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Hooper Goes Hollywood
What a comfort it is to learn that the makers of the new Brideshead Revisited tried to ignore the famous mini-series and "return to the book" for inspiration. This act of fidelity to what Waugh wrote would be slightly more impressive if they had actually decided to adapt what they found in its pages, rather than ... well, I'll let the filmmakers tell it:
As much as it is a story about a lost period of English history — a final shining moment before everything changed forever — “Brideshead” is a novel about the inexorable pull of Catholicism. The issues it raises are particularly relevant now, Mr. Brock said, though viewers may interpret what they see differently depending on the role of faith in their own lives ...
“In that tug between individual freedom and fundamentalist religion, there’s a story that’s apposite for our time,” Mr. Brock said. “In the modern age that’s something we’re all dealing with.”
...
An important divergence in tone from Waugh’s novel, Mr. Jarrold said, comes in the closing scene, when Charles — now back at Brideshead during World War II — talks to Lieutenant Hooper, a fellow soldier who has a rough accent and the forthright views of a modern man unimpressed by the aristocracy. How to portray him led to long discussions about the way that Waugh “is sometimes profoundly undemocratic” and disdainful of Hooper and what he represents, Mr. Jerrold said.
In the book Hooper is “described as a traveling salesman with a wet handshake,” he said. “But he’s the future of England, and the hope of the 1945 generation, and we’ve put a positive spin on him.”
We’ve put a positive spin on him ... I love it! And so would Waugh, I suspect, since the two men sound, frankly, less like real-life Hollywood boobs than like Wavian caricatures of the same. Catholicism is wicked and fundamentalist, Hooper is the hope of the future - but of course they're being very faithful to the book!
The Shock Doctrine
Speaking of the perfidious Chait, his essay on Naomi Klein in the latest TNR is pretty damn good.
The Case of the Hundred-Dollar Paperback
Mick Sussman has a really interesting (to me, at least) post at the Times's Paper Cuts blog about the phenomenon of used books that seem to be vastly overpriced on Amazon - a post prompted by his attempt to purchase Rick Perlstein's unjustly out-of-print Before the Storm, which is currently priced at $131.09 for a paperback, and (oddly) only $89 for a hardcover. I bought Perlstein's book used myself, a couple years back, but at the point, if memory serves, it was going for a much more reasonable price. (This was before Nixonland came out, of course.) I had a similar experience to Sussman, though, when I needed a copy of Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority; I don't remember exactly how much I spent, but it was something far more obscene than the $47.86 that it currently takes to get a copy.
In the spirit of authorial solidarity, incidentally, I urge anyone who wants to read Before The Storm - which is well worth your time, as I'm sure I've mentioned before - to wait until next summer, when Nation Books plans to bring it back into print. No matter how high the price of a used copy rises, the writer himself doesn't see a dime of it.
Debating GNP
Reihan and I will be discussing Grand New Party with a group of highly intelligent people this week at TPMCafe, so check it out if you dare ...
Credit Where Credit Is Due
Grand New Party draws very heavily on secondary sources, which means not only studies and reports but also books, magazine articles, newspaper columns, and so forth, and as a result we attempted to give nods throughout not only to the direct sources for data, policy ideas, anecdotes, etc., but also to the writers who called them to our attention in the first place. And so I should apologize to Steve Sailer, who correctly suggests that a passage about the UK's crime and illegitimacy rates, which appears on page 161 of GNP, draws on data points that I first encountered in an April 2005 column he wrote about the British working class. I should add that failing to credit Steve for calling the data in question to our attention was entirely my oversight, and not Reihan's; if there's another edition of the book at some point, I'll make sure that the oversight is corrected.
GNP Update
For those who live in Washington and can't get enough Grand New Party (and how could you?), Reihan and I will be doing an AEI event tomorrow at 2 PM, with David Frum and Ruy Teixeira as our interlocutors. (Translation: We'll get grilled.)
Also, since Bill Bennett was kind enough to have us on his show this morning, let me add my voice to the chorus promoting a McCain-Bennett ticket ...
The President's Unconscious
My morning session here at Aspen featured David Brooks talking about the subject of his next book, which will focus on the brain, neuroscience, sociology, politics, and the intersection thereof. He cautioned at the beginning that he's only a quarter of the way through the book, and the talk reflected that fact: It was more a diffuse collection of observations, anecdotes and arguments than a tightly-focused narrative. But even in inchoate form, the morning left me with the distinct impression that this book has the potential to catapult Brooks into Thomas Friedman or Malcolm Gladwell territory - except that unlike, say, Blink it'll actually be good as well. (And yes, I'm feeling pretty favorably disposed toward Brooks right now, so take my sentiment with however much salt you'd like.)
I'll try to post some video later (we're hoping to splice together highlights of these panels), but for now I'd just like to pluck out one politically-salient observation he made. Brooks talked a lot about the unconscious, likening the mind to a boy riding an elephant - the boy is your conscious mind, the elephant is everything else, and you need to really understand elephants to know what's going on. This point segued, among many other digressions, into a discussion of how unconscious mental structures affect politicians, and here Brooks brought up President Bush, and remarked that in all of his conversations with the President he'd always been struck by the extent to which Bush seemed (unconsciously, in ways he'd never articulate if pressed) to think of decisions in terms of fifty-year time horizons - almost as if he couldn't conceive of political action except in long-run terms. I'm paraphrasing a bit here, and this might not be exactly what Brooks meant, but I think it's an interesting way to think about what's gone wrong - and occasionally right - in the Bush Presidency, and especially the extent to which Bush's actions have been influenced, unconsciously or consciously, by the long-running American narrative of What Makes Presidents Great, often to the detriment of his day-to-day execution of the job.
Brooks also noted, echoing Yuval Levin's argument about honor politics, that McCain's unconscious structures are essentially pre-Christian - and not just, he added, because McCain is older than Jesus Christ. The crack, inevitably, prompted an objection from an outraged seventysomething attendee, who wanted to make it clear that she wasn't older than Jesus. Good times ...
Blogging GNP
The nice thing about having a co-author is that he can help shoulder the load of responding to comments on your book - and with that in mind, here's Reihan responding to Ezra Klein, to Ramesh, to Norm Ornstein (by way of Jonah Goldberg), and of course to Rush Limbaugh.
More GNP
You can listen to me chatting about the book with John Miller here, on his wonderful Between the Covers podcast series. Meanwhile, if the following doesn't convince you to purchase Grand New Party, then nothing will:
The complete, marginally-more-substantive Bloggingheads is here.
Grand New Party
 You may have heard that Reihan and I have co-authored a book. You may not, however, have heard that Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class And Save The American Dream is actually available for purchase as of today, both in your local bookstore and over the internet. If you really, really enjoy this blog, you'll probably enjoy the book, so you strongly consider buying it. Likewise, if you really, really hate this blog, and keeping coming back just to see what horrifying thing I'll say next, you should probably consider buying it as well: It'll be two hundred and fifty pages of pure hathetic joy (and you should feel free, of course, to scribble imprecations in the margins).
I don't think I'm going to manage Jonah Goldberg's achievement of replying to almost every reviewer (here are two early reviews, if you're interested), but there will probably be a fair amount of Grand New Party-related chatter around these parts for the next couple weeks - so if this post hasn't persuaded you to buy the book, rest assured that I'll be back to try again soon enough. Also, Reihan and I will be on NPR's On Point this morning at 11 AM, and we'll also be talking about the book tomorrow night at the Borders at 18th and L Street in Washington, so if you're in the neighborhood feel free to stop by and hurl tomatoes, or whatever fruit or vegetable you prefer.
Indwelling of the Nerds
For those who like this sort of thing, this thread is the sort of thing they might like.
A History of Theodicy
Inspired by James Wood's latest litany of eloquent complaints against the God in whom he doesn't believe, here's something I'd like to see: A history of popular theodicy, tracing the influence of the "argument from the existence of evil" against belief in God (or the Christian God, at least) throughout the course of Western history. It's my impression - and it's only an impression, which is why I'd like to see someone do the necessary intellectual spadework to refute it or back it up - that this argument has gained increasing currency even as our material conditions have dramatically improved; which is to say, the less suffering a particular population experiences, the more likely the suffering it does experience will be cited as evidence against the existence of a benevolent deity. (Or put another way, you're more likely to hear New Yorker writers wax indignant about how the existence of human misery precludes their believing in God than you are to hear the same argument from people in slightly less comfortable positions.)
I can think of various reasons why this might be so. There's the correlation-causation possibility: Atheism in general has become more prevalent as material conditions have improved in the West and science has demystified large swathes of the natural world, and since the problem of evil is one of the stronger arguments for atheism, you'd expect it to be cited more often in a more atheistic age. (Wood gestures at this notion in his essay when he remarks that "nowadays, theodicy always has a wary eye on the theological exit: this makes no sense, therefore I will have to reject the idea of God. But there was no such exit before about 1700, at the very earliest.") Or it could have something to do with mass media and instantaneous communication, which expand (and emphasize, since if it bleeds it leads) the range of tragedies that educated people are exposed to on a daily basis. (Wood opens his essay, tellingly, by reading off a roll of tragic headlines from a single copy of the New York Times.) It could have something to do with the scale of inhumanity that modern technology makes possible: Thus the reasonably-convincing argument, for instance, that the experience of two world wars and the Holocaust has been a crucial factor in Europe's abandonment of God. Or it could reflect something inherent in our psychology, which makes suffering seem like more of an absolute injustice the less we actually experience it.
I don't know the answer, or even if the thesis is correct - but I'd love to see someone investigate the question.
Remembering Robert Jordan
Last summer I recommended an essay by Mark Oppenheimer on the virtues of the "medium town," which appeared in a journal he'd co-founded called the New Haven Review of Books - a "medium town" answer to the decline of book reviewing, consisting of literary essays by Elm City natives. Now I'm pleased to recommend the second issue as well, not least because they asked me - a New Havenite in exile - to contribute a piece on the late fantasy author Robert Jordan, who was once upon a time my favorite living novelist.
While I'm at it, I should also recommend the NHRB website, where every Monday they're trying to publish a short review of an unfairly neglected book - as well as this profile of the review and its founders, which appeared in my (former) hometown rag.
Pinker vs. Humanism
Alan Jacobs picks up on another odd feature of that Pinker essay - its apparent horror at the notion that the humanities, and particularly literature, might have any bearing on contemporary bioethics debates.
Talking Nixonland
In a rare encounter between reviewer and author, I taped a chat with Rick Perlstein of Nixonland fame a couple weeks ago, and since today is the book's release date - and it just got front-cover treatment in the NYT Book Review, courtesy of George Will - now seemed like a good time to unleash our conversation on the world.
As always, our podcasts are all available for download from iTunes as well.
Heads in the Sand
In which the Atlantic and yours truly find ourselves incorporated into the promotional machinery for Matt's book.
Looking For the Black Swan
Riffing on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, Rod Dreher writes:
Taleb's discussion of the role of randomness in our lives, and how we cannot anticipate freak events (all we can know for sure is that they'll happen, sooner or later) makes me reflect on how I've never really gotten over watching 9/11 unfold right before my eyes. The anger is gone, mostly, but the sense of dread and unease isn't. I saw -- we all saw, but I saw it and heard it and smelled it, and I couldn't get away from it for a long time, because you always smelled it when you went outside for months afterward -- that our entire world could change radically in the course of a morning. Taleb talks about how his native Lebanon had lived in relative communal piece for centuries, such that nobody there could imagine the civil war that came upon them in the 1980s. And when it did happen, everybody assumed it would end quickly, because, well, it had to. But it didn't, and it was terrible.
I wonder if in some small way, I have a touch of the dread that people who went through the Depression (a far more traumatic event, cumulatively, than 9/11) do. My dad and mom have different attitudes toward money. He was a child of the Depression; she was born just after it ended. Neither had much money growing up, but my father is far more cautious with it, as if he feared the Thing coming back. Taleb makes me wonder to what extent much of my own intellectual preoccupations these days, and for the past few years, grow out of a general fear that everything around us that seems solid is really not, and that all this could be revealed to us in a terrible Black Swan moment. And that most of my work is done in light of preparing for the next Black Swan moment, such that whatever it is, we are as prepared to deal with it and prevail over it, no matter what it is.
What I find interesting about this is that I share Rod’s premise – the assumption that various inherently unpredictable disasters are lurking ahead of us – without sharing his tendency to scan the headlines looking for harbingers of the apocalypse. If anything, I lean in the opposite direction, and tend to be dismissive of the various doom-and-destruction scenarios that make their way into print these days. I think Rod and I draw similar political conclusions from the “black swan” premise, in the sense that both his “crunchy” politics and my Sam’s Club politics are dedicated to shoring up the sort of habits and institutions that are especially useful in times of dislocation and upheaval, and cultivating what Reihan has termed, in conversation if not in print, the “resilient society.” (Though of course Rod and I would often disagree on what that cultivation and shoring up ought entail.) But when it comes to specific scenarios for dislocation and upheaval, my default instinct tends to be that precisely because “black swan” events are by their nature wildly unpredictable, there’s little to be gained by trying to predict which one – peak oil? avian flu? the next Great Depression? – will actually end up throwing our society for a loop. Better to pursue a politics geared toward all eventualities, in other words, than to play a guessing game that’s only likely to cost you precious resources, and still more precious sleep.
Of course, this approach has its own set of problems: Some calamities are predictable, some unpredictable ones are dire enough to militate for action even when the odds are that the action in question will prove unnecessary, and I worry that my instincts may incline me toward an unwarranted panglossianism about a variety of problems, from global warming to the current economic situation. Somewhere between Rod’s approach and mine, then, lies the happy medium that policymakers ought to strive – so they should read us both, and split the difference.
Nixonland
My review is in the May Atlantic, and it just went up online. On the off-chance it isn't clear from the piece, I think the book is very, very good: Obviously Rick Perlstein and I have slight, slight ideological differences, but If you think that American history in the second half of the twentieth is relatively boring by world-historical standards - as I often did, sitting through U.S. history classes in high school - then Perlstein is the historian for you. (Though if for some crazy reason you haven't read Before The Storm, that's the place to start.)
Clarke and Minghella, RIP
Over on the Current, Reihan ponders the science-fiction giant's views on religion, and I lavish praise on the late director's adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley.
The Democrats And God
Russell Arben Fox, in the course of a characteristically thoughtful post on the book and the issues it raises, wonders why more people aren't discussing and debating Amy Sullivan's The Party Faithful. I suspect that the book would be getting more attention if the Democratic race weren't so dominated by debates over race and gender, which are temporarily swamping even hot-button topics like religion. But if you're looking for a break from the debate over Geraldine Ferraro's racism (or lack thereof), both Amy's book and E.J. Dionne's similarly-themed Souled Out make for thought-provoking reading - as the transcript and clips from this panel discussion (which happens to include yours truly) hopefully suggest.
I Like Sam Anderson
And here's why.
A Million Little Fabulists
Having spent some time now on the outskirts of both the book business and the fact-checking business, my first inclination when someone asks - as Rod does today, of the latest critically-acclaimed, basically fraudulent personal history to hit shelves and then get pulled from them - how a publisher could have possibly allowed themselves to be taken in by one of the seemingly endless slew of memoirist-cum-fabulists, my first instinct is to sympathize with the publisher in question. People usually assume that books are held to a higher standard of accuracy than, say, magazine pieces - after all, they're longer, more detail-rich, and more expensive to produce and market, so you'd think they'd be subjected to more scrutiny as well. But in reality, precisely because books are so much longer and more detailed than magazine articles, fact-checking becomes a luxury that your typical cash-strapped, time-strapped publishing house can't afford. The Atlantic, for instance, probably fact-checks about 50-75,000 words per issue, or about 600,000 words a year; to match our rigor, Simon and Schuster (to pick a publisher at random) would have to fact-check around half a million words for the first half of March alone. Which means that publishing-house editors are more or less at the mercy of their writers' honesty, particularly in a genre where the line between fact and quasi-fiction is always going to be at least slightly blurry. If they can't sniff out a gifted faker through some sort of sixth sense, they don't have anybody else to do it for them - until, that is, the book comes out and the wisdom of crowds (or angry sisters) takes over the fact-checking job for them.
As I said, that's my first instinct. But Rod's right: The list of fabulists has grown too long, and as resource-strapped as today's publishers may be, if you can't do just a little due diligence on a memoir whose subject matter - a white girl growing up among black gangs in South Central L.A. - sounds like it was, well, invented to sucker a publishing house, you deserve all the ignominy that's about to be heaped on the saps at Riverhead Books.
Liberal Fascism And Its Critics
Here is some free advice for liberals who don't care much for Jonah Goldberg or his (bestselling) new volume: Either confine yourself to dismissive snark, of the sort perfected by my colleague Matt, or buckle down and actually read the damn thing. The "definitive critiques" by people who admit that they haven't yet cracked the covers are not helpful to your cause.
And yes, I'll have something to say about the book myself, I promise - but only once I've finished reading it.
Jeffrey Rosen Versus Clarence Thomas
What Alan Jacobs said. I am by no means in the "Clarence Thomas, Real American Hero" camp, and much of Rosen's analysis seems to me astute. But I am persistently puzzled by the unwillingness of white male journalists, in particular - for whom a meritocracy-plus-affirmation action system of advancement provides constant validation, and constant confirmation that they're getting ahead on innate talent and hard work alone - to generate sympathy for a figure like Thomas, who feels, for not-incomprehensible reasons, that his successes have been won (as Jacobs puts it, quoting, Stanley Fish) "in such a way as to render them bitter to the taste." You don't have to like him or agree with him to understand, better than Rosen seems to, where his anger might be coming from.
I would also add, to Rosen's remark that "it is no more possible to feel pity for [Thomas] than for Britney Spears," that the comparison is ridiculous (persecution by the paparazzi is by no means comparable to the combination of segregationist racism, affirmative-action condescension and Uncle-Tom vitriol that has made Thomas the angry man he is today) and that even if it weren't I do feel pity for Britney Spears, and I'm a little puzzled by anyone who doesn't.
Pullman Versus Tolkien
From an interview with the Dark Materials author:
His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia". Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. "I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn't touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with."
It’s true that Lewis and Tolkien are engaged in very different projects, and the former is more didactic than the latter; that Pullman would see this as a reason to dismiss the Rings saga as “trivial” tells you a great deal about where his own fantasy saga went wrong. Being a Christian, I’m favorably inclined to Lewis’ polemical intentions, but even I can see that they sometimes step on the toes of his storytelling. Which is to say that I can see why Pullman-the-atheist would find them deeply irritating. But an appropriate response to this irritation would have been to write an “atheist’s Narnia” in which the polemic is less abrasive – and therefore more effective, perhaps – than Lewis’s Christian sallies sometimes are. More myth, in other words, and less message; more Middle-Earth, perhaps, and less Narnia. Instead, Pullman seems to have set out to take the things he hated about Lewis’ writing and recreate them, but at a heightened, more hectoring pitch. The world-building that makes The Golden Compass so compelling and fun – the panzerbjorn and the witches, the Jules Verne-meets-Tolkien landscape – is thus gradually abandoned as His Dark Materials progresses, no doubt on the grounds of its inherent “triviality,” in favor of a thudding polemic that passes well beyond Lewis and approaches the didacticism of Ayn Rand.
I also liked this bit:
Pullman says that people who are tempted to take offence should first see the film or read the books. "They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. It's very hard to disagree with those. But people will.”
Indeed. This is Atlas Shrugged in a nutshell: A style of literature-as-polemic that seeks to persuade the reader of its argument by associating those characters who share the author’s point of view with every possible virtue, and those who don’t with every possible vice. The result is a self-contained world – where Christians are all Nazis, say, or successful capitalists are all saints and geniuses – that’s persuasive so long as the reader stays immersed in it, but that can’t survive any contact or contrast with reality.
What's Wrong With His Dark Materials
It isn't that Philip Pullman's trilogy is anti-Christian (though obviously that doesn't make me favorably disposed to it). Nor is it that the saga is badly-written; Pullman is, of course, an immensely talented writer, as anyone who read The Ruby in the Smoke could have told you even before The Golden Compass made him world-famous. No, the problem is that the wheels come rattling off the storytelling wagon in the third volume (The Amber Spyglass, that is), thanks to a combination of preachiness and terrible, terrible plotting. In his great essay on the series, Alan Jacobs blames this squarely on Pullman’s atheism, suggesting that "powerful alternative versions of the biblical narrative can only be told by people who are themselves passionately theological." I was persuaded by this argument, but I didn’t realize how persuasive it really is until I read this critique (via Jeffrey Overstreet) by the fantasy writer John C. Wright, which lays out, piece by piece, how the story Pullman should have been telling, and seemingly set out to tell, was undone by the message he was trying to push. An excerpt follows below the fold:
Continue reading "What's Wrong With His Dark Materials" »
American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia
I'm not sure whether it's possible to say something intelligent about a thousand-page book in less than two thousand words, but I make the attempt in the latest Intercollegiate Review.
Mailer, RIP
I'm with Rick Brookhiser more than Roger Kimball. From what I've read of him, Mailer seems to belong - despite their wildly divergent styles and personae - to the same class of writers as Tom Wolfe: Immensely talented and creative wordsmiths who wasted far too much time (Wolfe, late in his career; Mailer, throughout) trying to be Great American Novelists, a task neither was really up to, instead of conducting the experiments in essays and narrative nonfiction that both will be remembered for.
However, I haven't made my way through Harlot's Ghost, which many people whose literary judgment I trust (including Christopher Hitchens) have suggested is the place where Mailer came closet to achieve his GAN ambition, and I should probably reserve judgment until I've blocked out a few weeks to read it.
The Regnery Affair, Cont.
A publishing-industry insider emails:
From what I’ve read of the lawsuit online, at least one of the main points made by the authors is silly; another, misleading.
The silly one is the implicit claim that the authors would be deprived of their ordinary royalties only because of the sweetheart deal between Regnery’s publishing division and book club. In fact, every reputable trade publisher distinguishes between royalties offered to authors for ordinary sales and those that apply to books that must be heavily discounted to clubs and elsewhere. To give one example, authors routinely make only 50% of their ordinary royalty on sales to channels where the publisher has to offer outlandish discounts to the vendor. These include any book clubs (owned by the publisher or not) as well as deals that persuade Barnes & Noble and other major chains to put the books on their New Release tables. (Does anyone really think they do that just because a buyer somewhere closely read the bound galley and wept with pleasure? It’s all about co-op dollars.) In many such cases, the publisher is losing money on every book sold. It’s hardly an injustice that the royalty for those units would go down.
Continue reading "The Regnery Affair, Cont." »
The Regnery Racket
So you may have heard about this right-wing mini-scandal, in which outraged authors are suing Regnery for selling their books through its own sister companies (like the Conservative Book Club) and paying them a pittance, rather than the higher royalties they're entitled to when books get sold through bookstores. What's interesting to me about the whole mess is that I had always understood the whole Conservative Book Club angle to be part of the appeal of signing a book deal with Regnery. I've had several in-the-know D.C. types explain to me over the years that if you're writing a conservative political book for the money, rather than the prestige (or the careful editing), you should do it through Regnery because their book club links - as well as their connections to the talk radio outlets that can help pump up a right-wing book's sales - enable them to more or less create best-sellers at will, in a way that other conservative imprints just can't match. But of course it rather defeats the purpose of picking a publisher for the money if their method of making you a best-seller doesn't net you very much, um, money. And you would think that someone would have picked up on this before now ...
Dumbledore Is Gay (II)
Of my remark, in response to J.K. Rowling's "by the way, Dumbledore's gay" announcement, that "a writer confident in her powers wouldn't feel the need to announce details like this," Neil Gaiman - yes, that Neil Gaiman - writes:
All that tells us is that Ross Douthat doesn't write fiction.
(Ouch.)
You always wind up knowing more about your characters than you can get onto the page. Pages are finite, and the story isn't about giving you all the information about everyone in it any more than life is. Things the author knows about characters (or at least, strongly suspects -- it's never really real until it hits the page, because the process of writing is also a process of discovery) that don't make it onto the page could include the characters' backstory, what they like to eat, the toothpaste they use, what happens to them after the story is over or before it began, and what they do in bed. That something didn't turn up in the books just means it didn't make it onto the page or wasn't relevant to the story. (Or even, it made it in and the author cut that scene out because it didn't work. One of my favourite scenes in Anansi Boys went because it made the chapter work better when it was gone.)
(I remember being astonished when I learned a few years ago, from an obituary, that two teachers I'd had as a child were a same-sex couple. Mostly astonished because at the age where they taught me, I didn't imagine that teachers had romantic lives, or were even entirely human; and learning that they were a pair reconfigured everything I knew about them, which wasn't very much.)
Neverwhere has two gay characters who are Out, as far as the book is concerned, and one major character who is gay but it isn't mentioned, simply because that character was one of many people in that book who don't have any sexual or romantic entanglements during the story. So it's irrelevant.
... And, truth to tell, sexuality tends to be such a minor thing, if you have several hundred characters running around in your head. You know more than you've written. One of the characters in Wall in Stardust, for example, is not what he is pretending to be in a way that has nothing at all to do with sex, although the clues are all there in the book, but if I don't do another story set in Wall you'll never find out who he is, or even why he's interesting.
I think the crucial question here is whether Dumbledore being gay is just a "a minor thing," just one of many quirks that the reader doesn't need to know while reading the books but might be interested to discover after the fact - or, as with Gaiman's two lesbian teachers, whether it's something that "reconfigures" everything we thought we knew about the Hogwarts Headmaster. I would submit that it's closer to the latter than to the former, given the role Dumbledore plays in the saga and the significance of his varied relationships to all the other players in the story; it isn't quite the equivalent of Rowling never giving the reader any clue that Snape was in love with Lily Potter, only to mention it in passing at a public appearance in 2009, but it's closer to that sort of thing than to, say, a piece of interesting trivia about how Minerva McGonagall once dated a guy from Slytherin. I'm not saying that every piece of information about every character needs to be spilled out on the page; I'm not even saying that one should be able to know, from reading the books, that Dumbledore is homosexual. I'm just saying that a writer with confidence in her powers would write that sort of important detail into the story in such a way, whether explicit or implicit, that she didn't feel the need to explain it after the books came out. (I'm trying to picture Melville patiently explaining to the Illustrated London News that yes, Claggart did have a thing for Billy Budd - or Proust telling a Paris audience: "Don't you get it? The narrator's gay! Albertine's a guy!")
Continue reading "Dumbledore Is Gay (II)" »
The Perils of Book Reviewing
In which Mom wasn't stuffed in a freezer, after all.
Dumbledore Is Gay
I don't think there's much to say about this, except that it seems like a case of J.K. Rowling trying to retroactively bestow a level of adult complexity on her characters that they don't possess on the printed page. A writer confident in her powers wouldn't feel the need to announce details like this after the fact, and a writer who understood the strengths and limitations of her creation would recognize that trying to smuggle this level of psychological realism into the Potter series is a fool's errand that can only diminish her achievement - by reminding adult readers of what it isn't (a serious work of realistic fiction, I mean), rather than letting them enjoy it for the gripping, inventive children's fantasy it is.
Update: My response to Neil Gaiman's remarks is here.
Christians and the Constitution
Andrew, in the midst of an engaging Cato Unbound dialogue with Mark Lilla, Philip Jenkins, and Damon Linker:
America is substantively and experientially a deeply religious country, and its political discourse has always been saturated with religious rhetoric and imagery ... It is a country whose politics is experientially creedal. It doesn't incubate the kind of high Tory pragmatism that I admire in the English experience; or even the kind of atheist secularism that helped spawn socialism in other developed countries in the twentieth century. But the power of that religious presence — I call it “Christianism” and describe it at length in The Conservative Soul — is in many ways a testament to the strength of the secular constitution that resists it. In fact, I think that without the kind of secularism that Mark detects in the founding documents and Constitution, America would long since have succumbed to some version of theocracy or another.
Mark's basic point is that this is the natural and historical state for humankind. The achievement of keeping God at arm's length in the ordering structure of a polity is very, very rare. Very few countries have achieved it in the history of the world. America's genius is to have sustained it, even while fostering an intensely religious, roiling, and often apocalyptic culture. So Damon is right to worry about theology's political claims — especially in the last few years, and during various spasms of the past. But he is wrong in thinking, I believe, that this will lead to a collapse of the American system as such. It could lead to disastrous social policies, civil dissension, social conflict, and what we have come to call a "culture war." But even then, the impulse to junk the Constitution as a whole, and the ability even to amend it, is limited. In fact, it is remarkable how modest many Christian fundamentalists have been in addressing the Constitution's core secularism. Whether out of national pride or simply denial, it remains a fact that the main policy goals of Christianists in American history has been in amending the Constitution or bypassing it, rather than attacking it frontally.
I think the sheer diversity of religious belief and institutions in the U.S. would make the possibility of an American theocracy pretty remote, whatever our constitution looked like - particularly given that the number of theocracies instituted in the nation-states of the modern West as a whole is close to zero. (It's pretty close to zero for the pre-modern West, for that matter.) It’s possible to imagine a much more politically fragmented North America producing some localized theocracies, along the lines of Deseret and Puritan New England, but on a national level .. not so much.
I'm more sympathetic to the rest of Andrew's comments here, but it's precisely the aspects of American political history that he gets right - particularly the resilience of the constitutional order in spite (or because!) of the persistence of God-infused political activity - that makes his promiscuous use of scare-terms like “Christianist” so silly. The fact that religious conservatives, with the occasional exception, share the same commitment to the Constitution as liberal believers and secularists – and that much of the culture war, from abortion to school prayer to gay marriage, boils down an argument between two perfectly lucid, un-theocratic readings of said Constitution – and that if anything, the religious right tends to be more committed to upholding the actual text of the Constitution than their more secular foes – well, all of these points suggest, at the very least, that constantly slinging around terms that effectively equate James Dobson with a shari’a-happy Islamist might not be the most accurate way to analyze the intersection of religion and politics in the contemporary United States.
Also, you should definitely read Jonathan Rowe's critique of the Lilla thesis, which is helpfully linked from the Cato Unbound page. I'll try to say something more about the issues it raises later on.
Robert Jordan, RIP
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.
Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time.
Robert Jordan was, for about four years during my adolescence, easily my favorite writer in the world. The first five books of his Wheel of Time saga are among the best popular fantasy novels of the last few decades, with only George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire and Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn providing serious competition. Now he is dead, still young at 58, with his saga still unfinished. It went on too long - eleven books, with at least two more projected - and when it is completed (as I assume it will be, with his family or other writers filling in the blanks), it will be less than it could have been. But at its best, it was remarkable indeed: Few writers have given me such pleasure, and few, I suspect, ever will. It's hard to imagine loving any books more than the books that you love when you're fifteen years old.
Jordan was a pen name; his real name was James Oliver Rigney, Jr. He was a South Carolinian, a Citadel graduate, a Vietnam veteran, a devout Episcopalian. He is survived by his wife, Harriet. Requiescat in pacem.
The Canon Wars
Rachel Donadio, on Allan Bloom:
Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation.
It's this latter debate that's crucial to understanding what's wrong with the contemporary university. In a better world, the multiculturalists and the canonists should have been able to meet halfway - preserving the idea of a canon, while expanding it to include more works from outside the circle of Dead White Males. Such a compromise would have ended up cluttering syllabi with more politically-correct junk than a reactionary like myself might like, but it would have preserved the essential liberal-arts notion that there are great books, and that one of the missions of the university should be to expose its students to as many of them as possible.
This did happen to some extent: As Donadio writes, "In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars ... In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison." Obviously, having Morrison and to a lesser extent Woolf in that group is somewhat depressing, but it wouldn't be all that objectionable if most students at top-flight colleges were being required to read this group of authors; a week wasted on Sula seems a small price to pay for a student body that's acquainted with Shakespeare's tragedies. The trouble is that they aren't. Instead of keeping requirements in place but compromising on their content, too many colleges - my alma mater included - rushed to embrace the "modes of inquiry" (or in Harvard-ese, "approaches to knowledge") view of education, and then breathed a sigh of relief that they'd set aside the messy debates over whether there's a Proust of the Papuans, while freeing their overspecialized young professors from the burdens of teaching survey courses. And that was how the canon wars ended - they made a desert, and called it peace.
Paul Krugman Explains It All
At the end of his contribution to the great Chait debate, Krugman writes:
I’m surprised that Jon doesn’t talk at all about the key political role of race in the political shift in this country. Reagan didn’t start as a supply-sider: he started as the enemy of welfare queens in their welfare Cadillacs. And what I’ve learned from Larry Bartels, Tom Schaller, and other political scientists is that race is really central to the whole thing. Here’s a preview quote from my own book:
“The overwhelming importance of the Southern switch suggests an almost embarrassingly simple story about the political success of movement conservatism. It goes like this: thanks to their organization, the interlocking institutions that constitute the reality of the vast right-wing conspiracy, movement conservatives were able to take over the Republican Party, and move its domestic policies sharply to the right. In most of the country, this rightward shift alienated voters, who gradually moved toward the Democrats. But Republicans were nonetheless able to win presidential elections, and eventually gain control of Congress, because they were able to exploit the race issue to win political dominance of the South. End of story.”
Really? That's it - that's the whole story? The Cold War, the crime wave, the sexual revolution and Roe v. Wade, the tax revolts, and about sixty other smaller things that I can think of were all trumped by the race issue? What an utterly ridiculous interesting idea.
You can find some of my earlier thoughts on this question here and here; I also think this Yglesias post (written in response to a previous Krugman foray on this topic) makes a great deal of sense. More generally, I would suggest that anyone who tells you that there's "an almost embarrassingly simple story" that explains thirty years of American politics (and happens to prove that their political opponents are evil bigots, and bigot-enablers) probably needs to do a little bit more reading on the subject.
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