crytical

As Ann Coulter begins the publicity tour for her new book, Mugged, we preview five other titles sure to be rightwing hits
As the conservative firebrand™ Ann Coulter begins the publicity tour for her new book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, we preview some other rightwing titles tipped to be among the season’s polemical bestsellers:
FURY: The Angry Rage of Barack Obama, by Dinesh D’Souza
In public, Barack Obama, the son of a leftwing Kenyan economist, maintains an eerily calm demeanour. insider accounts of the Obama White House suggest that he’s similarly unflappable in private; indeed, many of Obama’s leftwing critics have assailed him for being too conciliatory and conflict-averse. But in this devastating expose, the serious academic Dinesh D’Souza, president of the world-renowned Well-Respected College For Serious Academics, reveals the truth: behind Obama’s facade – unknown to his closest aides, his wife and children, or even to Obama himself – the president is angry, burning with a boiling anti-colonialist desire to subjugate America. Based on hundreds of hours of extensive daydreaming, FURY leaves the reader in no doubt that President Obama, who as you may know is black, is also very, very angry – as a direct result of his furious rage.
I KNOW YOU ARE, BUT WHAT AM I? by Jonah Goldberg
In this pathbreaking work of scholarship – a tour-de-force in the style of his bestseller Liberal Fascism – National Review writer Goldberg turns conventional wisdom on its head. Did you think the Nazis were rightwing? Actually, they were leftwing. Were you under the impression that the Democrats were the party of civil rights? Actually, that was the Republicans. Did you think that you should vote for Obama? Actually, you should vote for Romney. Do you think Jonah Goldberg is a contrarian for the sake of it? Actually, he’s vociferously opposed to contrarianism. True to the spirit of Goldberg’s worldview, the spine of this book is to the right of the pages, rather than to the left, the words can only be read if reflected in a mirror and the best way to enjoy it is not to buy it.
PUNK’D!!! Conservative Arguments to Drive Liberals #@!**?@ Crazy!, by SE Cupp and Greg Gutfeld
A book for butt-kicking, red-blooded conservatives who just don’t care how much liberals hate the fact that they love hunting with guns, eating red meat or dressing up in combat gear and pretending that the guest bedroom is a Marine training camp! In PUNK’D!!!, gun-totin’, right-leanin’, final-letter-of-words-omittin’ MSNBC commentator SE Cupp (author of Why You’re Wrong About the Right) and hilarious Fox News humorist Greg Gutfeld team up to show that liberals aren’t going to stop conservatives going hunting, or thinking about how it would probably be quite exciting to go hunting, or pretending that they went hunting once!
This book is sure to annoy the “politically correct” brigade, whose opinions Cupp and Gutfeld certainly don’t care about! They really couldn’t care less if leftwingers are outraged by what they’ve got to say! Not in the slightest! Really! (Important note: while reading this book, be sure to imagine that thousands of liberals have also bought it, for inexplicable reasons, and are being enraged by it, otherwise the entire premise collapses.)
DISTORTION: Fighting The Publishing Industry’s Liberal Lies, Communist Contortions and Socialist Spin, by Bernard Goldberg
Goldberg, a former CBS producer, shot to fame in 2001 when he published Bias, an impassioned account of how leftwing bias made it impossible for conservative voices to be heard in America. As if to prove his point, the book became a New York Times No 1 bestseller, but only for several weeks – and although Goldberg was interviewed in many news outlets, not one liberal publication dedicated an entire issue to his work. In this latest text, which has already sold 3m copies on pre-order, he shows how liberal tyranny has made it impossible to publish a conservative-leaning book in the United States.
SPECIAL THINGS YOU CAN DO TO MAKE GOD SMILE, by Joel Osteen
Be inspired to live the life of abundance that God intended for you. In this special audiobook package, Osteen, the televangelist and pastor of the Lakewood megachurch in Houston, Texas, offers one spiritually enriching thought for each day of the year. In some of the days leading up to 5 November, it might occasionally sound like he’s coughing and saying “Vote Republican” at the same time – in some sort of subliminal message – but he isn’t. He is just inspiring you to live the life of abundance (and heterosexuality) that God intended for you.

Oliver Burkeman 26.9.2012
guardian.co.uk







edvardmunch.org
Edvard Munch: Melancholy, 1894
“If people only read poetry, which you can never stop poets producing even when you pay them nothing at all, then the law of copyright would disappear in a trice.” —Tim Parks
Wonderful! I said to myself after I read this. The world is going to hell, but we poets have something to look forward to. We never got rich in the past and won’t see a dime in the future. Despite copyright laws, most of our poems are already freely available to millions of people on the Internet and in this age of short attention spans, poetry may end up by being the only literature people will read. With no bookstores left and libraries shut down, lovers in need of additional romantic stimulus will have to reach for their iPhones and find a poem suitable for the occasion to read to each other. Poetry’s strength comes from such practical uses. Everyone has heard of poems being read at marriage ceremonies and funerals, but I suspect nobody has ever tried to inflict a chapter of a novel or a short story on that kind of gathering. No wonder writers and intellectuals by and large disdain poetry. Poets work for nothing, Tim Parks says. In other words, they turn poems out the way a sweatshop in a third-world country turns out cheap toys.
More infuriatingly, most poems are short. They give the impression it took no time to write them. Ten minutes tops. To write a six-hundred-page novel takes years. You go and work at your desk every day the way a miner goes to his mine and you feel as drained afterwards. Of course, that kind of work should be amply rewarded. A poet stands by the window watching the rain fall, or looks at the lock of hair of his old sweetheart, scribbles something down on a piece of paper and is through for the day. The most outrageous thing about poetry is that poems composed in such a lackadaisical manner end up in anthologies your kids are supposed to study in school. Not only that, but they may fall in love with them, memorise them, and try to imitate them. “Poetry is dead!,” someone shouts happily every now and then, to the relief of parents and those among the educated who never read poetry. No such luck. One just has to see the number of poetry submissions the magazines, including ones that never publish poetry, receive every day. Today more than ever, there are thousands and thousands of people writing poetry in this country, some of them attending one of the hundreds of writing workshops being given in universities, colleges and various other venues, and others writing their own, most likely in complete secrecy and with the modest hope of publishing in a literary journal of some repute and perhaps eventually having a book that will be read and admired by fellow poets and a few others who care for poetry.
A successful novelist can, with luck, make a bundle, as can a memoir writer (if he or she is fortunate to have had a mother who murders the author’s father in front of his or her eyes), and a third-rate painter can do quite well if a hotel chain or a bank starts fancying his seascapes and sunflowers, but few poets ever made a living from poetry. In past centuries, they could hope for a dinner invitation from some noblemen holed up in his castle to entertain his drunken guests, or even receive a piece of land from the king after writing a paean to his various conquests and massacres. But in modern times, except in the Soviet Union under Stalin, the possibility that poets might toady up to the high and mighty and live thereafter in clover has been foreclosed. Even Robert Frost, who was immensely popular and widely read during his lifetime, had to get a teaching job to support himself. As for the rest of our great poets, going back to Whitman and Dickinson, their combined income from poetry, if it were known, would make them even more incomprehensible in the eyes of many Americans than they already are.
In a country that now regards money as the highest good, doing something for the love of it is not just odd, but downright perverse. Imagine the horror and anger felt by parents of a son or daughter who was destined for the Harvard Business School and a career in finance but discovered an interest in poetry instead. Imagine their enticing descriptions of the future riches and power awaiting their child while trying to make him or her reconsider the decision. “Who has recognised you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?,” the trial judge shouted at the Russian poet Josef Brodsky, before sentencing him to five years of hard labor. “No one,” Brodsky replied. He could have been speaking for all the sons and daughters who had to face their parents’ wrath.
As for me, I still can’t really explain to myself how I became a poet, and I’ve given up trying. What I knew from day one is that money had nothing to do with it. Only once I forgot about that and made a fool of myself. It was back in the early 1970s when I held a lowly teaching job in California and struggled to support my wife and my daughter. On a day when we were supposed to visit some friends in San Francisco, I received a letter in the mail from some guy who was starting a slick artsy magazine and who after telling me how much he liked my poems said he would like to publish a couple of them and pay $600, but he needed them in a hurry. This was a huge sum of money in 1972, particularly for someone whose salary as an assistant professor in a state university was pretty miserable and who was usually flat broke, and whose only other income came from small literary magazines that paid between five and twenty-five dollars per poem and most often nothing at all.
The problem was that I had nothing at that moment I could send him. I ran into the house, got a hold of a yellow pad and a pen, told my wife to drive, and sat in the back seat feverishly trying to write some poems during our trip. The next day when I got home, and for a week after, I continued working on them each day in high spirits and total concentration, while spending the evenings arguing with my wife about how we were going to spend the dough. But one bright sunny morning I rose before anyone else, sat at my desk and read what I’d been working on, and realised that everything about them was totally fake. I tore the poems up with great hurry and embarrassment and went out to take a long walk with my dog.
Charles Simic The New York Review of Books 24.8.2012
nybooks.com

All images courtesy of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust

Edward Gorey: ‘Lady Under Elephant Table’ (aka ‘Table Pausing Over a Lady’), 1977
While working in the Anchor/Doubleday art department in the 1950s, the illustrator and writer Edward Gorey discovered a long-forgotten cache of material by an earlier artist, the Krazy Kat creator George Herriman. These were Herriman’s original drawings for Don Marquis’s book about a poetry-writing cockroach and his cat companion, Archy and Mehitabel. In a 1999 interview with Steven Heller, Gorey recalled:
I could scream now, because nobody knew they were there, and I anguished but finally took three of them…. You can’t believe how much stuff there was…you know, old book jackets from the ’20s, the ’teens. Nobody paid any attention to it.

Gorey’s cover for an issue of The Kenyon Review, 1966

As Herriman’s drawings aroused Gorey’s impulse to preserve them, so the work of Gorey—who illustrated fifty-odd covers for the Anchor paperback series and would go on to create more than a hundred witty and macabre books of his own—arouses ours today. For the drawings he made throughout his life capture “a whole little personal world,” as Edmund Wilson put it: “equally amusing and sombre, nostalgic at the same time as claustrophobic, at the same time poetic and poisoned.” A number of recent exhibitions and editions of his books suggest a renewed interest in his legacy.
Gorey’s work tends to combine whimsically grim story lines with dour yet dancerly protagonists. Whether they are Edwardian ladies, fur-coated gentlemen, ill-fated children, or unusual animals, his characters are almost always on some kind of journey. His stories often unfold in wallpapered rooms, on barren estates, or among statues, beast-shaped topiaries, and urns. “Few seem to return from the borders to which I’ve sent them,” he wrote to Peter Neumeyer, with whom he collaborated on three children’s books in the late 1960s. (Their correspondence has recently been collected in an absorbing, elegantly illustrated book, Floating Worlds.) Perhaps this is what gives Gorey’s work its talismanic power: his books and drawings, which are so often about imagined deaths and disasters, turn into lucky charms for his readers.

An invitation to the opening night of Dracula and an after-theater dinner party, 1977

In addition to his own books and his covers for Anchor, Gorey—who died in 2000 at the age of seventy-five—illustrated some sixty books for other writers, including Edward Lear’s The Jumblies, several collections of John Ciardi’s children’s verse, and Muriel Spark’s The Very Fine Clock. Gorey also designed the sets and costumes for a Broadway production of Dracula, illustrated the opening sequence of the PBS show Mystery!, made drawings for the New York City Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera, and for many years drew limited-edition Christmas cards for the publisher and rare books dealer George Bixby, who sent them out annually to his clients (they now often sell for hundreds of dollars apiece).
While many Gorey aficionados own a handful of his treasures, few have amassed a collection as large and comprehensive as that of the architect and attorney Andrew Alpern. The author of nine books of his own, including the Goreyesque Alpern’s Architectural Aphorisms, Alpern spent over fifty years collecting more than seven hundred Gorey-related books and souvenirs and stored them wherever he could in his one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. In 2010 he donated the entire collection to Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where more than five hundred of the objects are on display until August 10 in the exhibition “Gorey Preserved.”
Curated by Alpern himself along with the library’s curator for the performing arts, Jennifer B. Lee, this gloriously overloaded exhibition has the potential to convert even an Aimlessly wandering visitor into a Zealously devoted Gorey fan, and is bound to delight those who already recognise these adverbs from Gorey’s abecedarium The Glorious Nosebleed. It is chock-full of everything from books, postcards, photographs, and newspaper clippings to T-shirts, pot holders, mugs, and plastic party cups—all decorated with Gorey’s illustrations. There are some original drawings, etchings, and prints here as well—including a rare edition of Elefantômas, his set of nine extraordinary elephant collagraphs, which are displayed alongside eleven of his exquisite elephant etchings—but the exhibition’s unmistakable emphasis is on the printed permutations of Gorey’s work and its transformation into a breathtaking trove of tchotchkes.

One of Gorey’s elephant etchings, 1985

Take, for example, the case housing Gorey’s artwork for Dracula. Near an original ink drawing of Dracula with a swooning Lucy are photostats of Gorey’s ink and water-colour sketches for the set and costume designs; posters and playbills from the performances; T-shirts, postcards, buttons, and stickers decorated with his drawings; a silver Dracula pendant; several books about vampires with cover illustrations by Gorey; a pop-up book based on Gorey’s sets; a New York Times Magazine article called “Gorey Goes Batty”; and a pair of stuffed-animal bats with thirteen-inch wingspans made out of cross-hatch-patterned cloth. Also included are a newspaper column about a wallpaper pattern adapted from Gorey’s Dracula designs, a magazine advertisement for same, and real samples of the cloth and vinyl damask, inviting visitors to imagine a life within four walls papered with Gorey’s vampiric illustrations.

The rest of the exhibition is nearly as eclectic. But one of its most impressive aspects is that, along with so much ephemera, it includes almost every edition of every book that Gorey wrote and illustrated, both under his own name and under his anagrammatic pseudonyms. Thus visitors can see a first edition of his first book, The Unstrung Harp—which depicts, in Edmund Wilson’s words, “the boredom, the monotony, the impermeable solipsistic confinement of the life of the professional writer”—as well as copies of the French and Japanese versions of The Epiplectic Bicycle, and a section dedicated to what might be Gorey’s most beloved book: The Gashlycrumb Tinies, in which twenty-six children with names from A to Z die in twenty-six different ways: by awl, by brawl, by ennui.

A drawing from an engagement calendar based on The Gashlycrumb Tinies, 2003

Especially tantalising are several rare letterpress editions of Gorey’s miniature books, The Eclectic Abecedarium and QRV (each a rhyming verse homage to moral primers of earlier centuries), complete with tiny slipcases smaller than matchboxes. Also on display are almost-as-rare editions of Gorey’s Exquisite Corpse–like books, including Les Échanges Malandreux, whose pages of drawings and text are cut into strips that can be mixed and matched to create different creatures and tell different stories. One longs to open them up and play with the possible combinations. Luckily, this will be possible for visitors to the library once the books have been catalogued and rejoin the permanent collection.

A postcard from the Interpretive Series, 1979

Gorey treated language playfully in all of his texts, hand-lettering the type, and he created many illustrated alphabet books, several of which are in the exhibition. Not on Modern Architecture’s Dark Side display is a particular favourite, one of his “thoughtful alphabets” called The Deadly Blotter, whose plot races forward letter by letter, from “Alarming behaviour” to “Corpse” to “Detective enters.” Instead of his usual finely detailed cross-hatching, Gorey used dense blocks of black and white for these illustrations, creating lean characters who drape themselves over drawing-room furniture and point their fingers in all directions while offering “Helpful irrelevancies” and “Likely motives.”
Another of Gorey’s magical word creations is his “Interpretive Series” of Dogear Wryde postcards, devoted solely to the letter I. All thirteen cards are elaborately displayed in the exhibition, giving viewers a chance to take pleasure in Gorey’s drawings of a lizard-like beast enacting “Inquisitiveness,” “Indolence,” “Inconstancy,” “Ineptitude,” “Inanity,” and eight other mostly unflattering nouns. It’s hard not to be smitten with these playful postcards, each of which was hand-painted by Gorey after being printed.

‘Christmas Tiger,’ from FMRA, 1980

Animals, both real and invented, live large in Gorey’s work, perhaps none more so than his cats. Gorey loved cats at least as much as he loved the ballet—for thirty years he spent half of each year in Manhattan during ballet season—and his anthropomorphic renderings of them are everywhere in the exhibition: peeking out from his books, posing on buttons for the “New York Kitty Ballet,” relaxing contentedly on a cat-patterned cravat, and emerging into being in a charming sketch from one of Gorey’s notebooks (on loan from the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust). “Cats share with ballet dancers the quality of graceful movement,” Gorey told Cats Magazine in 1978. “As an artist, I find their expressions endlessly and frustratingly fascinating.” Perhaps this is why most of his cats wear bewitching smiles; whether they are standing atop a unicycle or leaning against a gravestone, they seem carefree and sprightly, in happy contrast to Gorey’s more Gothic creations.
Gorey contributed a number of drawings to The New York Review of Books, including original artwork for every anniversary cover from 1978 to 1998 (two years before he died). None of them appear in “Gorey Preserved,” but many of the clippings are preserved in Alpern’s scrapbooks. Especially noteworthy is Gorey’s Les Mystères de Constantinople: La Malle Saignante, a farcical romp whose characters include a young leading lady, a baron, an ambassador, an alligator, and Ahududu, an unlikely villain apparently carved from wood. It was serialised in the Review in 1975; its heroine, according to Gorey’s close friend Alison Lurie, “was thought by some to resemble one of the NYR’s editors.”

The opening panel of Les Mystères de Constantinople, from a 1975 issue of The New York Review

It may surprise Review readers and Gorey fans alike to learn how far back his link to the magazine’s founders goes. Gorey first met the Review’s co-founding editor Barbara Epstein—who died in 2006—in the late 1940s, when he was at Harvard and she was at Radcliffe; and as a young editor at Doubleday in the early 1950s, she and her future husband, Jason Epstein, another founder of the Review who was then launching the Anchor paperback series, invited Gorey to work in the art department. Barbara Epstein recalled Gorey’s Anchor cover illustrations to Stephen Schiff in a 1992 New Yorker profile: “They were beautiful, ravishing. He worked very slowly, with a tremendous perfectionism, and he would never let a drawing out of his hands if it was less than perfect.”

Gorey’s Anchor cover for André Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures, 1953

Alpern’s Gorey collection began in about 1957 with one of those Anchor books: André Gide’s novel Lafcadio’s Adventures, whose cover was the first that Gorey illustrated for the series. Around the same time, Alpern bought Gorey’s second published book, The Listing Attic, a set of illustrated limericks. However, it was in the mid-1970s that his efforts became systematic. On a visit to the Gotham Book Mart in Midtown, Alpern bought a little book of Gorey’s on sale by the cash register. Andreas Brown, the bookstore’s owner, began to let Alpern know when Gorey would be making appearances at the store, where Brown frequently exhibited his work, and from then on, Alpern bought every new book that Gorey published, along with special editions of etchings and other artwork—as well as every Gorey-illustrated curiosity that came along.
In 1980, Alpern joined with George Bixby in an act of true collectors’ devotion to produce a limited edition of Gorey miscellanea. They gathered together an eclectic set of Gorey’s one-of-a-kind illustrations in a clamshell box, typed out a contract for him to sign, and asked him what to call the collection. Gorey spontaneously titled it, with the sound of the word “ephemera” in mind, FMRA—writing the letters down on a piece of paper for his enthusiastic publishers.
Today a growing number of Gorey cognoscenti are working to keep Gorey’s work permanently in print and in the public eye. More than fifty of his books and miscellany are currently available from Pomegranate, which plans to release new editions of The Osbick Bird and Thoughtful Alphabets: The Just Dessert & The Deadly Blotter this fall; and New York Review Books has also brought some of his collaborations back into print. Drawings from his archives continue to appear in magazines like the Review, in articles ranging from contemporary fiction to the Internet. Several Gorey-lovers have posted digitised versions of his books on YouTube.

Pomegranate
An envelope that Gorey sent to Peter Neumeyer in 1968, introducing characters for their 1970 book Why We Have Day and Night (from Floating Worlds)

Meanwhile, in addition to “Gorey Preserved,” at least two other Gorey exhibitions are now on view: “Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey,” at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach (which features a substantial number of original drawings and is accompanied by a wonderful catalog); and “Edward Gorey’s Envelope Art,” at the Edward Gorey House in Cape Cod (which includes some of the envelopes he sent to Peter Neumeyer). Andreas Brown, who is now a representative of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust, has been helping Gorey’s collectors find institutional homes for their valuable holdings—one or two even larger than Alpern’s—so that they will be archived and made accessible to scholars and the public. Gorey’s own enormous library of some 25,000 books has been acquired by San Diego State University, which already holds a rich collection of Gorey material and hosted a major exhibition of his work in 2004.

A postcard of the Doubtful Guest, from Leaves from a Mislaid Album, 1972

Shortly after Gorey’s death, Alison Lurie—to whom Gorey dedicated one of his most enchantingly discomfiting tales, The Doubtful Guest—wrote, “Often, characters in Gorey’s books who die or disappear leave only a void behind: empty cross-hatched streets and withered formal gardens and rooms with strange wallpaper.” But for Gorey fans and addicts—who, with all this Goreyana now abounding, will have mounds of material to admire for years to come—Lurie’s closing words ring true: “We are luckier.”
“Gorey Preserved” is on view at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New York City until August 10, 2012.
Eve Bowen New York Review of Books. nyrb.com 5.8.2012

The original check used to pay for Alaska, worth $7.2 million

Wikipedia.org/wiki/alaska

Martin Filler

The Wolfsonian
A German poster printed in the Netherlands, 1943: “Atlantic Wall: 1943 is not 1918″
There has long been a tendency to see the most important innovations of Modernism as arising directly from progressive causes. War, in this view, was considered a limiting if not wholly destructive force that stymied civilian architecture in favour of retrogressive military structures. But in his groundbreaking recent book Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, the French architectural historian and architect Jean-Louis Cohen establishes one big, awful, inescapable truth: the full potential of twentieth-century architecture, engineering, and design was realised not in the social-welfare and urban-improvement schemes beloved by the early proponents of the Modern Movement, but rather through technologies perfected during the two world wars to slaughter vast armies, destroy entire cities, decimate noncombatant populations, and industrialise genocide.
It is hard to come away from Architecture in Uniform without the same feelings of profound horror and lingering dread that overtake readers of recent books on World War II by Max Hastings, Timothy Snyder, and other historians who continue to reveal with terrifying immediacy just how horrific that catastrophe was. And yet it also had paradoxical consequences for architecture.
High among the major misconceptions that Cohen addresses in this heroic project—which included an eponymous exhibition he curated at Montreal’s Canadian Centre for Architecture last summer—is that World War II brought the building art to a veritable halt. Although non-essential commercial and residential construction were indeed banned for the duration of the war in the US, architecture and engineering proceeded apace in the military sphere. Urgent contingencies spurred the rapid development of new synthetic materials (especially plastics of all sorts) and imaginative technical solutions (including lightweight and portable structures as well as new forms of prefabrication) that would have taken far longer to emerge under less pressured peacetime conditions.
Now a professor at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and the University of Paris VIII, Cohen was himself touched by the immediate legacy of the war in the French capital where he grew up. Although he recounts such inspiring feats as the wholesale retooling of American manufacturing for the all-out war effort—which spelled certain doom for the Axis once our industrially invincible country entered the conflict in 1941—darker episodes predominate. Impelled by the saga of his mother (the wife of a leading French Communist Party official), who was a slave labourer in the greenhouses appended to the Dachau concentration camp, Cohen recounts how design concepts devised for human betterment were most effectively reapplied by the Nazis to the vilest ends:
It was a kind of sadistic radicalisation of the research on the minimum habitation that had been conducted under the Weimar Republic by architects in Berlin and Frankfurt, whose purpose was the large-scale production of affordable modern housing for large urban populations. The concentration camp version of the Existenzminimum was compressed beyond any imaginable limits.

Panstwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau
Fritz Ertl: Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, detention sheds, November 1944
As Cohen notes, one of the principal designers of the Auschwitz death factory, Fritz Ertl, was trained at the Bauhaus, the German design school we now associate with the most enlightened aspects of the new architecture. Ertl’s partner in crime at Auschwitz was the all-too-aptly named architect August Schlachter (slaughterer). Their thoroughly depraved SS boss, Hans Kammler, was an architect who had worked under the socially aware Berlin housing architect Paul Mebes during the Weimar period. Even though Hitler’s personal hatred for the supposedly un-Germanic International Style led his acolytes to reject its outward manifestations in favour of traditional Völkisch motifs (especially the pitched roof), they were all too willing to retain the internal functional improvements of Modernism and apply them wholeheartedly to the Nazi killing machine.
The author reserves special contempt for the much written-about overseer of these fiends, Albert Speer, whose talents as an architect and war-materiel strategist were far outstripped by a genius for lying and charm that saved his neck at Nuremberg. How this monster ever survived postwar justice to rewrite his own twisted version of history remains a great mystery, but Cohen will have none of it. As he concludes his terse but devastating section on the death camps:
Speer attempted to justify his actions by claiming that his “obsessive fixation on production and output statistics” had “blurred all considerations and feelings of humanity.” But in the case of the architects of the Bauleitung of Auschwitz [Ertl and Schlachter], who could not be unaware of the horror at work some meters away from their drawing board, this pale excuse cannot even be contemplated.
Unpleasant as it is to contemplate, the symbiosis between war and architectural advancement was hardly exclusive to World War II. Going back to antiquity—and particularly with the onset of the Industrial Revolution—large-scale conflicts caused new means of production to be redirected toward military ends, which in turn inevitably affected manufacturing technology in peacetime. But it was World War I that changed everything. As Cohen writes in a second recent book, his new history of modernism, The Future of Architecture: Since 1889: “Instead of disrupting the pattern of transformation in which architecture was engaged worldwide, the first industrial war in history had the opposite effect: by accelerating modernisation….”

Asigurarea Româneasca, Bucharest
The Future of Architecture is the best comprehensive history of modernism to appear in a generation. While not departing from an essentially familiar narrative, Cohen extends his sights well beyond the usual parameters of the modernist canon. Thus, in addition to such ever-fixéd landmarks as Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, we find less heralded but recently reappreciated masterworks such as Grete Schütte-Lihotzky’s ingeniously integrated Frankfurt Kitchen, Adalberto Libera’s majestically isolated Villa Malaparte on Capri, and Dimitris Pikonis’s monumental but understated pedestrian promenade on the Athenian Acropolis. And in no other survey are you likely to find off-the-beaten-path urban showpieces of the 1930s such as Kikuji Ishimoto and Bunzo Yamaguchi’s Shirokiya Department Store in Tokyo, Horia Crenga’s Asigurarea Romaneasca Building in Bucharest, and Antoine Tabet and Georges Bordes’ Hôtel Saint-Georges in Beirut.

Shirokiya Department Store, Tokyo
Cohen’s text will be closely read for his critical estimation of living and deceased architects. The most significant figures are accorded several paragraphs each, but such attention does not always signal approval. For example, the author efficiently dispenses with Philip Johnson, “who followed architectural shifts more than he generated them….[and] cast a long shadow over the American profession as well as its cultural institutions.” (He makes even shorter work of Johnson’s creature and epigone Robert A.M. Stern.)
Among today’s senior generation, Cohen focuses, appropriately enough, on Robert Venturi (though with scant attention to Denise Scott Brown), Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Álvaro Siza, Rafael Moneo, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Accorded less space and grouped in collective subsections are such perennial press favourites as Richard Meier, Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and Steven Holl, diminished allocations that I wholeheartedly subscribe to as well.

Foster+Partners
Foster+Partners: Hearst Tower, New York, 2000-2006
Cohen’s emphases seem merited in each instance, save one’s reservations about the ubiquitous but increasingly corporate Piano, Rogers, and Foster. What Cohen writes of Foster’s firm might be said of all three high-tech wizards: “The global success of Foster + Partners, which developed into a truly multinational firm in the 1990s, has led to high-quality projects, yet the conceptual power of Foster’s early buildings seems sometimes to have been lost in the transition.”
The high-tech aesthetic that Foster and his vast worldwide apparat have so skilfully marketed derives in large part, of course, from the no-nonsense engineering ethos that has been perhaps the most lasting design legacy of World War II, pacified though it may be at the moment. But just as mankind remains ever capable of slipping back into barbarism despite the horrifying lessons recent history offers, so does the destructive potential of man’s technological ingenuity seem not far removed from the terrible purposes to which it was put three-quarters of a century ago.

Jean-Louis Cohen’s Architecture in Uniform is published by the Yale Press and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, whose accompanying exhibition showed at the Nederlands Architectuur Institut earlier this year. Cohen’s The Future of Architecture Since 1889 is published by Phaidon.
New York Review of Books
Martin Filler 21.7.2012
nyrb.com

This week’s poem shows us a multi-faceted Ireland through the prism of the pub, and a half-interior imaginary ramble
It’s a month since Bloomsday was celebrated, but perhaps this week’s poem, “Legacies” by Peter Sirr, will help sustain us until the next one. Sirr, like many Irish writers after Joyce, is something of an internationalist. A fine translator as well as original poet, he was born in Waterford in 1960, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and has lived for spells in Italy and Holland. “Legacies” appears in his Selected Poems (Gallery Press, 2004) and was first published in Bring Everything (Gallery Press, 2000).

The wide cultural territory of Sirr’s poems includes a multi-faceted Ireland, and “Legacies” shows us two contrasting Dublins (perhaps three, if we count the speaker’s). It celebrates tradition, but not in any simplistic sense of celebration. If the legacy is dying in the 21st century (as the “nth bar” might imply) or fading into self-conscious cultural heritage, the poem subverts nostalgia by taking the form of a personal address. From a gently psychological perspective, it portrays an extrovert at ease in his ideal social setting: the pub. It’s where the sophisticated city of competing identities is banished by a village-like subculture, in which difference dissolves into noisy conviviality.

Sirr’s language is generally simple and direct. It’s not hard to imagine the addressee nodding his head at times in cheery agreement. But of course “Legacies” is the imaginary, interior half of an imaginary conversation. This corner of the snug is also a corner of the speaker’s head, and the addressee is button-holed there, but also observed and subjected to the pressures of imagination.

So, after that appealingly direct opening – “You so loved company” – the language takes a more figurative turn, and the reader/addressee is presented with an image that’s partly humorous, but also frightening and rather surreal: “an engine has attached itself to your body …” This partial metamorphosis of the happy drinker into an industrial process involving the ingestion and transformation of a quantity of disparate material allows Sirr to evoke the ruthless, pounding torrent of sounds. We get not only the songs and arguments, but that more recent decibel-raising ingredient of pub entertainment, “heavy rock”. Against the pandemonium, the poem singles out a surprising “dialect of intimacy” which also comes with the territory. The grammar is heavily garbled, and half the addressee’s words are lost – “But you don’t mind …”

The mechanical imagery is recalled in that powerful line, “it has poured down the generations” – “it” here referring to the “background roar”. The pronoun is unstable, subject to anaphoric shifts. In line 6, “it” is the engine. It’s also the place, the night, and the city itself, “refusing to sleep, talking to itself, drinking too much”. Meanwhile, the character addressed, and all the denizens hovering in the shadows, are seemingly on autopilot. This is an effect not only of alcohol, but, the poem reveals, something more powerful yet – heredity. The inexorable machine is also made of strands of DNA.

So the poem gives truth and solidity to what the outsider might misread as “romantic Ireland”. The communal, festive ritual at the end of the working day is a male tradition stretching back years. The addressee is more than rooted in this tradition. “We’re listening in the nth bar / to your great great grandfather / blurt his song, to his son urge him on, / then his son comes shambling in …” The latest son turns into the addressee, and finally there’s a delirious meltdown of identity between generations and individuals, one which also gathers the poem’s speaker into the centrifuge.

But first we’re shown another kind of life, another Ireland. The citizens are industrious and sober. The speaker seems close to them (“our friends”). In their orderly world, noise is limited: they are able to distinguish sounds, living sensibly and responsibly a life which (in Larkin’s phrase) might be “reprehensibly perfect”, but which is presented without that scathing judgment – unless we the readers wish to make it. The poem doesn’t stay long in their company. It goes back to the pub after this little interlude. Only perhaps in the almost throwaway phrase, “where the soul / grins”, is there a glimpse of something demonic or deathly in the euphoria.

The poem’s rhythm is the rhythm of talk, and the punctuation is similarly light and informal. Sirr employs the comma-splice to link separate statements, as in “But you don’t mind, / it comes with the grammar”. This device helps to keep the poem moving and underlines its character as interior monologue. Almost mimetic, it goes with the flow of the pints, the conversation, the hubbub of its setting. And its warmth is palpable: this is a poem of affection and reciprocal generosity. The speaker does not only sympathise with the addressee. He comes on in the end to share his identity and his legacy.

Peter Sirr received the prestigious Michael Hartnett award last year for his 2009 collection The Thing Is. You can read more of his poems here and his blog, The Cat Flap, here.

Legacies

You so love company

an engine has attached itself to your body,

taking up the night and feeding it back

as a spill of laughter

and confusion.

It takes half of what you say

and chews it up, the rest it overlays

with heavy rock, with old films,

the roar of other voices, glasses

clinking and a till slamming,

someone arguing and someone

starting to sing.

But you don’t mind,

it comes with the grammar

in this dialect of intimacy,

it’s how you like to live at night.

It’s where your father lived

and his father before him;

it has poured down the generations,

loud and smoke-filled,

a background roar where the soul

grins; it is the city

refusing to sleep, talking to itself,

drinking too much.

What happens here would die in quiet,

melts at dawn, is absent from

the sensible rooms our friends

have retired to. They’ve gone

to sleep or talk, to use the language rationally,

to distinguish one sound from another:

the purr of far-off traffic, the hum

of heating and the gravity of early news.

We’re listening in the nth bar

to your great great grandfather

blurt his song, to his son urge him on,

then his son comes shambling in

to wave your hands and shout for more

in your voice: more talk,

more drink, more noise

till neither they nor you nor I can tell

whose head is starting to spin,

whose voice is telling the story,

whose life it happens in.
Carol Rumans
guardian.co.uk 17.7.2012

The ancient Greeks had a word for it – pleonexia – which means an overreaching desire for more than one’s share. As Melissa Lane explained in last year’s Eco-Republic: Ancient Thinking for a Green Age, this vice was often paired with hubris, a form of arrogance directed especially against the gods and therefore doomed to fail. The Greeks saw tyrants as fundamentally pleonetic in their motivation. As Lane writes: “Power served greed and so to tame power, one must tame greed.”
In The Price of Inequality, Joseph E Stiglitz passionately describes how unrestrained power and rampant greed are writing an epitaph for the American dream. The promise of the US as the land of opportunity has been shattered by the modern pleonetic tyrants, who make up the 1%, while sections of the 99% across the globe are beginning to vent their rage. That often inchoate anger, seen in Occupy Wall Street and Spain’s los indignados, is given shape, fluency, substance and authority by Stiglitz. He does so not in the name of revolution – although he tells the 1% that their bloody time may yet come – but in order that capitalism be snatched back from free market fundamentalism and put to the service of the many, not the few.
In the 1970s and 80s, “the Chicago boys”, from the Chicago school of economics, led by Milton Friedman, developed their anti-regulation, small state, pro-privatisation thesis – and were handed whole countries, aided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), on which to experiment, among them Thatcher’s Britain, Reagan’s America, Mexico and Chile. David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism describes how the democratically elected Salvador Allende was overthrown in Chile and the Chicago boys brought in. Under their influence, nationalisation was reversed, public assets privatised, natural resources opened up to unregulated exploitation (anyone like to buy one of our forests?), the unions and social organisations were torn apart and foreign direct investment and “freer” trade were facilitated. Rather than wealth trickling down, it rapidly found its way to the pinnacle of the pyramid. As Stiglitz explains, these policies were – and are – protected by myths, not least that the highest paid “deserve” their excess of riches.
In 2001, Stiglitz, a former chief economist at the World Bank, and arch critic of the IMF, won the Nobel prize for economics for his theory of “asymmetric information”. When some individuals have access to privileged knowledge that others don’t, free markets yield bad outcomes for wider society. Stiglitz conducted his work in the 1970s and 80s but asymmetric information perfectly describes the Libor scandal, rigging the interest rate at a cost to the ordinary man and woman in the street. Stiglitz details the profound consequences not just of the current financial meltdown but of the previous decades of neoliberal interventions on the incomes, health and prospects of the 99% and the damage done to the values of fairness, trust and civic responsibility.
In the process, Stiglitz methodically and lyrically (almost joyously) exposes the myths that provide justification for “deficit fetishism” and the rule of austerity. If George Osborne is depressed at the ineffectiveness of Plan A, he should turn to Stiglitz’s succinct explanation on page 230 to feel truly miserable. Cutting spending, reducing taxes, shrinking government and increasing deregulation destroys both demand and jobs – and doesn’t even benefit the 1%.
For roughly 30 years after the second world war, the 1% had a steady share of the US cake. In the five years to 2007, however, the top 1% seized more than 65% of the gain in US national income. In 2010, their share was 93%. This did not create greater prosperity for all (myth number one). On the contrary, much of this gain was “rent seeking”, not creating new wealth but taking it from others; a modern wild west. In the last three decades, the bottom 90% in the US (figures that resonate in the UK) have seen their wages grow by 15%. The 1% have seen their wages increase by 150%. Another myth is that bloated salaries are necessary to retain high achievers. Except, as Stiglitz points out, the rewards are more often for failure. The inequality gap is becoming a chasm. Stiglitz demonstrates how, in the US, those born poor will stay poor yet nearly seven in 10 Americans still believe the ladder of opportunity exists.
Stiglitz is one of a growing band of academics and economists, among them Paul Krugman, Michael J Sandel and Raghuram Rajan, who are trying to inject morality back into capitalism. He argues that we are reaching a level of inequality that is “intolerable”. Rent-seekers include top-flight lawyers, monopolists (Stiglitz refers to the illusion of competition: the US has hundreds of banks but the big four share half of the whole sector), financiers and many of those supposed to be regulating the system, but who have been seduced and neutered by lobbyists and their own avarice.
In the “battlefield of ideas”, while governments turn citizen against citizen by demonising, for instance, benefit scroungers, what Stiglitz calls corporate welfare goes unchecked. In 2008, insurance company AIG was given $150bn by US taxpayers – more, says Stiglitz, than the total spent on welfare to the poor in the 16 years to 2006. Stiglitz is a powerful advocate for a strong public sector. He argues for full employment, greater investment in roads, technology, education; far more stringent regulation and clear accountability. Culpable bankers, he says, should go straight to jail.
Gross domestic product is an unsatisfactory measure of progress, he believes. Stiglitz wants to see metrics that include the cost of inappropriate use of resources. He illustrates the price of immiseration and unfairness. Management of Firestone tyres demanded much longer hours and a 30% wage cut. The demand created conditions that led to the production of many defective tyres. Defective tyres were related to more than 1,000 deaths and injuries and the recall of Firestone tyres in 2000. Unfairness affects lives, productivity and, ultimately, Stiglitz warns, the security of the 1%.
The Price of Inequality is a powerful plea for the implementation of what Alexis de Tocqueville termed “self-interest properly understood”. Stiglitz writes: “Paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest – in other words to the common welfare – is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate wellbeing… it isn’t just good for the soul; it’s good for business.” Unfortunately, that’s what those with hubris and pleonexia have never understood – and we are all paying the price. .
Yvonne Roberts is an Observer leader writer and a fellow of the Young Foundation

guardian.co.uk
14.7.2012

How bad could climate change get

Ahead of the Rio+20 conference, Gwynne Dyer considers climate change and asks, how bad could it get?
This week’s United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro (Rio+20) has brought out the usual warnings of environmental doom. They have been greeted with the usual indifference: after all, there are seven billion of us now, and we’re all still eating. What could possibly go wrong?
The UN Environment Programme published its five-yearly Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-5) saying that significant progress has been made on only four of 90 environmental goals that were adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.
“If current patterns of production and consumption of natural resources prevail,” warned UNEP head Achim Steiner, “then governments will preside over unprecedented levels of damage and degradation.”
Yawn.
Meanwhile, a team of respected scientists warn that life on Earth may be on the way to an irreversible “tipping point”. Sure. Heard that one before, too.
Last month one of the world’s two leading scientific journals, Nature, published a paper, “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere,” pointing out that more than 40 per cent of the Earth’s land is already used for human needs. With the human population set to grow by a further two billion by 2050, that figure could soon exceed 50 per cent.
“It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,” said the paper’s lead author, Professor Anthony Barnofsky of the University of California, Berkeley.
But Barnofsky doesn’t go into the details of what kind of new world it might be. Scientists hardly ever do in public, for fear of being seen as panic-mongers. Besides, it’s a relatively new hypothesis, but it’s a pretty convincing one, and it should be more widely understood. Here’s how bad it could get.
The scientific consensus is that we are still on track for 3 degrees C of warming by 2100, but that’s just warming caused by human greenhouse- gas emissions. The problem is that +3 degrees is well past the point where the major feedbacks kick in: natural phenomena triggered by our warming, like melting permafrost and the loss of Arctic sea-ice cover, that will add to the heating and that we cannot turn off.
The trigger is actually around 2C (3.5 degrees F) higher average global temperature. After that we lose control of the process: ending our own carbon- dioxide emissions would no longer be enough to stop the warming. We may end up trapped on an escalator heading up to +6C (+10.5F), with no way of getting off. And +6C gives you the mass extinction.
There have been five mass extinctions in the past 500 million years, when 50 per cent or more of the species then existing on the Earth vanished, but until recently the only people taking any interest in this were palaeontologists, not climate scientists. They did wonder what had caused the extinctions, but the best answer they could come up was “climate change”. It wasn’t a very good answer.
Why would a warmer or colder planet kill off all those species? The warming was caused by massive volcanic eruptions dumping huge quantities of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years. But it was very gradual and the animals and plants had plenty of time to migrate to climatic zones that still suited them.
(That’s exactly what happened more recently in the Ice Age, as the glaciers repeatedly covered whole continents and then retreated again.)
There had to be a more convincing kill mechanism than that.
The palaeontologists found one when they discovered that a giant asteroid struck the planet 65 million years ago, just at the time when the dinosaurs died out in the most recent of the great extinctions. So they went looking for evidence of huge asteroid strikes at the time of the other extinction events. They found none.
What they discovered was that there was indeed major warming at the time of all the other extinctions – and that the warming had radically changed the oceans. The currents that carry oxygen- rich cold water down to the depths shifted so that they were bringing down oxygen- poor warm water instead, and gradually the depths of the oceans became anoxic: the deep waters no longer had any oxygen.
When that happens, the sulphur bacteria that normally live in the silt (because oxygen is poison to them) come out of hiding and begin to multiply. Eventually they rise all the way to the surface over the whole ocean, killing all the oxygen-breathing life.
The ocean also starts emitting enormous amounts of lethal hydrogen sulphide gas that destroy the ozone layer and directly poison land- dwelling species.
This has happened many times in the Earth’s history.
Don’t let it worry you. We’ll all be safely dead long before it could happen again: the earliest possible date for a mass extinction, assuming that the theory is right and that we continue down our present track with emissions, would be well into the next century.
The only problem is that things like this tend to become inevitable long before they actually happen. Tick, tock.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
© Fairfax NZ News
stuff.co 20.6.2012
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Tim Parks

Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos
A man driving through Catia, a violent slum in Caracas, Venezuela, 2005
Is the novel a space of intense engagement with the world, of risk and adventure? Or is it a place of refuge, of hanging back from life? The answer will be all too easy if we are living in a country that does not allow certain stories to be told. For Solzhenitsyn writing novels was indeed a serious risk. But in the West?
In my last piece in this space I considered the idea that our personalities are formed in communities of origin where one particular polarity of values or qualities tends to dominate—fear or courage, winning or losing, belonging or not belonging, good or evil. As each person seeks to stake out a position for himself in his community and later in the world outside, it will be the position he or she assumes in relation to that polarity that will be felt as the most defining and any problems in establishing such a position (am I a strong person or a weak one, am I part of the group or not?) will be experienced as especially troubling.
Now I want to toss out a provocation: that in the world of literature there is a predominance of people whose approach to life is structured around issues of fear and courage and who find it difficult to find a stable position in relation to those values. Not that they are necessarily more fearful than others, but that a sense of themselves as fearful or courageous is crucial for them and will be decisive in the structuring of both the content and style of their work.
That certain vocations attract a particular character type is evident enough. At the university where I work in Milan, we have two post-grad courses for language students, one in interpreting and one in translation. With some exceptions the difference in attitude and character between members of the two groups is evident. The students who come to translation are not looking to be out there in the fray of the conference, under the spotlights; they like the withdrawn, intellectual aspect of translation. Often their problem as they begin their careers is not so much the work itself, but the self-marketing required to find the work.
It’s also hardly revolutionary to suggest that literature can be seen simultaneously as an adventure and a refuge. Per Petterson’s novels often feature a conflicted, anxious, but would-be courageous character surrounded by reckless friends and enemies. In To Siberia the young female protagonist is excited by images of Siberia she finds in a children’s book and dreams of one day going there. Frightened of wartime developments around her—the novel is set in Denmark—she takes refuge in reading, in fantasizing future adventures, but twice loses her source of books, once when a rich friend who has a library of her own suddenly dies, and once when a lesbian librarian makes aggressive advances at her. The refuge of reading (which is full of virtual adventure) is threatened by real adventure and calamity.
Throughout Petterson’s work the main characters devote a great deal of time to practical tasks that will protect them from all kinds of dangers, or just the weather. They build huts and fires with immense care, because life is perilous, exciting, frightening. In the novel Fine By Me, a bildungsroman about a young Norwegian who looks for a way out of his depressing family situation in a life of writing, Petterson makes explicit that, as he sees it, the craft of writing, of carefully reconstructing life’s precariousness in sentences as solid and unassuming as bricks, is itself a way of building shelter: for those who see danger everywhere, literature is a place of refuge.
We could equally well look at a classic like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is constantly frightened. The first time his name is used, his mother is demanding an apology. Rather than confronting her, he hides under the table. His aunt threatens to pull out his eyes if he doesn’t apologise. A page later he is frightened by the hurly burly of the rugby game. Pretending to participate because afraid of criticism, he actually hides on the edge of his line. The first time we see Stephen happy and relaxed it is on his own in the sick bay where he is no longer obliged to engage in life in any way. Here for the first time we see him quoting lines of poetry, fantasizing, imagining, escaping, and in particular turning an imagined funeral into something beautiful, through words.
Two to sing and two to pray
And two to carry my soul away.
How beautiful and sad that was! How beautiful the words were…
Terrified at Christmas lunch of the quarrel between the nationalist Mr. Casey and the fanatically Catholic Aunt Dante, Stephen focuses on the way the antagonists speak, the words they use, which allows him to keep out of the firing line, and creates an illusion of comfortable distance. Wishing to be a bold adolescent he goes to a prostitute; terrified by a Jesuit sermon on hell, he tries to be chaste and good. Eventually, courageously resisting all claims on his loyalty, he conceives of the vocation of the artist as someone beyond and above the factions. All the same he needs to justify himself imagining that his work will courageously “forge the uncreated consciousness” of his race; disengaging with all parties he will single-handedly, from the safe distance of other countries, change Ireland. He claims. The decision to move to writing can thus be conceived as courageous on the one hand, or motivated by fear of succumbing to forces that terrify him on the other; his writing is a space of refuge, but he insists that it is engaged in changing the world.
Or what about the curious case of Thomas Hardy’s first, unpublished novel? Having courageously left his village home to train as an architect in London, Hardy suddenly retreats to mother in Dorsetshire, pleading fatigue and illness (we have no record of any symptoms) and in 1867, aged 27, writes The Poor Man and the Lady, whose main character Will Strong, a bold Hardy alter ego, courts a rich man’s daughter, is chased away by the family, and launches himself pugnaciously into politics. Hardy described the book as a “dramatic satire of the squirearchy … the tendency of the writing being socialistic, not to say revolutionary.”
There are various accounts about why the novel was never published, but as Hardy has it, publication was offered, but the publisher’s reader, the novelist George Meredith, warned Hardy that the content was explosive and could damage his career. So, afraid of consequences he withdrew it. Courage dominates in the story of the strong-willed Will Strong, but not in Hardy’s dealing with his publishers; he is courageous only in so far as he supposes the work will not intersect with reality. He then set about writing the entirely innocuous comedy Under a Greenwood Tree. Later in his career Hardy did take on Victorian morals very courageously in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, but was so harrowed by the aggressive reviews he received that he chose to stop writing fiction and turned to the much safer production of poetry. “No more novel-writing for me,” he remarked. “A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to be shot at.”
One could name any number of novels in which the tension between a desire for and fear of intense experience is played out in all kinds of ways: J.M. Coetzee’s Youth and Damon Galgutt’s The Good Doctor are two contemporary novels that immediately come to mind; Coetzee’s characters are often eager to be tested by life, but at the same time afraid that they will be caught out, found to be lacking in courage. Peter Stamm’s novels (Unformed Landscape, On a Day Like This, and Seven Years) suggest how the need to create a narrative for our lives forces us towards moments of risk and engagement, while fear of those moments may lead us to fantasise rather than act, or to become hyper rational and cautious in our decision making. These antithetical energies, towards and away from adventure, are mirrored in the writing itself as Stamm sets the reader up for melodrama, then seems to do everything to avoid or postpone it, as if, like his characters, he would much prefer to plod quietly along with life’s routine, but knows that sooner or later, alas, a writer has to deliver the goods.
So much, then, for a fairly common theme in literature. It’s understandable that those sitting comfortably at a dull desk to imagine life at its most intense might be conflicted over questions of courage and fear. It’s also more than likely that this divided state of mind is shared by a certain kind of reader, who, while taking a little time out from life’s turmoil, nevertheless likes to feel that he or she is reading courageous books.
The result is a rhetoric that tends to flatter literature, with everybody over eager to insist on its liveliness and import. “The novel is the one bright book of life,” D H Lawrence tells us. “Books are not life,” he immediately goes on to regret. “They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.” Lawrence, it’s worth remembering, grew up in the shadow of violent parental struggles and would always pride himself on his readiness for a fight, regretting in one letter that he was too ill “to slap Frieda [his wife] in the eye, in the proper marital fashion,” but “reduced to vituperation.” Frieda, it has to be said, gave as good as she got. In any event words just weren’t as satisfying as blows, though Lawrence did everything he could to make his writing feel like a fight: “whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage,” he insisted.
In How Fiction Works James Wood tells us that the purpose of fiction is “to put life on the page” and insists that “readers go to fiction for life.” Again there appears to be an anxiety that the business of literature might be more to do with withdrawal; in any event one can’t help thinking that someone in search of life would more likely be flirting, traveling or partying. How often on a Saturday evening would the call to life lift my head from my books and have me hurrying out into the street.
This desire to convince oneself that writing is at least as alive as life itself, was recently reflected by a New York Times report on brain-scan research that claims that as we read about action in novels the relative areas of the brain—those that respond to sound, smell, texture, movement, etc.—are activated by the words. “The brain, it seems,” enthuses the journalist, “does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.”
What nonsense! As if reading about sex or violence in any way prepared us for the experience of its intensity. (In this regard I recall my adolescent daughter’s recent terror on seeing our border collie go into violent death throes after having eaten some poison in the countryside. As the dog foamed at the mouth and twitched, Lucy was shivering, weeping, appalled. But day after day she reads gothic tales and watches horror movies with a half smile on her lips.)
The same New York Times article quotes Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist and, significantly, “a published novelist” who claims that “reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers…. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.”
If Oatley genuinely believes this I suspect he is not a very good novelist, novels being largely about form and convention. Halfway through Seven Years Peter Stamm, who I believe is an excellent novelist, has his narrator describe his oddly quiet and passive mistress thus:
My relationship with Ivona had been from the start, nothing other than a story, a parallel world that obeyed my will, and where I could go wherever I wanted, and could leave when I’d had enough.
Nothing other than a story. How disappointing. How reassuring. The passage seems to be worded in such a way as to suggest the author’s own frustration with his quiet and safe profession. But a mistress is a mistress, and a novel a novel. To ask her or it to be more than that would be to ask the mistress to become a wife, and the novel a life. Which it can never be.
nyrb.com 12.05.2011