The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (Redux)

With Tuesday's release of Freedom (to much fanfare), I've decided to re-visit my review of Franzen's prior novel, The Corrections, which can be found here, mildly revised.

I haven't read much of Freedom, but so far it strikes me as a continuation of Franzen's ambition in The Corrections: the novelistic equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

The Complaisant Fog Wakes Me From My Slumber

One would think goodness matters, but it doesn't seem to, in the end. Perhaps because we're all about equally good, both with each other and with ourselves. The world has its saints—heaven help them—and its demons, but we shouldn't model our lives after aberrations. We should be true to what require.

I've discovered that I don't require goodness but strangeness—strangeness and beauty.

By strangeness I don't mean eccentricity, which, like Montaigne, I find irritating. I mean unexpectedness in the movement of a mind, as when Zachary said: "I like fish because they are interesting." Zachary is not eccentric but he is strange, to my unending delight.

I also mean formal strangeness: the way a poem, for example, or a face is assembled. Beyond all other qualities strangeness is what we look for in art, and in love. It's what the French call je ne sais quoi—that certain I-don't-know-what that escapes, in both French and English, the scope of a single word.

As with beauty, we recognize strangeness immediately—so we always fall in love at at first sight.

I remember that discovery: I was seven years old and sitting in Sunday School in Lafayette, Indiana. Just in front of me: a girl's long brown hair, its streams of curls, its unthinkable resplendence. At a particular moment she glanced toward the back of the room—her name, I soon learned, was Denise—and her eyes caught mine, and I was finished.

Even now, remembering that moment, I can feel her strangeness, her difference from anything else, anyone else I had ever encountered. She was indecipherable.

She proved to be a girl who took pleasure in kicking my shins, not unlike most girls at that time, but she was also possessed of a strange quietness, so long ago. She still had that quietness when I saw her twelve years later, in college. But our time, we knew immediately, had passed.

The great artists are like our great loves: Homer, the swift-footed poet of friendship, grief, and life's on-goingness; Shakespeare, who is so strangely all-encompassing as to make everyone else seem provincial; Dickinson and her dashes; Kafka; Billie Holliday; Radiohead. Borges, Bolaño, Cézanne, and Chagall. Ravenous Petronius. Cartier-Bresson, Vallejo, Gombrowicz, Bjork. The list is, thank goodness, long enough for a lifetime.

Occasionally the world itself summons us from our slumber. The fog this morning, butting up against a radiant sky to the east, enshrouds Half Moon Bay in strangeness. I am a small animal pulsing inside the sky. And for the first time in a long time—these things can't be explained—anything seems possible.

That's the gift of strangeness: like beauty, it opens the world, transforming everything, if only for a moment, into real—not fantastical—mystery.

TFTD

"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true?
Or is it something worse . . . "
                                        — Bruce Springsteen, "The River"

Cultural Amnesia, by Clive James

One of my life's treasures is a single Word file: Various Quotes.doc

A collection, begun about a decade ago, of quotes that have caught my eye, it's become a record of my intellectual life: my reading, my thinking, my enthusiasms, my obsessions, my laments, my solitude, my delight. I've assembled the quotes as I've encountered them, so it's order is chronological, and I've recorded their origin, including the page number, so I that I can easily locate them again, should I need to. What riches.

Fundamentally, Cultural Amnesia is Clive James's Various Quotes.doc, consolidated into a book, with commentary. The book is filled with astonishing quotes, taken from a life of reading—my goodness, what reading—and film-going, listening, traveling. James uses his various quotes to contemplate people whom in his view we should not forget, mostly for their grandeur, occasionally for their depravity. The quotes get him rolling, and his essays often turn in unexpected—and consistently marvelous—directions: a mediation on the anti-Nazi heroine and martyr Sophie Scholl, for example, turns into a celebration of Natalie Portman. James imagines Portman playing Scholl in a movie of Scholl's life—which takes him to a fascinating claim about the limitations of cinema:

If Natalie Portman plays the role, the girl won't die. Natalie will go on after the end of the movie with her career enhanced as a great actress, whereas Sophie Scholl's career as an obscure yet remarkable human being really did come to an end. The Fallbeil (even the name sounds remorseless—the falling axe) hit her in the neck, and that was the end of her. Her lovely parable of a life went as far as that cold moment and no further. It's a fault inherent in the movies that they can't show such a thing. The performer takes over from the real person, and walks away. For just that reason, popular, star-led movies, no matter how good they are, are a bad way of teaching history.

The essays in Cultural Amnesia wander like this, as essays should—orbiting elegantly, satellites crossing the firmament, around their brilliant quotes, the shining little planets upon which they gaze and which give them the axis all orbits require.

The primary pleasures of this text, which as a whole constitutes the most compelling defense of Western liberal democracy that I've ever read, number three: 1) reading the quotes James has gathered; 2) becoming acquainted, or re-acquainted, with some of the essential figures of (mostly) 20th century cultural and political history; and 3) following the movement of the author's mind, which, in the end, is any essay's fundamental purpose.

The good news here is that Clive James has a exceptional mind and he has given us an indispensable book.

What's Mine Is Mine, and God Bless America

While God's light shines serenely upon him, David Koch spends a little bit of his $35,000,000,000 (which he earned all by himself, without any help from the society into which he was born) upgrading New York City concert halls.

Much less publicly he spends a good chunk of his billions fighting popular efforts to protect the environment (bad for his business) and arguing for tax policies that will starve to death the social security programs that help those who are at risk of starving to death.

The Dead Parade

Astonishingly, the murder rate in Venezuela is 63% higher than the murder rate in Mexico. And it's nearly 4x higher than the murder rate in Baghdad. More than 90% of the murders are never solved.

One out of every 500 Venezuelans will be murdered this year.

Another megalomaniac, another wrecked country, another example of "revolution" providing cover for depravity.

The English 1B Book Club, Fall 2010

I've made a minor habit of doing this. . . . Here are the books I'll be using for English 1B at Foothill College this fall.

Break It Down, by Lydia Davis
Fool for Love, by Sam Shepard
Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin
The Foundation Pit, by Andrei Platonov (reviewed here)
The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald
Dusk, by James Salter

I've never taught Platonov or Fitzgerald before, but those are favorite novels of mine and Books I Love is going to be the theme of the class.

That sounds a bit self-indulgent, perhaps, but sharing what you love seems like a decent way to spend an autumn morning.

And I'll supply a collection of poems for us to enjoy. I've decided—I now think foolishly—not to have the students purchase any poetry collections.

I'm sorry to say they will also be asked to buy Easy Access, our standard grammar handbook.

TFTD

"There is no such thing as forgetting." — Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater

Love's Labour's Lost Among the Redwoods

Empty wine bottles around our feet. The remnants of cold salads and sliced cheese. The picnic basket, as much as possible in the tight crowd, kicked aside.

Standing to pee I snapped the stem of a wine glass.

The stage among the trees; the stage lights lashed to the trees' trunks, high up. The actors running by.

Their eagerness is a kind of joy. Our laughter, too.

The moon came on very late, turning the sky, the tops of the trees, vaguely silver.

The only line I remember is: "All ignorant that soul that sees thee without wonder."

Conundrums

Must all the good things in life do battle between themselves?

• Love with Peace
• Memory with Time
• Abundance with Simplicity
• Joy with Rest
• Freedom with Stability
• Youth with Innocence
• Exuberance with Wisdom
• Secrecy with Knowledge
• Privacy with Integrity
• Passion with Tranquility
• Sophistication with Purity
• Beauty with Reason
• Desire with Contentedness
• Inquiry with Faith
• Curiosity with Tradition
• Comedy with Elegance
• Lust with Composure
• Action with Idea
• Strength with Compassion
• Bravery with Humility
• Decisiveness with Patience

And on and on, the irreconcilable dilemmas of life, which are not struggles between good and evil but, to paraphrase an idea from Isaiah Berlin, between two indisputable goods. That's where life is lived—or lost.

Lou Gehrig Didn't Die of Lou Gehrig's Disease?

This fascinating article suggests that multiple concussions—which Lou Gehrig was known to have suffered playing both football and baseball—can lead to exactly the same types of neurological disease that doctors normally associate with Lou Gehrig's Disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).

The Yankee legend had a well-documented history of significant concussions on the baseball field, and perhaps others sustained as a battering-ram football halfback in high school and at Columbia University. Given that, it’s possible that Gehrig’s renowned commitment to playing through injuries like concussions, which resulted in his legendary streak of playing in 2,130 consecutive games over 14 years, could have led to his condition. 

“Here he is, the face of his disease, and he may have had a different disease as a result of his athletic experience,” said Dr. Ann McKee, the director of the neuropathology laboratory for the New England Veterans Administration Medical Centers, and the lead neuropathologist on the study.

In other words, its possible that Lou Gehrig didn't actually die of Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Which is, at some level, impossible.

Burning the Days, by James Salter

You either burn the days or you're burned by them, I suppose—although at some point the wood becomes the fire, the fire the wood, and attempting a distinction is futile. That futility might be what we mean by aging, if we're lucky.

James Salter certainly has burned through his days, as this oddly structured, intensely lyrical memoir demonstrates. He's best known (properly) as the author of two of my favorite post-war novels—A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years (reviewed here). He wrote the screenplay for the icy, piercing Downhill Racer, one of Robert Redford's best films. Before becoming a writer, he graduated West Point and fought in the Korean War as an Air Force fighter pilot.

Also, to his credit, he embraced the post-war possibilities open to an American man: see (and rule) the world; educate yourself as world citizen; help re-construct, if only by your love, Western Europe; and never cease to admire our country's incomparable landscapes and coincident opportunities.

By all appearances, Salter has known power—been close to it—but never allowed that closeness to ruin him as an artist. He evokes the circles of power, the famous faces, with their fantastic, distorted personalities, with intriguing delicacy. He's also had the good sense to fall in love a few times. Anyone who has picked up A Sport and a Pastime already knows how precisely, how lethally he records the burning choreography of love.

I don't know if it's still possible for an American man to burn the days as Salter did. There are obstacles on all sides—foremost among them our post-Reagan isolationism and moralistic fervor, our proud Crawford stupidity, our decadent laziness. Reading this book, I couldn't help but lament what we're becoming (which is probably another way of saying, What I'm becoming). This book allows us the secondary pleasure of envying Salter—which is an important pleasure, as it means that something essential is not yet forgotten.