Ralph as Obama

I'm teaching Lord of the Flies right now to my freshmen. Yesterday we talked about the scene in which Jack and his hunters let the fire go out. They miss a chance at rescue because they're busy killing their first pig.

Afterward, when Ralph, the elected chief of the boys on the island, accuses Jack of dereliction of duty, Jack apologizes. His Cheneyesque apology draws a positive response from members of his own party:

The buzz from the hunters was one of admiration at this handsome behavior. Clearly they were of the opinion that Jack had done the decent thing, had put himself in the right by his generous apology and Ralph, obscurely, in the wrong.

One of my freshmen asked, "Why do they side with Jack? Can't they see that Ralph is right?"

Ralph is right, of course, that the first priority of the boys on the island should be keeping the fire going as a signal to possible rescuers, and that the second priority should be building shelters. But the lure of the hunt is too great, especially in comparison with the drudgery and labor of fire-tending and shelter-building. The kids don't understand the truth of the situation, so they get caught up in political theater.

I thought of this today as I read George Packer's fine New Yorker article (subscription required) about Obama's first year. Packer quotes a congressional senior aide who suggests that part of Obama's difficulties have stemmed from his disinclination to play simplistic, flashy political games like Jack's, and his desire to think long-term about what's best for the nation.

"One of the problems with this Administration is it has tried to have a grownup, sophisticated conversation with the public.... The country doesn't want to have the conversation he wants to have."

DFW's Copy of Suttree

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has acquired David Foster Wallace's papers. Here you can look at some books from Wallace's library, along with the notes he's scribbled into the first page.

Check out Wallace's copy of Suttree (he's drawn fangs, mustache, and glasses on Cormac McCarthy's face) at the bottom of the list.

I would consider driving down to Texas if I could flip through the rest of Wallace's copy of this book. Anybody wanna go with me?

Tendencies That Deserve to Be Ignored

Sasha Frere-Jones's nice piece on Bill Withers points out the amazing fact that "Ain't No Sunshine" was the first song Withers ever wrote, and makes these perceptive observations about that song as well:

Withers says that he is an untrained musician, and his songs bear him out, not because they lack sophistication but because they ignore tendencies that deserve to be ignored more often. “Ain’t No Sunshine” is a two-minute song with only three verses, a bridge that repeats two words twenty-six times—“I know”—and no chorus to speak of.

Stoicism and Optimism

From an interesting Richard Rodriguez piece about Cesar Chavez:

If you would understand the tension between Mexico and the United States that is playing out along our mutual border, you must understand the psychic tension between Mexican stoicism— if that is a rich enough word for it— and American optimism. On the one side, Mexican peasants are tantalized by the American possibility of change. On the other side, the tyranny of American optimism has driven Americans to neurosis and depression— when the dream is elusive or less meaningful than the myth promised. This constitutes the great irony of the Mexican-American border: American sadness has transformed the drug lords of Mexico into billionaires, even as the peasants of Mexico scramble through the darkness to find the American dream.

Evolution of an Urban Landscape (Charlotte)

Via Dotage (it's best if you make it full screen, with sound):

Adventures at QT (4)

Today I was at the soda fountain (I've fallen off the wagon), and this guy was scanning the various drink offerings, obviously frustrated and hurried. He had a full 32-oz. cup of cola in one hand and an empty one in the other.

"What are you looking for?" I asked him.

"Some kind of fruit juice, something that's not soda," he said.

I looked with him for a moment. "Here's peach tea," I said. "But I guess that's not really juice. Strawberry Fanta?"

"Yeah, I guess he'll like that," he said and started to fill the empty cup.

"Who are you getting it for?" I asked.

"My son," he said. "He's four, and if he gets too much sugar, you know, he gets kind of hyper."

"Yeah," I said.

"And we're on our way to church, so we don't want him to get too wound up." He finished filling the 32-oz. cup for his four-year-old.

"Well, good luck," I said, as he went to put lids on his drinks.

"Thanks. We'll need it," he said, laughing.

Knowledge We Don't Know What to Do With

This passage, from Larissa MacFarquhar's profile of Paul Krugman, seems very suggestive, even profoundly so, about how we sometimes dismiss obvious and fundamental ideas because they're not couched as we want or expect them to be:

Later on, Krugman became interested in economic geography, in the related question of why there were regional specialties—why, in the United States, for instance, were cars produced in Detroit, carpets in Dalton, Georgia, jewelry in Providence, and chips in Silicon Valley? Again, the answer turned out to be history and accident. Once an industry started up in one place, for whatever reason (the carpet industry in Dalton appears to have its origin in a local teen-ager who in 1895 made a tufted bedspread as a wedding present), local workers became trained in its methods, skilled workers from elsewhere moved there, and related businesses sprang up close by. Then, as more skilled labor became available, the industry could grow and benefit from economies of scale. Soon, as long as it didn’t cost too much to transport the industry’s products, the advantages of the place would be such that it would be impractical for someone to open up a similar business anywhere else. Many economists found the idea that economic geography could be so arbitrary “deeply disturbing and troubling,” Krugman wrote, but he found it exciting.

Again, as in his trade theory, it was not so much his idea that was significant as the translation of the idea into mathematical language. “I explained this basic idea”—of economic geography—“to a non-economist friend,” Krugman wrote, “who replied in some dismay, ‘Isn’t that pretty obvious?’ And of course it is.” Yet, because it had not been well modelled, the idea had been disregarded by economists for years. Krugman began to realize that in the previous few decades economic knowledge that had not been translated into models had been effectively lost, because economists didn’t know what to do with it. His friend Craig Murphy, a political scientist at Wellesley, had a collection of antique maps of Africa, and he told Krugman that a similar thing had happened in cartography. Sixteenth-century maps of Africa were misleading in all kinds of ways, but they contained quite a bit of information about the continent’s interior—the River Niger, Timbuktu. Two centuries later, mapmaking had become much more accurate, but the interior of Africa had become a blank. As standards for what counted as a mappable fact rose, knowledge that didn’t meet those standards—secondhand travellers’ reports, guesses hazarded without compasses or sextants—was discarded and lost. Eventually, the higher standards paid off—by the nineteenth century the maps were filled in again—but for a while the sharpening of technique caused loss as well as gain.

A Quick Fling

At Larry Dark's Story Prize blog, an interview with Wells Tower, whose fine collection of stories is one of the finalists for this year's prize. An interesting excerpt:

What do you like about the short story form? Is it the form that comes most naturally to you as a writer?

I respect the form for cutting us so little slack. Readers often approach a short story suspiciously.They know they're being asked to embark on a brief relationship, one that won't give them days or weeks of enagement, as a novel does. A "Why should I care about you? This is just a quick fling" sort of deal, which leaves us with the challenge of devising stories that matter much, and quickly, without contrivances or bad emotional syrups. You can't waste time or language in a short story. I like that rigor. Keeps you honest.

Before the Arch

Michael Allen's post about a new exhibit at the Old Courthouse features a sobering reminder of the architectural cost of St. Louis' trademark Arch and its grounds:

The nation's only urban national park, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial with the stunning Gateway Arch by Eero Saarinen, has long been haunted by a shadow architectural history. To make way for one of the world's most full-realized modernist landscapes, St. Louis wrecked forty blocks of historic riverfront buildings. The significance of these buildings in American architectural history was such that in 1939, eminent architectural critic and historian Siegfried Gideon came to St. Louis to deliver a lecture on the doomed buildings. Gideon not only spoke about the unparalleled mass of cast-iron facades and storefronts found on the riverfront, he implored the city to change course and preserve the riverfront's commercial buildings.

Sins of the Fathers

From Arnold Rampersad's biography of Ralph Ellison, a couple disturbing snippets about American literary giants:

William Faulkner, quoted in Life, asserted that he was ready to shoot blacks in the street, if necessary, to save the Old South. (324)

Ernest [Hemingway] never cared much for American Negroes. When the integrated Brooklyn Dodgers visited Cuba, he invited the white players to his home, Finca Vigia, but quietly barred their black teammates. (410)

Jackpot

From an interesting post about James Baldwin:

A journalist once asked James Baldwin if being poor, black, and gay had made him feel disadvantaged as a young writer. “No,” Baldwin replied, “I thought I had hit the jackpot. It was so outrageous, you had to find a way to use it.”

Rebels Without a Clue

From a brilliant James Surowiecki piece about the incoherence of the current populist wave:

The failure of free markets during the financial crisis might have led people to think that the government should be more involved in the economy. Instead, the percentage of Americans who think government is trying to do too much is higher than it’s been since the late nineties. Health-care reform offers a case study in this. The bills passed by Congress, whatever their flaws, would do things that voters overwhelmingly say they support: extend coverage to the uninsured, ban the worst practices of insurers, and guarantee insurance for people who lose their jobs. Yet more voters now oppose the bills than support them, with many saying that the government is overreaching. And, while voters routinely say that the rising cost of health care is a problem, it is the bills’ cost-control provisions—including a tax on expensive insurance plans and rules to restrain Medicare spending—that have proved especially unpopular. On top of this, many people are just annoyed with the whole process: a survey of voters who supported Obama in 2008 but voted for Scott Brown in the recent Massachusetts Senate race found that forty-one per cent of those who opposed health-care reform weren’t sure whether reform went too far or not far enough. In short, they don’t know why they’re against reform; they just are.

Fundamentally Tragic

I'm currently reading Arnold Rampersad's 2007 biography of Ralph Ellison, and enjoying it quite a bit. So I was interested to read this Stanley Crouch piece about the recently published manuscript, over 1100 pages long, of Ellison's unfinished second novel.

Here's a particularly scintillating passage from Crouch:

Ellison’s trouble is obvious in what we have before us now. He knew much too much and was much too conscious of what he wanted his novel to do and achieve. He could neither bunt nor swing for a base hit. Only a grand slam would do, bases loaded and the ball leaving the enclosed field on the way to a landing in the parking lot, where it would be lost under the uncountable cars covering almost every inch of the asphalt. Whenever that did not happen to his satisfaction, Ellison sullenly returned to the bench and brooded until his inspiration brought him back to the plate. That seems to have been his tragedy.

Ellison appears to have wanted his piece of the crown worn only by two novelists before him, Melville and Faulkner....

Ralph Ellison may well have been up to the challenge that Faulkner threw down because his experience was broad enough to create a reasonable distrust of the academy, although he became, as an inarguably splendid intellectual, a symbol of the academy at its best. He knew how to put historical facts together with lasting ideas and the new conceptions of modern life that were continually changing while adhering to deathless, classical concerns.

Ellison was suspicious of the right and the left, the capitalists and the Marxists, the corporations and the workers, the whites and the non-whites, the rich and the poor, the religious and the atheists, and every other human variation. He was aware of how often those of any persuasion had been wrong as long as the day goes on. This meant that the Ellison vision was fundamentally tragic.

Restoring Carver's Voice

I'm about 90 percent through with Raymond Carver's Collected Stories now, and I've found that the most enjoyable part of reading the volume has been comparing Beginners, Carver's original manuscript version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, with the published version as heavily edited by Gordon Lish.

In this post, I wrote some early thoughts on the differences between these two versions. Here at The Millions you can read my comparisons after having finished both collections.

The Hills That He Called Home

I like this, from an article about Cornish, N.H., the town where J. D. Salinger moved when he was 34 years old:

Here Mr. Salinger was just Jerry, a quiet man who arrived early to church suppers, nodded hello while buying a newspaper at the general store and wrote a thank-you note to the fire department after it extinguished a blaze and helped save his papers and writings.

Despite his reputation, Mr. Salinger “was not a recluse,” said Nancy Norwalk, a librarian at the Philip Read Memorial Library in Plainfield, which Mr. Salinger would frequent. “He was a towns- person.”

And last week, after his death, his neighbors would not talk about him, reflecting what one called “the code of the hills.”

Reading New Yorker Readers

Readers of this blog may be aware of my affection for the New Yorker and my attention to its weekly fiction offerings.

I found this piece amusing in its analysis of perennial complaints about the "typical New Yorker story"—amusing also because it appears to rope me in (tangentially, I suppose—click on the "inner sabremetrician" link) to its argument.

If You Grab That Stuff

From an interesting and topical piece by Rebecca Solnit, whose book Savage Dreams I liked a lot:

We need to banish the word “looting” from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.

---

If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?

---

It’s pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn’t obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.

A Remembrance from Our Childhood

A lovely passage from the ending of The Brothers Karamazov:

I want you to understand, then, that there is nothing nobler, stronger, healthier, and more helpful in life than a good remembrance, particularly a remembrance from our childhood, when we still lived in our parents' house. You often hear people speak about upbringing and education, but I feel that a beautiful, holy memory preserved from childhood can be the most important single thing in our development. And if a person succeeds, in the course of his life, in collecting many such memories, he will be saved for the rest of his life. And even if we have only one such memory, it is possible that it will be enough to save us some day.

Translated by Andrew H. MacAndrew

Trivia Quiz: O Brother Where Art Thou?

It's January again, time to show my freshmen O Brother, Where Art Thou?, our reward for having read The Odyssey over the course of the first semester. I guess I've seen the movie around thirty times now, and it still manages to delight me. My colleagues and I will spend the rest of the year quoting it to each other.

One thing about teaching a movie is that you begin to notice tiny details about it. Here's a fairly hard O Brother trivia contest that I wrote up last year while watching the film in class. (I'll post the answers in the comment section.)

1) Which artist from the film's soundtrack has a cameo in which she asks for a record of the Soggy Bottom Boys singing "Man of Constant Sorrow"?

2) Who performs the version of "I'll Fly Away" that's used in the film? (It's different than the one on the Grammy-winning soundtrack album.)

3) Whose translation of The Odyssey is quoted at the beginning of the film?

4) What moment in the film could be construed as a joke about Foley art?

5) Which character is speaking at a moment in the film when the sound doesn't match up with the image—when the dialogue does not fit with the character's mouth?

6) In what year is the movie taking place—and how do you know?

Pat and Flannery, on Second Thought

I read this post at the Book Bench several days ago, about Patricia Highsmith and Flannery O'Connor's simultaneous residence at the Yaddo writer's colony. They did not hit it off, apparently. A friend of Highsmith's related this story:

One night they went out on another bender, and once again, Flannery refused to come, and they left her on the porch. And there was a tremendous thunder and lightning storm and [when they went back] there was Flannery kneeling on the porch. And Pat said: “What are you doing?” And Flannery said, “Look, can’t you see it?” And she’s pointing to some knot in the porch wood. And then she said: “Jesus’ face.” And Pat said to me, “That happened. And ever since then, I’ve not liked that woman.”

Just today, though, I had this thought: Assuming that this incident truly occurred, could O'Connor have done this as a private joke on Highsmith, a way of playing off of Highsmith's preconceptions and judgments of the devout, abstemious (yet also wickedly humorous) O'Connor?

Maybe, maybe not. But it does seem like the type of thing that one of O'Connor's characters would do.

Spring and All

After exploring and photographing the area around Spring and Itaska, I headed home, pedaling north on Spring.

I love how St. Louis city streets just go on and on, unlike all the cul-de-sacs and self-enclosed neighborhoods one finds in the suburbs. You can really take a core sample of the city just by following a single street.

Leaving behind the wreckage of the apartments (see post below), I rode by some of Spring's lovelier sections. I particularly like this little jog the street takes at Meramec:

And at Spring and Keokuk there are a couple of handsome apartment buildings. This one just seems solid and proud:

I love the cozy little yard that this L-shaped building embraces:

And the fountain in Tower Grove Park was collared with ice.

If You Build It...

A couple months ago, I was riding my bike south on Spring, through Tower Grove South and into Dutchtown, when I came across a mostly abandoned apartment complex near Spring and Itaska. Adjacent to neighborhoods of fairly old frame and brick houses, it was of obviously more recent vintage, and in its uninspiring architecture felt like public housing. It reminded me a bit of the "low-rises" in The Wire. I didn't have my camera with me that day, but today I was out for a ride and decided to swing by there again (though this time I arrived by a slightly different route, taking Morganford to Bates).

Here's a view of part of the complex, from the west:

The complex comprises eight, maybe ten buildings, most of which are boarded up. The buildings are on both sides of Spring, and extend a block east on Itaska.

Despite the rather alarming condition of so many of the buildings, others in the complex are still occupied. I saw a thirty-something woman enter this building, and a kid in one of the upper windows, as well as a few kids running out to a car in the parking lot behind. Judging by the sign out front, you can still rent an apartment at this place.

Further down Spring are some other apartments, also largely if not entirely abandoned.

The other noticeable construction in the vicinity is a baseball field, which a wind-battered sign on a chain-link fence indicates is the future "Field of Dreams" of St. Mary's High School. I rode up the hill on Itaska to get a better vantage point.

When I got home, I checked around online to see if I could find out any more about this area. I found this very interesting thread on the Urban St. Louis forum.

According to the thread, the ball field used to be the site of more apartment buildings, ones fairly similar to the ones pictured above, which are in actuality the remnants of a much larger and, according to some comments in the thread, rather rough neighborhood. St. Mary's purchased the buildings and demolished them. Included in the thread is an interesting series of photos of the demolition.

The thread offers a variety of viewpoints on these apartments. One commenter, who claims to have lived in the complex in the 1980s, remembers it as a nice place to live, and regrets that poor tenant screening caused it to decline so quickly. Several St. Mary's alums remember the area as scary and crime-ridden. One commenter blames the apartments, which he thinks were public housing, for introducing crime to a formerly stable area. Others find it troubling that urban-style density is giving way to suburban-style campus development. A comparison is drawn to athletic facilities built at St. Louis U. High on the site of a former neighborhood. Though this post at the Dutchtown West site indicates that the apartments on Spring will be refurbished, a commenter on the thread asserts that those plans are now on hold because the developer ran out of money. Even among those who find troubling the buildings' demolition, no one feels that they were much of an architectural or historical loss.

I still have some questions about the history of this area, which is so subtly tucked away from general view: What was on the site before all these relatively new (and indeed rather suburban style) apartment buildings? Were the complexes used solely for subsidized housing, or were they intended to cater to a mixed-income clientele? Does their fate have any implications for the various mixed-income areas that have recently been constructed in St. Louis? Where do all those who used to live here live now?

A Zero-Sum Game

This Post-Dispatch article talks about a proposed new Wal-Mart store in Bridgeton, one that would result in the closing of a Wal-Mart that is partially in neighboring St. Ann, thus reducing the tax base of an area that's already struggling financially. Bridgeton, of course, is looking to offer TIF to Wal-Mart in order to lure them to this big new location. The whole piece is a perfect example of why it's bad to have the St. Louis area divided up into so many little municipalities. According to the article, the Missouri legislature changed TIF laws not too long ago, "taking some authority from the cities and adopting a regional countywide approach." It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. How successful can the regional countywide approach be when the county is still divided up into all these autonomous "cities," each looking out for itself?

Raymond Carver Revisited

I: A Different Kind of Story

In this wonderful season of holiday breaks and seniors away on projects, I've been reading like crazy, working my way through some Christmas presents: The Brothers Karamazov and the Library of America edition of Raymond Carver's collected stories.

I first encountered Carver's fiction in an English class I took during the first semester of my senior year of high school. We read a bunch of stories from Where I'm Calling From, a new and selected collection published shortly before Carver's death in 1988. On the Christmas break after that semester, I read most of the other stories in that collection. Then in my sophomore year of college, I took a contemporary American fiction class in which we studied Cathedral, Carver's 1983 collection.

This time around, I started by reading stories from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Carver's first collection—the stories, that is, that I hadn't already read in Where I'm Calling From. Then I went ahead and re-read those, too.

In the back matter of the book, the editors include a little note that Carver wrote for a 1973 anthology in which his story "Neighbors" (from WYPBQP) was included. In that note, Carver expresses some equivocal feelings about the story:

I think the story is, more or less, an artistic success. My only fear is that it is too thin, too elliptical and subtle, too inhuman. I hope this is not so, but in truth I do not see it as the kind of story that one loves unreservedly and gives up everything to; a story that is ultimately remembered for its sweep, for the breadth and depth and lifelike sentiment of its characters. No, this is a different kind of story—not better, maybe, and I surely hope no worse, different in any case—and the internal and external values in the story do not have much to do, I'm afraid, with character, or some of the other virtues held dear in short fiction.

A number of the stories in WYPBQP have this elliptical, even inhuman quality. Few of them are told in the first person; we tend to stand outside the characters, coldly watching them in their pathetic and venal moments.

Not all of the stories are this way—especially not "Nobody Said Anything," one of Carver's greatest stories, about a kid who cuts school one day and goes fishing. But besides that one, I don't know that any of these early stories are remarkable for their sweep, breadth, or depth.

II: Carver vs. Lish

This Library of America collection has drawn a lot of attention (for example) because it includes Beginners, the manuscript that Carver's editor Gordon Lish drastically cut, basically against Carver's wishes, and published as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver's second trade-press collection of stories.

During his lifetime, Carver eventually made clear the differences between his and Lish's visions by re-publishing a story called "A Small, Good Thing" in his third major collection, Cathedral; the story had been published in a truncated and much bleaker form in WWTA as "The Bath."

I had already been familiar with these two versions of the same story, along with the differing versions of the title story, published in the New Yorker a while back. Now, though, having read the first three stories as Carver submitted them, alongside the first three stories as published in WWTA, I find that I much prefer Carver's versions in these cases as well.

- - -

Lish does streamline the first story "Why Don't You Dance?" effectively, but he tampers with the overall mood of the story, which I would describe as a tempered sweetness. In this story, a young couple buys some household furnishings from an alcoholic man who has set them up on his lawn. Lish makes the man nameless, a good editorial choice for this story about a random moment of connection between strangers. But he adds a darkness to the story that is at odds with what Carver's up to.

In the original version the alcoholic man is charmed by the couple's negotiation over the price of the items:

In the lamplight, there was something about the expression on their faces. For a minute this expression seemed conspiratorial, and then it became tender—there was no other word for it.

But Lish makes the moment much more ominous:

He looked at them as they sat at the table. In the lamplight, there was something about their faces. It was nice or it was nasty. There was no telling.

In Carver's original it was never nasty.

Lish adds a nasty element to the conclusion of the story as well, as the girl re-tells the story of what happened that day:

We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don't laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record player. The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?

Her crudeness and mockery sharply contrast with the tenderness in the original version:

We got drunk and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don't laugh. He played records. Look at this phonograph. He gave it to us. These old records, too. Jack and I went to sleep in his bed. Jack was hungover and had to rent a trailer in the morning. To move all the guy's stuff. Once I woke up. He was covering us with a blanket, the guy was. This blanket. Feel it.

- - -

The next story, "Viewfinder," is a very short one in both versions. In it, a man with hooks for hands offers to take pictures of another man's house for a small amount of money. But again Lish darkens the ending, severely warping its implications.

In the original, the man, whose wife and children have recently left him, seems to gain a new perspective on his situation when he climbs up to have his picture taken on the roof. He finds a pile of rocks that kids have thrown up there, and in the process of chucking them off his roof he seems to feel that he is cleaning house metaphorically as well as literally.

The photographer snaps a shot and looks at how it's turned out, injecting a positive feeling into the final moments of the story:

"By God, it's okay." He looked at it. He held it up. "You know," he said, "it's good."

"Once more," I called. I picked up another rock. I grinned. I felt I could lift off. Fly.

"Now!" I called.

The photographer has offered the man some empathy (his wife and kids left him too), and helped him by his own example. This story seems like a precursor to Carver's famous story "Cathedral," in which a blind man leads another man to a similar epiphany.

But Lish would have none of it. In the Lish version, the photographer never says the photo turns out okay, and the man on the roof seems to throw the rocks only out of increasingly hysterical anger. The story ends this way:

I laid back on my arm and I hollered, "Now!" I threw that son of a bitch as far as I could throw it.

"I don't know," I heard him shout. "I don't do motion shots."

"Again!" I screamed, and took up another rock.

- - -

Most startling, though, are the changes Lish made to the third story in Carver's manuscript, which Carver titled "Where is Everyone?" This story of addiction and recovery seems a clear precursor to "Where I'm Calling From," from Carver's next collection, a story that John Updike chose as one of the Best American Short Stories of the Century. Indeed, at one point in the story, the exact phrase "where I'm calling from" is used twice.

The story is sprawling, a bit lurid in its details of alcoholic dysfunction. Yet, told in the first person, it's quite affecting; we inhabit the narrator's voice and come to like him. Carver's story is some 11 pages long. Lish, changing the title to "Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit," cut it by 78%, according to the editors of the Library of America volume, in which the WWTA version is only three pages long. In this case, Lish doesn't alter the overall implications of the story, but he makes it a very different experience, a jolt of espresso instead of a rich, full-bodied cup of coffee with even a little milk and sugar.

In his review of this volume, James Campbell notes that, later, Carver learned "to curb his characters' tendency to become prolix and sentimental." Perhaps he's thinking of this passage, part of the 78% cut from "Where is Everyone?", in which the alcoholic narrator and his alcoholic wife talk about their marriage:

"When I was pregnant with Mike you carried me to the bathroom when I was so sick and pregnant I couldn't get out of bed. You carried me. No one else will ever do that, no one else could ever love me in that way, that much. We have that, no matter what. We've loved each other like nobody else could or ever will love the other again."

Sentimental? Well, drunks tend toward sentimentality at times, don't they? And, on the other hand, this is rather beautiful, isn't it, and true? It's human, and lifelike, to use the terms Carver used when discussing what was absent from "Neighbors."

And Carver is well aware, too, of the limitations of such sentiment. As the wife says this and they hold hands, the narrator begins to think of something else:

I remembered the half-pint of whiskey or vodka or gin or scotch or tequila that I had hidden under the very sofa cushion we were sitting on (oh, happy days!) and I began to hope she might soon have to get up and move around—go to the kitchen, the bathroom, out to clean the garage.

What Lish has done with this story is taken a messy but lifelike and affecting story about alcoholism (of which Carver had nearly died not long before) and re-tooled it into a sleek, arch piece of hipness, something closer to the type of story in Carver's first book (which Lish had also spent time "cutting and fixing," as Carver puts it in a thank-you note to his editor).

- - -

In any case, it's been fascinating to read these very different versions of the stories, and I'm looking forward to continuing.

Some have suggested that the whole Carver-Lish affair leaves us wondering what's left of Carver as a writer, but I find myself feeling even more respect for Carver and his vision, along with some sadness that he found that vision stymied by an editor with more professional clout and, perhaps, mental stability at the time.

The Fabric of a City

From an interesting piece about Jonathan Lethem and Brooklyn:

Lethem is not a mourner for the past in the way that traditional Brooklyn nostalgists are – not wailing that people were friendlier back when things were cheaper and more dangerous, or that the Dodgers should never have moved to LA. He observes continuity as much as change. When I say, walking with him and thinking about what he's written, that it's interesting how the fabric of a city creates a kind of human fabric, he responds: "Yeah. I guess I'd call myself a kind of addict of that process. Because it's the unfinished quality that's surprising. Being able to come back here and feel like it was still alive came from realising that gentrification didn't mean that it was somehow sealed in amber now, but that frictions and juxtapositions are still being generated here." He coins a lovely phrase. The Brooklyn that he loves, Lethem says, is marked by "a definitive incompleteness".

I feel the same way about St. Louis: fascinated by the swaths of old neighborhoods, the layers of development, the scars and retrofits, the palimpsest of our built environment. Ride your bike around the South Side—through Tower Grove South, Dutchtown, Carondelet, for instance—and you can see all of that, frictions and juxtapositions akin to those that Lethem finds in Brooklyn.

Stephen King Revisited

The other day I came across this website, which compiles the bestselling books from each decade in the 20th century. Looking through the 1970s through 1990s, I was struck by the emergence and endurance of Stephen King on the top ten lists. He's got a book on the list for virtually every year from 1980 through 1999, and sometimes two at a time.

Skimming through the list reminded me of all the Stephen King books I read between 1988 and 1993, from the time I was 12 till I was 16. Looking over this chronological list, I find that I read 21 of his books. I have very fond memories of some of them; it occurs to me that they were the perfect things to be reading at that time in my life—a bridge to more serious literary fiction. Although I once read literary critic Harold Bloom saying that he had looked in vain for any evidence of "aesthetic dignity" in King's work, his work does in fact have virtues that are well-suited to an adolescent reader: compelling plots, clear (verging on simplistic) character motivations, a lively (if unbeautiful) prose style, and visceral emotional power.

All of the King books I've read were published between 1975 and 1992. Here are the five I think are most worth remembering. (The links are to the Wikipedia entries for each—I find that the plot summaries are quite enjoyable to read.)

1) The Eyes of the Dragon (1987)—The first King novel I ever read remains my favorite, a fact which is kind of disappointing, in a way. This novel is a fairy tale, of sorts, with an evil magician and a spooky castle and a tower prison, with snowy journeys and hair's-breadth escapes, and a charming narrative voice. I re-read it a number of years ago to make up a bonus reading test for my freshmen, and I found that the book held up pretty well. The freshmen who've chosen to read it have invariably enjoyed it, too.

2) Misery (1987)—Most people know the story from the movie, which was also well done. This one filled me with delicious dread as an adolescent, and I re-read it several times. Of all of King's books about writing and writers, I think this one has the most interesting things to say about the craft. I even considered using this book as the summer reading requirement for my Reading and Writing Fiction class. (Instead, I went with Tobias Wolff's Old School, but who knows—I might try this sometime.)

3) Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982)—The first novella in the collection Different Seasons, this is another great escape story (as are the first two novels on this list), which of course was made into a fine movie. I think I read this in one sitting, unable to stop, and completely blown away by the ending.

4) It (1985)—Topping 1000 pages, this was the longest book I'd ever read. And while it certainly has its share of ridiculous scenes, it has an evocative sense of place (the sewers, the forts in the woods) as well as an impressive imaginative range: as counterpoint to his main narrative, King dramatizes horrific eruptions of evil from the historical annals of a small Maine town.

5) Thinner (1984)—This book was originally published under King's secret pseudonym Richard Bachman, but soon after its publication its true author was revealed. It's a fairly pulpy story of a guy who gets cursed by a Gypsy and begins steadily, uncontrollably losing weight. But as I recall, it had a pared-down narrative directness that was irresistible.

Honorable Mentions: Firestarter, The Dead Zone, Christine.

Other than some short stories and essays he's published in the New Yorker (and the first third of The Green Mile, which I took on a vacation in 1999 and found very boring), I've not read much Stephen King in the second half of my life. I don't really see myself ever getting back into him, but he was certainly a major figure in my development as a reader. And I remain impressed by his superhuman output and his personal story.

Rival Genres of Reading

From Sam Anderson's reflection on how reading and novels changed in the last decade:

The DFW generation’s primary technological bugaboo was TV, a rival narrative engine that both attracted and repelled. (See Wallace’s classic essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in which he calls TV “both medicine and poison.”) Novelists in the aughts, however, had to contend with a very different bugaboo. The technology that infinitely distracted us this decade, sometimes even to the point of death—the entertainment that tore us away from work and family and prevented us from immersing ourselves in complex meganovels from the noble old-timey decades of yore—was not a passive, cartridge-based viewing experience but largely a new form of reading: the massive archive of linked documents known as the World Wide Web. TV, in comparison, looks like a fairly simple adversary: Its flickering images lure readers away from books altogether. The Internet, on the other hand, invades literature on its home turf. It has created, in the last ten years, all kinds of new and potent rival genres of reading—the blog, the chat, the tweet, the comment thread—genres that seem not only to siphon our attention but to change the way our brains process text.

Harlem Renaissance?

From an interesting NY Times article about changing demographics in Harlem:

Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, said, “Harlem has become as it was in the early 1930s — a predominantly black neighborhood, but with other groups living there as well.”

The Contradiction

James Surowiecki's Financial Page in last week's New Yorker is the briefest, clearest, most encouraging thing I've read on health insurance reform. It also has the virtue of affirming my own notion of what's going on.

An especially nice passage about the debate's central contradiction:

Politicians on both sides of the aisle overwhelmingly believe, likewise, that insurance companies should be prohibited from taking preëxisting conditions into account when setting prices or extending coverage. Both the House and the Senate reform bills include language banning this. Even Republicans have been vehement on the subject: Senator Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma, has said that “everyone agrees” that we need to eliminate the use of preëxisting conditions, while Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, declared that insurers have to be barred from “charging higher premiums to people who are sick.” The insurance companies themselves have accepted that the only factors they’ll be allowed to take into account in setting prices will be age, region, and whether or not someone smokes. The general consensus, then, is that even if you’re already sick, and guaranteed to run up huge medical bills in the future, you should be able to get health insurance at the same price as someone your age who’s perfectly healthy. Economists have a name for this: “community rating.” And the fact that it has such strong backing in Washington is heartening. Americans, and American politicians, have decided that people should have guaranteed access to insurance, and that they shouldn’t have to worry about losing it just because they get laid off or fall ill.

So where’s the contradiction? Well, Congress’s support for community rating and universal access doesn’t fit well with its insistence that health-care reform must rely on private insurance companies. After all, measuring risk, and setting prices accordingly, is the raison d’être of a health-insurance company. The way individual insurance works now, risk and price are linked. If you’re a triathlete with no history of cancer in your family, you’re a reasonably good risk, and so you can get an affordable policy that will protect you against unforeseen disaster; if you’re overweight with high blood pressure and a history of heart problems, your risk of becoming seriously ill is substantial, and therefore private insurers will either charge you high premiums or not offer you coverage at all. This kind of risk evaluation—what’s called “medical underwriting”—is fundamental to the insurance business. But it is precisely what all the new reform plans will ban. Congress is effectively making private insurers unnecessary, yet continuing to insist that we can’t do without them.

English

From Tad Friend's fascinating article (subscription required) about protests at Berkeley to statewide budget cuts in education, a perhaps surprising point, which I appreciate, as a former English major and graduate student in a family of engineers:

Another danger is that privatization can turn a university into a glorified trade school. Business programs and computer-science departments will attract wealthy supporters, but who will bankroll poetry? This concern is heightened because English—a high-enrollment, low-teaching-cost department—actually subsidizes disciplines such as nuclear physics and engineering, which require expensive equipment.

Drop the Thousand

Yesterday one of my Facebook friends asked whether we should call the current year "twenty ten" or "two thousand eleven." It hadn't occurred to me that this was a meaningful question, but apparently some people are really serious about this.

Hendrik Hertzberg adds to the discussion an interesting bit of sociolinguistic analysis:

In my opinion, the late Stanley Kubrick is the culprit for what we’ve just been through. If his movie had been set a hundred years in the future, everyone would have called it “twenty sixty-eight.” But “2001”? You couldn’t call it “twenty one,” obviously. It wasn’t about Blackjack. And you couldn’t say “twenty oh one”; that would just sound stupid. So it was, as it had to be, “two thousand and one” or, less frequently, “two thousand one.”

It was natural for everybody to call 2000 “two thousand.” Besides the millennial portentousness, there was the fact that “two thousand” has one fewer syllable than “twenty hundred.” But when the big three-zero year was over, I’m convinced, we would have reverted to the usual practice and said “twenty oh one,” “twenty oh two,” and so on. (We’d most likely have avoided “twenty one,” “twenty two,” and so on, to avoid confusion with card games and starter rifles.) But Kubrick’s space odyssey had already conditioned us.