling tradition continues to this day. The difference is that we do not identify it as such, and it is not widely used as a source for virtue ethics. But we are still steeped in our own stories of ennoblement, and these can be a source for our ethical reflection in the context of virtue ethics.The example I will focus on is the corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien, with specific focus on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, with reference to this other works, books, essays and letters. Tolkien is a potentially superb example of modern stories as living virtue ethics because he is in an interesting position. On the one hand, he is steeped in the heroic storytelling of northern Europe—the languages, traditions, cultures and so on, from Beowulf to the Elder Edda to the Kalevala. He also set out, particularly in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, to create stories which reflected his own Catholicism (Carpenter, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 172), including the tradition of Catholic moral theology in the tradition of Aquinas. Finally, his stories are avidly devoured by millions of fans worldwide, and have been adapted many times into various media since their publication. (Endnote 1) It seems that there is a clear potential here for one to find living, breathing virtues expressly located in modern storytelling.
Indeed. Check it out.
Sense of place and the global economy
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Richard Florida and his book Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, but he makes an interesting argument:
It’s a mantra of the age of globalization that where you live doesn’t matter: you can telecommute to your high-tech Silicon Valley job, a ski-slope in Idaho, a beach in Hawaii or a loft in Chicago; you can innovate from Shanghai or Bangalore.According to Richard Florida, this is wrong. Place is not only important, it’s more important than ever.Globalization is not flattening the world; on the contrary, the world is spiky. Place is becoming more relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. The choice of where to live, therefore, is not an arbitrary one. It is arguably the most important decision we make, as important as choosing a spouse or a career. In fact, place exerts powerful influence over the jobs and careers we have access to, the people meet and our “mating markets” and our ability to lead happy and fulfilled lives.
Intuitively, this makes sense to me, because (as Florida puts it in the first chapter of his book, excerpted here)
The place we choose to live affects every aspect of our being. It can determine the income we earn, the people we meet, the friends we make, the partners we choose, and the options available to our children and families. People are not equally happy everywhere, and some places do a better job of providing a high quality of life than others. Some places offer us more vibrant labor markets, better career prospects, higher real estate appreciation, and stronger investment and earnings opportunities. Some places offer more promising mating markets. Others are better environments for raising children.
Even if the sense of place our ancestors had is indeed fading away, Florida’s right that place matters, in and of itself; that’s the reason sense of place developed to begin with, and the reason that even as we become more moble and mix ourselves up more and more, different places still have different identities and characters and subcultures (and sub-subcultures). Given that, and given our need to belong, and our need for self-definition, I suspect that while our sense of place may evolve somewhat and weaken with the mobility of our society, it may look different in our children and grandchildren, but it will never really disappear. Who knows—add in the tendency of each generation to react against the generation before, we may even see a resurgence, and an intentional effort to recreate an older, more settled form of community. It would be nice.HT: Chris Forbes
Barack Obama, writer?
It would never have occurred to me to ask whether or not Sen. Obama wrote the books attributed to him; but as the Anchoress points out, writers write. It’s what they do, because the need to write drives them. If circumstances are such that they have little time or energy to spare from the other demands of life, they may write very little, but when they can, what they can, they write.Which does raise the reasonable question: do we see that kind of drive in Sen. Obama’s life? Put another way, do the existence and quality of his books (and particularly Dreams from My Father) square with the rest of his writing career? We know Barack Obama wrote virtually nothing for the Harvard Law Review despite serving a term as its president; we know that at Occidental College, he wrote some truly awful poetry; and we know that when it comes to any other evidence of his ability as a writer—”a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis”—that he’s been careful not to let us see it. Jack Cashill argues that on the basis of this evidence, the only reasonable answer to the question is “no”:
Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called—with a straight face—”the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn’t happen.
If Cashill’s skepticism is correct, this might seem a curiosity; it’s not exactly a major literary scandal, after all. Indeed, in the realm of political ghostwriting, it would be at most a distant second to JFK accepting the Pulitzer for Profiles in Courage. If Cashill’s analysis, which is close and compelling but not conclusive, is correct that Barack Obama’s ghostwriter was none other than Bill Ayers, that would certainly give the lie to his efforts to deny any kind of close relationship between the two of them, but again, it’s not like there’s any great wrongdoing here. The fact that this question can be not only raised but convincingly argued, however, is a reminder of one very serious issue with the Obama campaign: even after all these months, despite the books, we still don’t really know all that much about Barack Obama, let alone feel like we know him—and he’s done everything he possibly can since bursting on the national scene to keep it that way.