BTW

I have a million things--at least three years worth? probably more, I think that's an unrealistic estimate--to write first, but I do think that my next academic book is going to be a cross-over kind of thing, short and smart and elegant (I hope, anyway) without a lot of footnotes, that addresses some of the questions raised by Garry Wills in the short piece called "The End of the Enlightenment?" that he published as an editorial in the NYT the day after the presidential election this fall. This is Wills: "The results bring to mind a visit the Dalai Lama made to Chicago not long ago. I was one of the people deputized to ask him questions on the stage at the Field Museum. He met with the interrogators beforehand and asked us to give him challenging questions, since he is too often greeted with deference or flattery. The only one I could think of was: 'If you could return to your country, what would you do to change it?' He said that he would disestablish his religion, since 'America is the proper model.' I later asked him if a pluralist society were possible without the Enlightenment. 'Ah,' he said. 'That's the problem.' He seemed to envy America its Enlightenment heritage. Which raises the question: Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation? America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values - critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity. They addressed 'a candid world,' as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, out of 'a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.' Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the elections showed that 75 percent of Mr. Bush's supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11. In his victory speech yesterday, President Bush indicated that he would 'reach out to the whole nation,' including those who voted for John Kerry. But even if he wanted to be more conciliatory now, the constituency to which he owes his victory is not a yielding one. He must give them what they want on things like judicial appointments. His helpers are also his keepers. The moral zealots will, I predict, give some cause for dismay even to nonfundamentalist Republicans. Jihads are scary things. It is not too early to start yearning back toward the Enlightenment."

This isn't what my book will be like, of course. (And I disagree with Wills's analysis, though I share some of his yearning for the Enlightement--sometimes to my own chagrin.) I want to write a book that will really explain what people mean now when they talk about the Enlightenment, what the political freight of the term might be in different contexts and how it came to be so ideologically loaded. (The critique of Enlightenment from the left--singling out the corrupt core of "universalist" values"--ended up colluding with the critique of Enlightenment from the right--its purported neglect of the religious in preference for the polemically secular--in ways that have had really awful consequences.) The project will make me read a lot of stuff I'll learn from, historians talking about the Enlightenment in France and Germany as well as things like the Federalist Papers that I've only really dipped into so far. Anyway, just a late-night meditation on future projects...

I have just spent a decadent

and delightful evening rereading one of my very short-list absolute favorite novels of all time, James Baldwin's Just Above My Head. It's one of those novels that you really want to weep when you finish, partly because it's so moving but mostly just because you can't believe it's over. David Copperfield always makes me feel this way, and my very beloved The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West. It combines the best elements of his essay-writing (and of course Baldwin's essays are just superb, I think that's really his most fundamental mode) with the best of novel-writing in a way that I don't think his other fiction really does. Books like Giovanni's Room and Another Country are impressive but just don't have the same satisfactions as this one--I wish more people would read it, and teach it (though I imagine its length and its sort of waywardness in terms of formal structure and its relatively late publication date make it much less likely to be taught in college classes than those others).

And one more gripe

I haven't found a link to post to, since the online "Editors' Choice" at the NYTBR seems rather more ecumenical, but the print version just made me have a majorly Cupcake moment. So this is the print list of the editors' "other recent books of particular interest": David Riggs, World of Christopher Marlowe; Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, De Kooning biography; Amoz Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness; Michael Kauffman's biography of John Wilkes Booth; the New Yorker Cartoons book; selected letters of Tennessee Williams; Richard Overy's book about Hitler and Stalin; Max Hastings book about the last stages of WWII; George Plimpton's "The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair" (self-explanatory); Warren St John's "Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania"; and Bob Cowser's "Dream Season: a Professor Joins America's Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team." DOES ANYTHING STRIKE YOU ABOUT THIS LIST OF CHOICES?!?! It's not that I think these lists really have a major impact. But come on, guys. Could this be more male-slanted? And why no books on science, psychology, biology--the stuff that's really good and where I don't care if the authors/subjects are male or female? This focus on sports, American political history and male-dominated Arts and Letters (Marlowe, De Kooning, Oz and Williams are cool and all, but STILL...) is really alienating.

I realize

that this griping about the NYTBR is quite pointless--and I don't disagree with the idea that they should review "popular" fiction--but I can't believe they gave a full page to Alan Dershowitz writing about John Grisham's latest! It includes a description of Richard North Patterson as "our best contemporary political novelist"...?!?!?

The full review is here, and this is the paragraph that just blew my mind: "There are few writers today capable of producing political novels of the quality of those once written by C. P. Snow and Alan Drury. Our best contemporary political novelist, Richard North Patterson, spends months interviewing the politicians upon whom he loosely bases his characters. He also masters the political issues he writes about -- abortion, gun control, capital punishment. Compared with Patterson's likelife presidents, senators, congressmen and lobbyists, Grisham's political characters are stick figures -- entirely predictable stereotypes without flesh and blood."

Tales of the Otori

I've just read a most wonderful trilogy of books by Lian Hearn (a pseudonym for the Australian children's author Gillian Rubinstein), Tales of the Otori. I liked the very first one the most, Across the Nightingale Floor, but the second--Grass for His Pillow--and third--The Brilliance of the Moon--are both excellent as well. The setting is really well and fully imagined (it's a kind of fantasy feudal Japan, but pretty soundly historically based as far as I can tell) and the prose style is superb--plain and clear but very striking as well. This is the big shortcoming of many even quite good fantasy tales, and it's what made these books a particular pleasure to read. You can see the author drawn more and more strongly towards a kind of historical saga-writing that's not exactly my cup of tea, but these books are EXCELLENT. In fact, pretty much what I always walk into the Bank Street Bookstore every month to look for--I have this deep conviction that somehow since the last time I went in two or three really wonderful new YA fantasy trilogies will have appeared on the shelves, and I am always disappointed since I've read the good ones already. That's why I wrote Dynamite No. 1 (which awaits one more round of revision--however I've made headway with all my other work, so I think I can start with this tomorrow)--it's the book I most want to read and fail to find. In fact I had a strong fellow feeling for Hearn as I read these novels--on the surface they're COMPLETELY different from what I'm working on (my novel's set in an alternate-universe 1930s Edinburgh, featuring a sort of melange of science and technology and spiritualism that is very much grounded in real history but also in practical rather than mystical things), but the underlying interests are remarkably similar. I am delighted with these books! I gather that Hearn's written 2 more volumes but hasn't yet decided whether to publish them. I really hope she does.

Stop....

I really can't seem to stop reading novels now I've started. It's reprehensible. I read an excellent one last night, though, a recommendation from Sarah Weinman: Peter Temple's Identity Theory. It's fabulous! I am outraged that this is the guy's first novel to be published in the US; Australian-published fiction is surprisingly difficult to get hold of over here. (I rely on various university libraries that are linked by BorrowDirect to Columbia's for a lot of the British and Irish fiction I read; at least a few of these libraries regularly buy the lists of small presses like Serpent's Tail and so on, not just the big-name ones like Faber etc. All these libraries usually have two copies of new novels that would have been published first in the UK, for instance--there will be the UK and the US editions of someonelike Kate Atkinson, in other words. But Australian fiction doesn't seem to be on the radar in the same way. It's a great pity, too. I was terribly thwarted when I couldn't get hold of Emily Maguire's novel earlier this summer--I can't wait for it to come out from Serpent's Tail.) Anyway, someone should buy up his earlier list & bring them all out directly to paperback & sell huge numbers of copies. He's a really good writer, and it's a really complex but well-worked-out plot that had me wondering whether I could try to write something like that, which is always a good sign.

I also saw a not-particularly-good production of Chekhov's Three Sisters: it had some good ideas, but the gimmicks quickly grew old. I was disappointed--it had sounded pretty interesting beforehand.

And I am in the throes of this Leslie Farber fixation--I think I won't really write anything much here, I really must try and write some kind of an essay about all this, but here are a few thoughts. EVERYONE should read Farber's essays--the most readily available collection is The Ways of the Will (a selected/expanded edition). My favorite is the one called "Lying on the Couch," which seems to me both brilliant and absolutely obvious, so that you can't believe nobody ever saw it like this before. Here's a brief quotation, just to give the taste of it: "Revelation is addictive because the pursuit of the esthetic--at the expense of the accurate--is essentially coarsening. Ordinary, fragmentary truth, on a more modest scale, appears by contrast trivial and inadequate--appears, in short, untrue, sincce it so conspicuously lacks the splendor and intensity of feeling by which one has come to recognize the validity of revelation. In this way one's assumptions about truth fasten on the revelatory, and this habit of discovery quickly becomes addictive." And also of great, great interest to almost anyone who cares about good prose/mental illness/ethics and the intellect is Emily Fox Gordon's memoir about her treatment by Farber (it's about other things too, but that's its moral center), Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy. It is absolutely wonderful! I loved it. I read it in a single sitting, it's extremely addictive. It has some obvious points in common with Girl, Interrupted but it's a completely different kind of book.

Interesting article

by Stanley Fish in the Chronicle, on the rise of religion and the history of separation of church and state. This touches on things I'm thinking about for my next book--though at the rate I'm going, I'm never going to finish either of the books I'm working on now & there won't be a next book at all... but I think it will be something more crossover, less academic, a book about the Enlightenment that will explain how and why that term is so often invoked in contemporary American political discourse (usually as something that has just recently ended, with the rise of militant Islam and fundamentalist Christianity).

Two detective novels

and I didn't enjoy either of them very much (which probably means that it's time for me to STOP WASTING MY TIME READING NOVELS and get properly back to work--funny how quickly self-indulgence goes from being enjoyable to being a torment). The first was Simon Kernick's The Murder Exchange, which I didn't like nearly as much as his first one. The writing felt a bit flat and neither of the two first-person narrators really came to life. It picked up a bit towards the end, though. The second was Peter Robinson's Playing with Fire, which was pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Perfectly fine, but nothing special. I must confess that I always have to remind myself that Robinson is not the same writer as Reginald Hill, their detectives (Alan Banks for Robinson, Peter Pascoe for Hill) seem to be cut so much from the same cloth.

"God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap"

John Brockman asked various scientists about what they believed in but couldn't prove; the NYT prints some of those answers, including a really sweet one by David Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas (and here's the link for the article):

I've spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I've documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I've discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I've studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I've remained unwavering in my belief in true love.
While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It's difficult to define, eludes modern measurement and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can't prove it.

Uncharacteristically

I read a book of poetry, Craig Dworkin's Dure, a sort of meditation on a strange and compelling image of Durer's. Favorite sentence: "Lips lie parched and parcel where a tremble meant tear, or cheer, depending on the tongue." My friend MG loaned it to me after I was pigheadedly talking about how I never read any poetry. (Which I don't. If I'm going to read something that asks you to consume it in small chunks on which you then ruminate, I would rather read something like this or this or this. However honesty compels me to admit that 99 times out of a hundred I will just be reading a novel anyway.) I will seek out Dworkin's other books, though; I liked this one a lot.

Further restoration

of my mental health: just finished Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel, Going Postal. Good stuff. Another find on the new-book shelf at the local public library branch: I often lurk there just after the new year to see if they've got any books that could be called new rather than just "new." (Public library users will take my point.) If I was a gazillionaire I would make a huge donation towards the book-buying budgets for the branch libraries, so that they'd really have all the exciting new books, and then give them enough money that they could stay open for 50 hours a week and have programs for kids after-school. I love libraries.

A mental health day

I decided this morning that I had to have one more day of reading novels before returning to work. Happily I found Jennifer Weiner's Little Earthquakes at the public library; I thought it was quite good but will be more interesting to people with children than without. Also finished Adam Phillips' Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories, which was excellent (another recommendation from Ken Bruen). A taste of it: "If mortality was a flaw, or a punishment, we were always verging on humiliation. Tyrannical fantasies of our own perfectibility still lurk in even our simplest ideals, Darwin and Freud intimate, so that any ideal can become another excuse for punishment. Lives dominated by impossible ideals--complete honesty, absolute knowledge, perfect happiness, eternal love--are lives experienced as continuous failure." I also dipped into his collection Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis. I got it because I wanted to read the essay on Leslie Farber, who I've been interested in recently, and read most of the essays that didn't have directly to do with poetry. Especially good: "On Translating a Person"; "On Eating, and Preferring Not To"; "Farber's Quibble"; "Christopher Hill's Revolution and Me"; and my favorite, "Sameness is All" (I'd read this one before, it's about cloning, but it struck me more this time round). Here is Phillips on a teenage patient of his who fantasizes about having a girlfriend who will be his clone: "The fantasy of the clone girlfriend--not exactly a rarity--was for this boy an all-purpose magical solution. A way of preempting what you do about, or with, the parts of yourself that have nothing 'in common' with an object of desire. What is of interest is that the (narcissistic) solution of creating absolute sameness--the clone--unconsciously kills desire. The fantasy of cloning a girlfriend is a fantasy of not needing a girlfriend. The exact replication of the self mrerely replicates the problem."

Phillips is a great writer, but he provokes strong feelings in me, ones that often come up when I read psychoanalytically inclined critics & that clearly themselves represent some kind of a symptom. I really admire this guy's intellect & style and yet I want to wrestle with it; I have an irritable feeling of wanting to copy-edit and wrench his thoughts into the way I'd say them. Reading his prose definitely brings out my competitive instincts, and my critical ones (he's got a few annoying mannerisms that could be helpfully eradicated--those awful locutions like "as it were" and "so to speak" and the habit of bracketing thoughts between dashes even before he's really got going on a sentence). And this is comical--I fell asleep after reading these essays and had a sort of half-waking dream where I was sure that at the end of the volume was Phillips's reprinted review of my novel Heredity! Which he has of course never seen or read. I'd be interested to hear what he would think of it, though. Don't I sound like a wretched egomaniac today? Now I must go and read another novel I think. Or perhaps do a bit of work--I must write my review of Malcolm Gladwell's new book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking; and I must finish commenting on my graduate students' papers from the fall semester; and I must... but this is defeating the purpose of my mental health day.

Miscellaneous reading

What with holidays and MLA stuff, I haven't had much time for reading. However I do seem to have read a few books here and there, including some very good ones. First of all, my friend Seth Mnookin's account of the structural and institutional factors at the NY Times that led to the Jayson Blair episode, Hard News, is absolutely wonderful! It's a great read. I have no particular interest in media stuff, but I'm fascinated with the way that institutional and human factors converge to make a place (a company, a school, a university, a church, a government) great or troubled. And Seth comes through in spades. Buy it. Also really excellent (well, we could have predicted that) is Stephen Elliott's Looking Forward to It, an account of his year following the Democratic presidential candidates up to the election. It's hilarious! It's a crime if this guy doesn't write more novels, though--I am eagerly awaiting whatever he publishes next. Miscellaneous others: Stella Duffy's Fresh Flesh (the best of the series so far, I think); Margery Allingham's Traitor's Purse (which I've read a gazillion times before & which holds some strange fascination for me, as do her other novels--I don't think they're good, exactly, but there's something terribly appealing about them in all their strangeness); Augusten Burroughs' Magical Thinking (a good read but slight; there are a few really fantastic pieces in this collection but they're not up to the standard of either of his full-length memoirs, both of which I found extremely rewarding reads, albeit in rather different ways); and In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner, whose blog I love. I bought the last at the train station in Philadelphia and it made the ride back to NY pass in a flash. She's a really good writer. I don't think this is as good as her first novel, Good In Bed, but still a very fun read. (My brothers worked on the movie version which was of course filmed in Philadelphia, and were quite as scathing as usual about the story and the production.) Weiner is definitely the best of her kind; in the end, I'm just not that interested in boy-meets-girl stories, or in "pretty on the inside" stories, but I will continue to read her fiction with great enjoyment, and I'm curious to see what she comes out with next. My great reading disappointment of the last few months--and I still haven't finished it, which doesn't speak well--was Jonathan Stroud's sequel to the first novel in the Bartimeus trilogy, The Golem's Eye. I really liked the first one--wonderful writing, really stylish and funny and sort of the anti-Harry Potter because the talented young magician is also selfish, ethically bankrupt, all-round smarmy and horrible in a really wonderful way--but this one just didn't work for me. I think the key difference between YA fiction and adult fantasy, aside from questions of sensibility, concerns style--Susan Cooper really is a genius and the way she did those Dark Is Rising books was amazing. What I'm getting at here in a roundabout way is that the point of the multivolume YA fantasy is that you DON'T write a Dickensian multi-plot novel; instead, you split up characters' stories into different volumes. Philip Pullman does something similar, although he is more ambitious in weaving different stories together. But Stroud gives us way too many different strands in this sequel, and I would much rather have had it split up into (1) vol. 2 for Kitty's story; (2) vol. 3 for Nathaniel's story and (3) vol. 4 for Bartimeus's angle on all this stuff, and then have a resounding fifth volume that wraps up all the strands. However I expect I will finish reading this over the next few days to see what I think of the rest of it.

A most magical and delightful book

Just finished Matt Ruff's Fool on the Hill. I can't believe I didn't read it sooner! Somebody must have told me about it long ago but I never read it till now. And it is EXCELLENT. It gives me vague and positive feelings about the kind of novel I would really like to write in time (unfortunately I am a slow learner when it comes to fiction, it is taking me a million years to get to be a good writer). It reminds me of Jonathan Carroll (only with a vision of the world that's much closer to mine, partly because it's so much less involved with a romantic story of a man and a woman coming together) and Robin McKinley and Neil Gaiman and various others I really like who write on the edge of fantasy and realism, books that are as satisfying in terms of character and setting and style as any other kind of novel but have that intangible thing that delights you from when you first read the Chronicles of Narnia or its equivalent.

And I've got a reasonable draft of my MLA paper. And I've done all laundry and picked up dry-cleaning and gotten Xmas presents and generally prepared for a more-sociable-than-usual stint in Philadelphia with family and then MLA-related things. So things look a bit rosier than they did earlier in the week... My only wish for tomorrow is that Penn Station (terrorist/fire hazard par excellence) not be thronged tomorrow morning as it was on Thanksgiving!

My grandfather

My grandfather died on Thanksgiving, aged 94. Here are a few obituaries, rather belatedly: Richard Robbins in the Guardian;the Times and an addendum by my uncle Patrick;the Independent (requires a subscription).