Things change

WHENEVER Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Those deconstructionists who say only the text matters are sure missing out on some interesting reading. From today's Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of Edwin Arlington Robinson, born in Head Tide, Maine (1869).

His family was wealthy, and he expected a life of ease, but his father died, the family's investments in the West went bad, and his mother contracted an illness so contagious that no undertaker would touch her body. Edward and his brothers had to dress her, make the coffin, and bury her themselves.

Robinson continued to write poetry unsuccessfully and he lived on the brink of starvation, until one day Kermit Roosevelt read Robinson's poems and he gave them to his father, Theodore Roosevelt, who gave him a cushy job in a Customs House.

President Roosevelt told him, "I expect you to think poetry first and customs second." All Robinson had to do was show up, read the morning newspaper, and leave it on his chair to prove he had been in.

This sustained him until he started to write poetry that won some praise. Edwin Arlington Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1922, the first year it was awarded. And he won it again in 1925 and 1928.

By the time he died, Edwin Robinson was one of the best-known poets in the country.

Teddy Roosevelt is one of those historical figures that turn up in the most unlikely places, like da Vinci and his cannons. Good thing for us he gave Robinson a hand up.

Mr. Flood’s Party

OLD Eben Flood, climbing along one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:

“Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird.” He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: “Well, Mr. Flood,
Since you propose it, I believe I will.”

Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben’s eyes were dim.

Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He set the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break;
And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:

“Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this
In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was
We had a drop together. Welcome home!”
Convivially returning with himself,
Again he raised the jug up to the light;
And with an acquiescent quaver said:
“Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might.

“Only a very little, Mr. Flood—
For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do.”
So, for the time, apparently it did,
And Eben evidently thought so too;
For soon amid the silver loneliness
Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,
Secure, with only two moons listening,
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang—

“For auld lang syne.” The weary throat gave out,
The last word wavered; and the song being done,
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again alone.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below—
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

Poems from Bartleby.com; photo via Modern American Poetry

Love and travel

A couple of particularly interesting items from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for today, via the daily email newsletter.

-It's the birthday of American statistician George Gallup, born in Jefferson, Iowa (1901). He was a student at the University of Iowa when he conducted his first poll for the Daily Iowan, to find the prettiest girl on campus. The winner was Ophelia Smith, whom Gallup later married.

-Ticket

I love the moment at the ticket window—he says—
when you are to say the name of your destination, and realize
that you could say anything, the man at the counter
will believe you, the woman at the counter
would never say No, that isn't where you're going,
you could buy a ticket for one place and go to another,
less far along the same line. Suddenly you would find yourself
—he says—in a locality you've never seen before,
where no one has ever seen you and you could say your name
was anything you like, nobody would say No,
that isn't you, this is who you are. It thrills me every time.

Poem: "Ticket" by Charles O. Hartman, from Island. © Ahsahta Press, 2004.

Watercolor of Greek church by Rebecca McGoodwin after photo by Louise Robertson

Reading in

There's a very-typical New Yorker article up, Future Reading. It's got all the wooly-headed prose you'd expect, as well as the sweeping generalizations that sound good and erudite but upon further puzzlement collapse like so much froth, and as always the overiding sense that the article comes as a finely-observed well-chewed dispatch from some alternate universe, so very much like ours but perhaps half a beat behind our messy timestream.

Nevertheless, some nuggets:

Cheap but durable editions like those of Bohn’s Library brought books other than the Bible into working-class households, and newspapers, which in the late nineteenth century sometimes appeared every hour, made breaking news and social commentary available across all social ranks.

Wow... so there are some-- surprisingly major--newspapers which don't update as often as their 19th century brethren!

Now even the most traditional-minded scholar generally begins by consulting a search engine. As a cheerful editor at Cambridge University Press recently told me, “Conservatively, ninety-five per cent of all scholarly inquiries start at Google.”

The article points to the Online Computer Library Center and its fascinating ">map with details on each country's library system, which leads to this observation:

Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million. Poverty, in other words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food. The Internet will do much to redress this imbalance, by providing Western books for non-Western readers. What it will do for non-Western books is less clear.

List of best fiction series

There's nothing like the thrill of discovering an amazing novel that's the first in a series, knowing thousands of pages of an alternate world lie ahead of you.

It's interesting seeing how characters grow as authors themselves mature through years and sometimes decades; it gives you an almost personal connection to the author, especially if read in real time. Plus there's a real sense of comfort dipping into a familiar world at will, which lends itself to rereading.

Not to mention a good series gives you something to hunt bookstores for.

Below is the beginning of a list of my favorite fiction series; it's weighed toward science fiction, because the genre tends to spawn series and because I seem to have read a lot of it in recent years.

I'm generally defining series as any multiple books by one author containing commmon characters, and/or internal references to previous works. (Number in parentheses is how many times I've read the series).

-Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin historical fiction series (once)
Nominally about a British captain and ship's doctor during the Napoleonic wars, as I've written before these twenty books are like a male version of Jane Austen's novels, with all the insights into character and humor that her works contain. They're among the best contemporary writing of any kind I've read; it's a shame O'Brian died recently, just as the books were gaining a significant mainstream following (with the likes of a Times reviewer tagging it the best historical novels, ever). This is my standard suggestion for friends looking to get some guy (especially) in their life a gift. The first chapter of the first book speaks for itself.

-J.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings fantasy series (four/five times)
Britain may have long lost its status as a world power, but it's still dominant when it comes to creating alternate worlds--and Tolkien's three LOTR novels (plus the Hobbit) have long been the gold standard. His Middle Earth is so detailed it feels as if the novels are just one path through it; now if they could only make a decent movie out of it.

-Issac Asimov's Foundation science fiction series (twice)
This trilogy turned heptalogy (plus there are an additional eight novels roughly set in the same universe) follows a series of heroes as they meddle with the politics of man, robots and empires 50,000 years in the future. They can be a bit comic-booky, but are by far the most influential of science fiction works--everything goes back to Asimov. It's even spawned the name for at leastone real world tech company .

-Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children/Shame/Satanic Verses fiction series (twice, once, once)
I habitually cite Rushdie as among my favorite contemporary writers, on the basis of the three books above (which may not technically be a series, but to me their magical realism exploration of religion, identity and India are strongly interdependant) and his "children's" book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. He's startingly yet casually insightful--I always feel like any one of many of his seemingly-throw-away lines would be the basis for an entire story by a lesser writer. Rushdie's overflowing in every sense of the word; nobody belongs in Shakespeare's category, but when I read Rushdie I have a similar sense of multiple thoughts dancing on the head of a pin.

-Orson Scott Card's Ender science fiction series (twice for Ender's Game, once for rest)
These eight novels (and counting) have grown in ambition and scope along with the boy that first appeared in Ender's Game, set at a training school for child soldiers around 2165. Card, in my view, is our leading science fiction thinker (along with Neal Stephenson). He explores honestly and without blinders what we call multiculturalism, which is simply the universe in his books. Ender's Game is in a class of its own because of its inventive plot, but the themes explored in Speaker for the Dead is more representative of the author Card has become.

-Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk fiction series (once)
Until his death almost exactly a year ago, Nobel prize winner Mahfouz was considered the leading writer of the Arab world; in my estimation, he's also one of the (necessarily) few writers who will be read generations from now--the way he captures character and evokes emotion is usually compared to Dickens. His Palace Walk trilogy, set in 1950s Cario, is pre-Islamic in the sense that although the specifics of that religion plays a role in the series, the themes are broadly universal ones of love, family and man's place in society. It's unfortunate the trilogy isn't required reading in American schools, instead of some of the token multicultural works that are notable only for their clumsiness.

-Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea fantasy series (twice for original trilogy, once for rest)
I think LeGuin's the most literate of science fiction writers, a field traditionally known for interesting ideas embodied by wooden characters via clunky prose. I don't think it's a coincidence that she's one of the few female sci fi writers; her grasp of character and nuance is poetic. She reminds me of Georgia O'Keefe in how varied her works are in their greatness, from the stark exploration of ideas in the Left Hand of Darkness to the charming world of dragons and people spun in the five Earthsea novels and a collection of short stories. As is typical in series, she wrote the initial trilogy in six years, then after they found acclaim wrote the final three works after a 16-year gap. Incidentally, LeGuin wrote an interesting article about her unhappiness with the Sci Fi Channel's decision to whitewash Earthsea in their television miniseries.

-Frank Herbert's Dune science fiction series (twice for first book, once for rest)
I've only read the first three of the six ecologically-themed Dune books Herbert wrote, all set in the distant future and centering around the species-altering 'spice' of a desert planet (with, I think, aspects of Islam/Christianity). The drop-off between the amazing first and very good second book is noticeable, and becomes severe by the end of the not-bad third book.

-J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter genre-busting series (three or two times for most, once for last)
I'm curious as to whether this becomes a series all kids grow up with, perhaps alongside (or muscling out) the likes of Narnia. I definitely plan on reading it to my kids... well, at least the first few of the seven.

-Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials fantasy series (twice)
Compared most often to his arch-nemesis forebearer C.S. Lewis, Pullman can stand on his own--and for an adult, at least, I think his Paradise Lost-inspired trilogy about teens, their daemons and their souls is more rewarding, if less traditional. Like many of the authors on this list, Pullman follows in the footsteps of H.G. Wells in asking you to suspend disbelief about one thing; once you accept his conception of a world in which people's partner animals embody a literal second half to their selves, everything else flows with internal logic. Plus, his kids are neither annoying mini-adults nor infantile vessels for cloying set pieces.

-John LeCarre's George Smiley thriller novels (twice for some, none others)
I've often said LeCarre is the most literate writer of thrillers (more so than Graham Greeene even), especially once you get past the first two hundred establishing pages. He's best known for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (which is the one book I'd recommend to a space alien who wants to understand the Cold War), but since this is a list of series he's here for the five spy novels that center around Smiley (only three of which I knew about).

-Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes detective series (twice)
As I've written before, I don't think the four novels that make up the Holmes series quite live up to their reputation. But the stories are so inventive and the sense of 19th century Britain so exact that I still put Holmes at the top of the detective genre.

-Christopher Paolini's Inheritance fantasy series(twice)
I guess Paolini's 24 by now; he was just 19 when Eragon, the first of a planned trilogy about a boy/then young adult and his dragon, came out. As I wrote before, there are traces of his age in his at-times clunky writing, but he's got a first-rate imagination. The last book in his series is due out sometime soon (hopefully).

-John Fitzgerald's Great Brain historical fiction series (few times, as a kid)
These eight (! I only thought there were three!) books set in frontier Utah about a boy and his active brother may have been my favorite growing up. They had an irresistible mix of humor and classic action, and lots of interesting scheming.

-Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr detective series (once for most)
I read most of Block's ten books about a suave Manhattan-based burglar as a kid; they convey pretty well what a certain strata of people are like in NYC, with the sense of skimming lightly through life, conversant with culture and the arts even if not drinking deeply of them. These are a fun read; they're on the list mainly for nostalgic reasons, not great literature but about the best of what's become a horrific detective genre.

-C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia fantasy series (twice)
As I've mentioned before, I reread these books recently and was a bit disappointed that, in contrast with my glowing childhood memories, the Oxford prof's seven books about kids whisked into a fairytale land weren't that good, and were perhaps actively harmful. It's on the list anyway because I think they're worth reading, maybe as a kid and in conjunction with Pullman's works.

-Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern fantasy series (twice some, none most)
I thought about not putting this series on the list, because McCaffrey (and now her son) has essentially taken a great first few novels and spun them into dross, at 18 works and counting. But I loved reading Dragonflight/quest/song as a kid, and all three held up upon more recent rereading. (It's interesting, by the way, how Wikipedia's entry on Pern is barely distinguishable from its entries on real countries/planets; it's like a dry run for the discovery of alien civilizations).

-Other series that I've liked, but would put below the 'classics' tier:

-Roger Zelzany's Amber sci fi series
-Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever fantasy series
-James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small veterinary series
-Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan thriller series
-Ian Fleming's James Bond thriller series
-Larry Niven's Ringworld sci fi series (I've read just the first two of four, the original novel's first half was great, rest wasn't bad)
-Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars sci fi series
-And a whole host of other childhood favorites, like Tom Swift, Encylopedia Brown, Beverly Cleary's, works, etc.

On a related note, there's a running users-generated list of the top 100 Sci-Fi Books; it includes ever sci fi series I've listed, although not in the order which I rank them.

I've read all of the top twenty save two (#4 Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and #19 Hyperion), all of the top fifty but ten others... odd, especially since I never read any science fiction as a kid.

Thoughts on finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I think you'd have to go back to the days of Dickens to match the anticipation for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

J.K. Rowling doesn't disappoint. I raced through the book on a beautiful mid-summer New York day, propelled forward by the desire to know but balanced, always, by the acute awareness as each page slipped by that there was that much less Harry Potter, ever, to read.

It's a great read, for any Harry Potter fan. A lot of things come back; many red herrings just float away; for me, the book matched my expectations and was one of the rare finales that didn't fall short.

Rowling must have increasingly felt like Potter himself as she wrote the finale, with all the pressure and huge expectations and legions of critics with their knives all sharpened ready (hoping?) to pounce.

And like him, she's true to who she is, and follows that through to the end, for better or for worse. And, in my mind, pulls it off--without magic, no less.

I was struck by how accurate some of the fan sites had been in their speculation about some important small items; and any close reader (or rereader) of the series will be rewarded with nods 'of course' throughout.

That's one of the great things about Rowling, she's internally and logically consistent; she's not making up things as she goes along, throwing up everything and the kitchen sink to dazzle and distract us--her world has core principles, and even when they call for hard choices she makes them and plays them out to their end.

And so how right--yet totally unexpected--the overall story was. Like the best explanations, that always seem so obvious and singular and elegant in hindsight. Of course it had to end the way it did--it makes sense, in every sense of the word, from plot to Rowling's style to our expectations and beliefs about how life plays out.

Like our fairy tales there's a connection to something that predates all of us, and Rowling follows the rules, even as she finds new ways to illuminate and play with them.

As Michicko Kakutani notes in her oddly once-over review, the story "could be Exhibit A in a Joseph Campbell survey of mythic archetypes."

Maybe that's why it felt so satisfying to close the thick tome.

And yet, of course, because although Rowling is no great shakes as a writer she's an amazing storyteller, finishing the book--the series!--leaves you with a certain emptiness.

I'd never thought I'd see the kind of outward passion for books Harry Potter has kindled; who'd have ever thought thousands of (creatively costumed!) kids and adults would pack a bookstore for the chance to, together, start reading a 759-page book?!

That the city of New York would shut down a city block so people could gather in celebration of a world that gushed from the pen of a former Scottish welfare mother (now certainly a queen)?!

I feel bad for people who haven't been reading the books, who haven't had a chance to experience the solitary wonders of Rowling's creation mixed with the communal passion of Harry Potter's fans, without whom the entire journey wouldn't have been nearly as much fun.

There's a diversity, an innocence, to Potter fans that I've never found in Trekkies and their ilk; maybe because it's so obviously a series for children that happens to stretch to create lots of room for adults, I've seen little of the weird obsessiveness that seems to me to mar other outwardly-similar events. There's plenty of room, for everyone to share their own version of Rowling's world.

It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing, I think; there will be others along these lines, but now that we've experienced it, the next time can only be 'better' at the margins, it can never spark this type of authentic phenomenon, at least not in this genre.

And not, at least, for us--first love being what it is.

I'll leave for another day the parsing of the meaning of it all (the series definitely changed after 9/11, or to be more accurate grew to encompass more of the world as we see it now); the recounting of what was guessed and wasn't, the musings about why Rowling writes the way she does, my subjective list of what made sense and what was muddled.

What a great ride it's been; I'm sad to see it end, but happy for all the pleasures of the journey.

Image of Deathly Hallows cover found everywhere.

Believing in each other

The apt above drawing by 'Shout' goes with Natalie Angier's Times review of David Sloan Wilson's Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives.

It's a pretty thought-provoking review; doesn't waste much time jabbering about religions, instead has paragraphs like this:

Wilson explores the many fascinating ways in which humans are the consummate group-thinking, team-playing animal. The way we point things out to one another, for example, is unique among primates. “Apes raised with people learn to point for things that they want but never point to call the attention of their human caretakers to objects of mutual interest,” Wilson writes, “something that human infants start doing around their first birthday.” The eyes of other apes are dark across their entire span and thus are hard to follow, but the contrast between the white sclera and colored iris of the human eye makes it difficult for people to conceal the direction in which they are looking. In the interdependent, egalitarian context of the tribe, the ancestral human setting, Wilson says, “it becomes advantageous for members of the team to share information, turning the eyes into organs of communication in addition to organs of vision.” Humans are equipped with all the dispositional tools needed to establish and maintain order in the commons. Studies have revealed a deep capacity for empathy, a willingness to trust others and become instant best friends; and an equally strong urge to punish cheaters, to exact revenge against those who buck group rules for private gain.

Of course, even as humans bond together in groups and behave with impressive civility toward their neighbors, they are capable of treating those outside the group with ruthless savagery. Wilson is not naïve, and he recognizes the ease with which humans fall into an us-versus-them mind-set. Yet he is a self-described optimist, and he believes that the golden circles of we-ness, the conditions that encourage entities at every stratum of life to stop competing and instead pool their labors into a communally acting mega-entity, can be expanded outward like ripples on a pond until they encompass all of us — that the entire human race can evolve the culturally primed if not genetically settled incentive to see our futures for what they are, inexorably linked on the lone blue planet we share.

Interesting books

Things to read, on the 8th day of the week.

-The Undercover Economist, Tim Hartford
This book applies basic economic theory to such modern phenomena as Starbucks' pricing system and Microsoft's stock values.

-Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq, Stephen Kinzer
Beginning with the ouster of Hawaii's monarchy in 1893, Kinzer runs through the foreign governments the U.S. has had a hand in toppling, some of which he has written about at length before (in All the Shah's Men, etc.)

-The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick

-A Twist of the Wrist: Quick Flavorful Meals With Ingredients From Jars, Cans, Bags and Boxes, Nancy Silverton

-At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, Susan Sontag
Literature and politics are inextricably intertwined and unified by moral purpose in this powerful collection of pieces (a couple not previously published in English or at all) by iconic critic and novelist Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others), who died in 2004.

-A Letter from Japan: The Photographs of John Swope, Ed. by Carolyn Peter
Even before Japan’s official surrender in 1945, the photographer John Swope (1908-79) traveled around the country taking pictures that documented the war’s effect on the people and the land. The 144-page letter he wrote to his wife about his experience is included here, along with several essays about his work. Above, the city of Hamamatsu, Sept. 6, 1945.

All summaries from the Times Book Review, unless otherwise noted

Sailing off

In poetry as in life so much is about tone; William Logan's review in the Times of Derek Walcott's latest collection bothered me from the first line:

Poets behave like conquistadors wherever they roam, picking up a new verse form, a lover, some inventive cursing, a disease. Would Byron have been Byron without Italy and Greece? What would Eliot and Pound have become without the hostility of London? Can we imagine Hart Crane without the Caribbean or Elizabeth Bishop without Rio? Derek Walcott has crossed so many borders, his poems read like a much-thumbed Baedeker. To a boy born on St. Lucia, the rhythms and intonations of English verse were a passport to the elsewhere; but they came with a burden — the language of the colonial masters was not the one caught in his ear at home. “How choose,” he wrote, “Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? / Betray them both, or give back what they give?”

Yeah, poets would be like conquistadors if they slaughtered and stole wherever they go. The rest of the review continues in a condescending, passive aggressive vein; there's some very odd writing in there, actually, it's like someone professing to your face they like you, they really do, as they proceed to trash you to everyone else.

Really, the above watercolor by Olivier Kugler is the best part of the review.

Eternal life

There's a USA Today article, They were never born, but they'll live forever, about the 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived. The list is from a book by three guys from Jersey, one of whom told the paper "the point of the book is to entertain." And provoke discussion; here's the list:

1. The Marlboro Man
2. Big Brother
3. King Arthur
4. Santa Claus (St. Nick)
5. Hamlet
6. Dr. Frankenstein's Monster
7. Siegfried
8. Sherlock Holmes
9. Romeo and Juliet
10. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
11. Uncle Tom
12. Robin Hood
13. Jim Crow
14. Oedipus
15. Lady Chatterly
16. Ebenezer Scrooge
17. Don Quixote
18. Mickey Mouse
19. The American Cowboy
20. Prince Charming
21. Smokey Bear
22. Robinson Crusoe
23. Apollo and Dionysus
24. Odysseus
25. Nora Helmer
26. Cinderella
27. Shylock
28. Rosie the Riveter
29. Midas
30. Hester Prynne
31. The Little Engine That Could
32. Archie Bunker
33. Dracula
34. Alice in Wonderland
35. Citizen Kane
36. Faust
37. Figaro
38. Godzilla
39. Mary Richards
40. Don Juan
41. Bambi
42. William Tell
43. Barbie
44. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
45. Venus and Cupid
46. Prometheus
47. Pandora
48. G.I. Joe
49. Tarzan
50. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock
51. James Bond
52. Hansel and Gretel
53. Captain Ahab
54. Richard Blaine
55. The Ugly Duckling
56. Loch Ness Monster (Nessie)
57. Atticus Finch
58. Saint Valentine
59. Helen of Troy
60. Batman
61. Uncle Sam
62. Nancy Drew
63. J.R. Ewing
64. Superman
65. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
66. HAL 9000
67. Kermit the Frog
68. Sam Spade
69. The Pied Piper
70. Peter Pan
71. Hiawatha
72. Othello
73. The Little Tramp
74. King Kong
75. Norman Bates
76. Hercules (Herakles)
77. Dick Tracy
78. Joe Camel
79. The Cat in the Hat
80. Icarus
81. Mammy
82. Sindbad
83. Amos 'n' Andy
84. Buck Rogers
85. Luke Skywalker
86. Perry Mason
87. Dr. Strangelove
88. Pygmalion
89. Madame Butterfly
90. Hans Beckert
91. Dorothy Gale
92. The Wandering Jew
93. The Great Gatsby
94. Buck (Jack London, The Call of the Wild)
95. Willy Loman
96. Betty Boop
97. Ivanhoe
98. Elmer Gantry
99. Lilith
100. John Doe
101. Paul Bunyan

Their top choice struck me as ridiculous, until I read their explanation, "The most famous killer of the last two hundred years."

Yeah, that does make sense--a fictional character that helped cut short God knows how many lives, thus keeping unfathomable numbers of ideas and products from coming to fruition is pretty influential, even in an entirely negative way.

It's actually a pretty classic list (assuming #7 indeed isn't Roy's partner; it's funny how they wrote the Greek spelling for #76).

Next, let's make a list of people who may have existed but whose influence rests on outsized myths.

Uncredited image of Wayne McLaren as the Marlboro Man in various places online.

Known for

Do we recognize greatness when we see it? I thought about this recently when I heard that Orhan Pamuk had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I saw him speak earlier this year, and wrote in part:

Turk Orhan Pamuk, the famous novelist and now political figure, looking suave and distinguished--not at all like his goofy picture. Also a bit nervous, I think, he kindof wasn't paying attention when the others were reading, like a kid anxious to get his turn over with. He apparently lives and writes in the same building that he grew up in; he read an excerpt from a memoir, Istanbul, that was essentially one long, amazing sentence, very Walt Whitman-esque in that it was just one phrase and image after another, each preceded by 'Of', describing his beloved Istanbul. My favorite was: "of everything being broken, worn-out, past its prime." He started out wanting to be an artist and photographer, can totally tell, each phrase was like a little photograph.

He also said he thought a word that summed up the Turkish people was their equivalent of the word 'melancholy', but the Turkish word apparently connotes also a 'nobility of failure' meaning, essentially the entire country was living in the ruins of an empire, but it was somehow okay, not to be celebrated, but nothing to be ashamed of, either, just sad.

Pamuk was one of five wonderful novelists on a panel devoted to 'The Global City.' He read an excerpt from his memoir, Istanbul; answered a few questions, and that was about it.

If you had asked me at the time, of these five, which one is most likely to win a Nobel, I may have picked Pamuk--but only because of what I knew of his career, of the raves his works draw, of his interesting role as a bridge between East and West in this post-9/11 era.

But on this panel, he was truly one among peers; pretty much everyone was, at a glance, thoughtful, warm, brilliant yet gentle. I've only read the opening chapter of one of his novels--it didn't suck me in, the words swirled too much for what I was in the mood for, so I left it on the shelf, to be picked up again, soon.

[Incidentally, I'd put Pamuk's Turkey on the short list of countries most likely to play an outsized role in the world in the coming decades. Israel, Iran and North Korea would be there too, for pretty different reasons; you can't really put the U.S. on the list because the word 'outsized' doesn't really apply to us. Ditto for China and India, both of whom have long punched below their weight.]

Here are the last 33 years of Pamuk's fellow winners:

2005 - Harold Pinter
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
2003 - J.M. Coetzee
2002 - Imre Kertész
2001 - V.S. Naipaul
2000 - Gao Xingjian
1999 - Günter Grass
1998 - José Saramago
1997 - Dario Fo
1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
1995 - Seamus Heaney
1994 - Kenzaburo Oe
1993 - Toni Morrison
1992 - Derek Walcott
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
1990 - Octavio Paz
1989 - Camilo José Cela
1988 - Naguib Mahfouz
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1986 - Wole Soyinka
1985 - Claude Simon
1984 - Jaroslav Seifert
1983 - William Golding
1982 - Gabriel García Márquez
1981 - Elias Canetti
1980 - Czeslaw Milosz
1979 - Odysseus Elytis
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1977 - Vicente Aleixandre
1976 - Saul Bellow
1975 - Eugenio Montale
1974 - Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson

You're struck, of course, by the geographical diversity of winners. Wikipedia's version of this list comes with helpful little flags--a glance shows the UK, Austria, South Africa, Hungary, Trinidad & Tobago, China, Germany, Portugal, Italy, and Poland as the countries of origin of the prior 10 winners.

It makes you wonder where's the U.S., particularly since we dominate many of the other Nobel prize categories. Toni Morrison is the only American to win the award in recent tyears--you have to go all the way back to John Steinbeck in 1962 to find another one who's not a bi-national (although I always thought of Saul Bellow as an American, turns out he's originally Canadian).

What gives? Well, there's the oft-repeated criticism that politics plays a big role in the selection of winners, that the Nobel isn't an accurate barometer of literary merit since so many obvious worthies have never won--Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, John Updike among those still living so therefore theoretically eligible.

In an article headlined The Nobel as a mysterious joke, Susan Salter Reynolds of the San Francisco Chronicle puts together this list of authors who died Nobel-less:

Critics point to the glaring omissions of Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, among others (but then again, Gandhi was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, so maybe there's some kind of freakish reverse psychology thing happening).

It's a pretty damning list, to which I'd add Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Graham Greene.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, any author's club without these guys is not really one worth getting into (in part because it'd be pretty dull).

But you could also say there aren't more Americans on the discredited-or-not Nobel list because in this day and age determining someone's nationality can be a tricky thing.

I'd wager half of the more recent winners have spent significant time in the U.S. during their adult careers, either teaching/lecturing, or else living in New York City.

For reasons of convenience if nothing else, most of what they read is probably in English; and I'd guess that America in general and American letters in particular is for almost all of them a major force shaping their worldview, even if in opposition.

We were never all really Berliners, but it's not that wrong to say in this world, for a certain type of people, we're all Americans.

Or, at least, we'd like to think so when it comes to explaining why the lack of American Nobel winners isn't an indictment of what we think of as our leading, even guiding, role in world literature.

Incidentally, alt.Muslim makes the interesting point that Pamuk's win and Muhammad Yunnis'Peace Prize means two Muslims have won Nobels this year.

Oddly enough, I've yet to see anywhere the headline Muslims Commit Great Acts of World Renown....

Uncredited photo of Pamuk found in various places online.

Best words, best place?

The latest entry in the ongoing harshest (yet possibly entirely justified) letter to the New York Times Book Review. How do you recover from opening up the paper and reading something like this?

To the Editor:

With regard to your review of Charles Wright’s new volume of poems, “Scar Tissue” (Sept. 17): I cannot bring myself to believe that I am the only serious follower of contemporary poetry who is getting sick of reading reviews by young literary nonentities posing as Randall Jarrell, and with cheap and superficial sarcasm standing in for genuine wit quoting out of context and generally manipulating the work of a master like Wright for the purpose of proving some artistic or prosodic theory of their own, usually one that has little or nothing to do with the book under discussion.

Wright is one of a very small handful of poets widely considered to have made, over decades, a significant contribution to the body of American literature in our time, and he long ago earned the right — regardless of any particular reviewer’s aesthetics — to be discussed, even to be disliked, with some degree of thoughtful reverence, as opposed to the still stylishly ironical and arrogant condescension to which even The New York Times Book Review unfortunately remains far too hospitable. Taking up space in a relatively brief discussion of a serious book to speculate, for example, on the state of the author’s keyboard (“I picture his comma key worn down to a nub and the period filmed with dust”) is simply pathetic, and makes me wish I could take that sharp stick the reviewer fantasizes poking Charles Wright with and giving him a good spanking — proof, perhaps, that stupid writing produces a stupid state of mind, in this reader and I suspect in others, just as surely as fair and profound writing tends to produce a serious and objective one.

I have a suggestion: Why not assign beginners to review other beginners, and when dealing with the work of proven contemporary masters like Wright, take the trouble to enlist the mind of someone capable of writing intelligent prose?

Franz Wright

Waltham, Mass.

The writer won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2004.

Uncredited photo of Franz Wright via New York State Writer's Institute, SUNY. Uncredited photo of review writer Joel Brower via Saint Lawrence College.

Slices of life

Some lines from Jhumpa Lahiri's short story Hell-Heaven that caught my ear for one reason or another.

She and Pranab Kaku would argue passionately about these matters, raising their voices in playful combat, confronting each other in a way she and my father never did. ...

My father had a survivor’s mentality. From time to time, he liked to remark, in mixed company and often with no relevant provocation, that starving Russians under Stalin had resorted to eating the glue off the back of their wallpaper. ...

At larger gatherings, they kissed and held hands in front of everyone, and when they were out of earshot my mother would talk to the other Bengali women. “He used to be so different. I don’t understand how a person can change so suddenly. It’s just hell-heaven, the difference,” she would say, always using the English words for her self-concocted, backward metaphor. ...

Having me in the back seat allowed Pranab Kaku and Deborah to practice for the future, to try on the idea of a family of their own. Photographs were taken of me and Deborah, of me sitting on Deborah’s lap, holding her hand, kissing her on the cheek. We exchanged what I believed were secret smiles, and in those moments I felt that she understood me better than anyone else in the world. ...

As usual, my father said nothing in response to my mother’s commentary, quietly and methodically working though his meal, his fork and knife occasionally squeaking against the surface of the china, because he was accustomed to eating with his hands. He cleared his plate and then my mother’s, for she had pronounced the food inedible, and then he announced that he had overeaten and had a stomach ache.

Jana Leon photo of Lahiri via Leon's website; uncredited photo via Young India.

Science non-fiction

More Rain Heading to Washington

The Post: Heavy rain returned to the Washington area this afternoon, bringing a serious threat of additional flash flooding, the National Weather Service warned. ...

The heavy rain that began over the weekend and is predicted to continue tonight has resulted in the closure of major government buildings and museums, and left thousands of homes without electricity. Afternoon showers snarled traffic in downtown Washington, taking motorists several minutes to move one block along gridlocked streets. ...

The rare tropical deluge that began over the weekend unleashed floods Sunday and Monday that swamped homes and highways and forced some people to swim for their lives. ...

"It sounds like a broken record. Rain through Tuesday, Tuesday night, Wednesday, Thursday, possible through Sunday," said Jackie Hale, a National Weather Service spokeswoman this morning. "Here's some good news: They don't mention rain for next Monday."

All this rain in our nation's capital brought to mind a book I read a couple of years ago, Forty Signs of Rain . Publisher Weekly's synopsis reads:

In this cerebral near-future novel, the first in a trilogy, Robinson (The Years of Rice and Salt) explores the events leading up to a worldwide catastrophe brought on by global warming. Each of his various viewpoint characters holds a small piece of the puzzle and can see calamity coming, but is helpless before the indifference of the politicians and capitalists who run America. Anna Quibler, a National Science Foundation official in Washington, D.C., sifts through dozens of funding proposals each day, while her husband, Charlie, handles life as a stay-at-home dad and telecommutes to his job as an environmental adviser to a liberal senator. Another scientist, Frank Vanderwal, finds his sterile worldview turned upside down after attending a lecture on Buddhist attitudes toward science given by the ambassador from Khembalung, a nation virtually inundated by the rising Indian Ocean.

The book ends, as the title and book jacket portend, with heavy rains falling on Washington. The main character is trapped in an office building downtown by the swiftly-moving flood waters, and is forced to escape via a canoe. The images are pretty unforgettable.

With all the crazy weather in Washington, the debate over flag burning totally slipped past my radar. So it was with a real sense of shock that I read in the Times, Flag Amendment Narrowly Fails in Senate Vote

Carl Hulse: A proposed Constitutional amendment to allow Congress to prohibit desecration of the flag fell a single vote short of approval by the Senate on Tuesday, an excruciatingly close vote that left unresolved a long-running debate over whether the flag is a unique national symbol deserving of special legal standing.

The 66-to-34 vote on the amendment was one vote short of the 67 required to send the amendment to the states for potential ratification as the 28th Amendment. It was the closest proponents of the initiative have come in four Senate votes since the Supreme Court first ruled in 1989 that flag burning was a protected form of free speech.

The opponents — 30 Democrats, 3 Republicans and an independent — asserted that the amendment would amount to tampering with the Bill of Rights in an effort to eliminate relatively rare incidents of burning the flag. They said it violated the very freedoms guaranteed by the symbolism of the flag.

"This objectionable expression is obscene, it is painful, it is unpatriotic," said Senator Daniel Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat who won the Medal of Honor for his service in World War II. "But I believe Americans gave their lives in many wars to make certain all Americans have a right to express themselves, even those who harbor hateful thoughts." ...

The vote is likely to be an issue in the coming Congressional elections, and Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican who was the chief sponsor of the amendment, predicted the minority who opposed it would be held accountable by voters.

"I think this is getting to where they are not going to be able to escape the wrath of the voters," Mr. Hatch said.

Yeah, the wrath of the voters is focused on flag burning. The article goes on to say if it'd passed the Senate, it likely would have been ratified by the states.

It's scary that the 28th Amendment to the Constitution would've been a bookend to the 1st, as if the two were somehow worthily co-equal rather than being in contradiction. I can't think of a more powerful form of self-expression than burning the flag of a country that you love.

It's pretty shameful that our generation's answers to Washington, Jefferson and Madison spend their time on this....

Incidentally, Robinson is one of my favorite sci-fi authors (Hatch is one of my least favorite). I highly recommend, for a rainy or any other day, Years of Rice and Salt, a 672-page (in paperback) reimagining of how world history may have turned out if the black plague had killed 99% of Europeans, instead of 25%. The world essentially winds up divided between American Indians, Indian Indians, the Chinese, and an Islamic empire.

The issues and tensions Robinson explores mirror in an interesting way many in our 'real' world; he's very good at quickly creating characters and playing out on them broad societal trends without being preachy or boring. A plot device of reincarnation helps ties the book together over its centuries.

I've only read Red Mars and Blue Mars in Robinson's celebrated trilogy (ends with Green Mars), they're in my opinion a little less interesting than YRS, but are still probably the best things I've read on the human dynamics that go along with colonizing another planet.

Robinson basically creates new worlds that echo ours; he reminds me a lot of Orson Scott Card, although of course nothing really compares with Card's masterpiece (and one of my top 10 favorite sci-fi novels), Ender's Game. Ideally everyone should read that around 14; I think I didn't come across it until my mid-20s. The story at root is about social dynamics, told through the classic boy overcomes great odds, expanding upon his innate abilities to achieve something astonishing.

Card is unmatched among sci-fi authors at mixing macro 'fate of civilization in the balance' plots and micro character development; and he's especially good at infusing his plots with philosophy (eastern and western). Not only that, but you can also see him growing as an author through the eight Ender books; the first is still by far the best, just like once you make Star Wars it's kindof hard to create another comparable cinematic experience. But the rest probably do more with less.

As long as I'm on the subject, here's my list of my favorite science fiction works (I'll do the fantasy list in a future post).

Foundation series, Issac Asimov
Any serious list has to start with Asimov's trilogy--Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation. (The series continues in four other books). The plots are unparalleled; Asimov lays out a future universe that feels complete, and explores grand, sweeping themes--usually involving one man vs. society--with great battles on which the fate of planets hang in the balance. His concept of psychohistory has got to be one of the great fictional constructs of all time.

His characters can be a little two-dimensional, and there's a bit of 50s sci-fi rote to some of his prose. But it's like quibbling about Hitchcock's treatment of actresses--he's still the master from whom all else flow.

I also like Asimov's Galactic Empire books, and the Robot series (which I'd also include in any list of the best detective novels).

Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash was like nothing I'd ever read before; and suprisingly, I liked Diamond Age as much, if not more. Although completely separate they both tease out future worlds where people enhance their natural abilities with hardware, software, and drugs. His prose is quick and clever; words matter and are used well, and even though he's inventive with his lingo you can always figure out based on context or rhythmn what's going on. His books are definitely 'weird'; but because they're rooted in the tradition of good literature everywhere, they're not so experimental as to forego good plot and interesting characters. Plus his key characters are just as likely to be female or Asian as white and male. I also liked Cryptonomicon a lot; but didn't like Quicksilver much.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
This may be the most unique science fiction book ever written. It's usually tagged as a 'post-apocalyptic' novel, nominally about a few monks over a few hundred years, each wandering the American Southwest. The language is beautiful, and the philosophic and religious musings are interesting. I was reminded of this book a few years after reading it when I read Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, which although spare and languid compared to Miller's sprawling and frenetic work, packs the same mix of accurate observation about the West and theology.

Dune, Frank Herbert
The same mix of environment and theology comes out in Dune--but oh, how different, it's Islam to Cather and Miller's Christianity, desert to their sagebrush. Herbert's central characters are even more piercing; and his universe more distinct and detailed. Dune reminded me of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, aka the autobiography of 'Lawrence of Arabia'. Herbert must've read it too, he uses some of the same terminology and his portrayal of the desert reminds me of Lawrence on the Sahara.

Witches of Karres, James Schmitz
This book defines the genre of space opera; it's funny, inventive, a bit spare, and features females in its leading roles. Lots of interesting vocabularly too, like Sheewash drive and klatha. Hard to say exactly why I like it so much, except it's perfect for what it is and in a way captures the mix of authority and counter-culture that were the 60s exactly.

Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
If Asimov anchors one wing of science fiction, Dick--in many ways his polar opposite--reigns at the other. His plots are all twisted and spring from small, interesting concepts; while Asimov is well-lit corridors, Dick is all squalid corners. MHC, which is commonly seen as his masterwork out of a career that saw hundreds of publications, posits that the Axis powers won WWII and the U.S. is divided between Japan (West Coast) and Germany (East), with some remnants of resistance in the middle. He's one of the only Western authors I've known who gets the Asian mindset; his portrayal of a defeated but not beaten America feels uncomfortably real.

Reuters photo of Supreme Court building by Jonathan Ernst via Yahoo News.

Amateur writer

B
One of my favorite blogs to pop in on every now and then is The Amateur Gourmet, a theater grad student's account of eating in NYC. It's not great literature, but is consistently entertaining; and even though I don't share the blogger's food taste at all it sometimes points me to restaurants worth a visit.

The other day the blogger mentioned he has a quotation from Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite writers, posted on his wall: "Great ideas are hogwash, style and structure are the essence of a work."

I've never heard the quote before, but it fits my view of Nabokov. He's one of those gruff Russian geniuses, a classic hedgehog to borrow Isiah Berlin's term in that he has life philosophies that he applies to his writing in a disciplined, hard-working manner and someone who as a result hates dilettantes/dabblers/sloppy thinkers above all.

The genius of his writing stems from exact and telling description, whether of character or situations, along with inventive plots that unfurl in unexpected--to the reader--ways, stirred with a deep psychological understanding of the human condition. He's all concrete--what happens matters in his books, it's not about mood or talk. Even his love of butterflies was as a collector rather than as a head-in-the-clouds poet. And his letters to Edmund Wilson (Bunny) reveal not great minds communing, but rather are filled with pithy comments and revolve around money.

So maybe it's not surprising that he'd value style and structure--things that can be learned and worked at--over great ideas, which seem to just come to you (although in reality they require the foundation of a lifetime of awareness). It fits the Russian mentality of head-down, straight at 'em, an attitude that compensates for inferior materials, whether in sending waves of soldiers at the Nazis in WWII or in stockpiling nuclear warheads during the Cold War.

I actually disagree with Nabokov (for one thing I like science fiction, which is nothing if not great ideas wrapped in bad style inside bad structure) although I can see his point that having great ideas means nothing unless one also does the hard work of making the most out of them, a process that in writing requires structure and style. It's why Russians love poetry, where every word is absolutely necessary and one idea is enough to inform an entire work (too many indeed leave it bloated).

It was unexpected to see the quote on the Amateur Gourmet's website--he's pretty slapdash--and my guess is Nabokov would've detested the blog as a format ('you must be disciplined in your writing; you must spend time to revise and revise and revise; and you must receive money for your work.').

It's especially ironic that the Amateur Gourmet misquotes Nabovkov... the actual quote from Lectures on Literature appears in the foreword and reads:

Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Inscription by Nabokov via the Times.

Murderer's row

A Reporter's Reporter

Kurt Anderson review of 'A Writer's Life' in the Times: It's hard to overstate Gay Talese's gold-standard reputation. A few years ago, David Halberstam called him "the most important nonfiction writer of his generation, the person whose work most influenced at least two generations of other reporters."

The bedrock of that reputation consists of several exceptional magazine profiles from the 1960's, in particular "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," published in Esquire in 1966. Helped along by one of the great modern magazine headlines, the piece became a canonical archetype of the so-called New Journalism — nonfiction conceived and written in the manner of fiction, with fully rendered scenes, extended conversations and plainly subjective depictions of mood. In 1969, Talese published "The Kingdom and the Power," an institutional portrait of The New York Times, where he had been a reporter for nine years. That book became a best seller, certifying him as a literary pop star as well as a reporter's reporter. Just two years after the Times book, he published another first-rate best seller, his story of a Mafia family called "Honor Thy Father." ...

He's now 74, and one's instinct is to let him take his victory lap and applaud respectfully for the good work he has done. "A Writer's Life," I figured, would be a traditional memoir that picked up where "Unto the Sons" left off, in the 1940's, when he was 12. But this book is something else. It's mostly an account of Talese's inability these last 14 years to find a story that he and his editors were excited about. His dead ends and dry holes might have been usefully deconstructed and illuminated with careful, tough-minded, craftsmanlike introspection — something akin to the way, for instance, that Joan Didion created a masterpiece last year out of the death of her husband. But instead he has simply recapitulated and redoubled his botches by aggregating old notes and manuscript pages and interlarding them with bits of autobiography and self-abasement. The whole is less than the sum of its mostly arbitrary parts. It's a saga of serial professional failures that is itself a failure. ...

Rather than a memoir, though, Talese had decided to write a book "set within the milieu of a restaurant." He had accumulated files of notes since the 70's, although by the summer of 1999 he had written only 54 pages. So instead of working one Saturday afternoon in 1999, he's watching baseball on TV — and happens to change channels to the final game of the Women's World Cup soccer championship, the United States versus China. This prompts many pages of weirdly generic text about modern China, of which this is a typical passage: "Brand-name merchandise from the West had been distributed and also made in China for many years, encouraged by the trade policies of Deng Xiaoping, who became the Party ruler in 1978 (two years after Mao's death) and proclaimed, 'To get rich is glorious.' But now in 1999, as this nation of 1.3 billion people was about to mark a half-century of Communist rule that had been inaugurated by Mao's triumphant entrance into Tiananmen Square in October of 1949, China was hardly rich."

We know all this, of course, so why do we need to read it again? It is setup. It is drumbeat. Because the quietly desperate Talese is deciding he has stumbled onto his next Big Story. ...

It's one thing to rummage through the files and cut and paste together enough material to fulfill a very old book contract. Talese has hustled enough over the years to be permitted a punt. But a great deal of the prose in "A Writer's Life" is shockingly, inexcusably bad. ...

He's naturally old-school — always wears a suit and tie, writes longhand, flies on "a jet airplane," takes a "motor ride," calls blue jeans "dungarees" and China "the mainland." Fine. But most of the bad writing seems faux-old-fashioned in a stilted, wordy, strenuously highfalutin way — Restoration Hardware prose. "We journalists, in my view, were the pre-eminent chroniclers of contemporary happenings," he writes, and "I still respond inharmoniously to home cooking." About nepotism, he writes of employees "on the Times payroll in part (if not entirely) because of their cosanguinity or their conjugal affiliation with the Ochs patrilineage."

Are these guys overated? This group of ambitious white male authors who came of age after the war, the Doctorows and Mailers and Updikes and Wolfes and Roths (and to a lesser extent Talese), these old lions whose every new release is still scrutinized, pondered over for what it tells us about us.

Or, rather, has their time just passed by? Maybe once they were American letters; now, are they just musty relics, paddling madly under the surface to keep their heads in the limelight.

Or maybe these guys just were never that great, and spoke mainly to their cohorts--who happened to make up the reviewers, professors and critics of their time. As times change and everyone now can weigh in on anyone, perhaps they've lost their echo chamber cheering section.

Here's the Times' Michiko Katuni on John Updike's 'Terrorist' Imagines a Homegrown Threat to Homeland Security

John Updike writing about terrorism? The bard of the middle-class mundane, the chronicler of suburban adultery and angst, tackling Islamic radicalism and the call to jihad?

In theory Mr. Updike's shopworn new novel, "Terrorist," not only gives him an opportunity to address a thoroughly topical subject but also represents an effort to stretch his imagination — to try to boldly go where he has never gone before, as he did with considerable élan in his African novel, "The Coup" (1978), and with decidedly less happy results in "Brazil," his misbegotten 1994 variation of the Tristan and Iseult legend.

At the same time, it offers Mr. Updike a chance to explore some of his perennial themes from a different angle: to look at the sexually permissive mores that his other characters have embraced through the disapproving eyes of an ascetic, religious man, and to contemplate this man's absolute and unwavering faith, which is so unlike the existential doubts and tentative yearnings for salvation evinced by Mr. Updike's earlier creations.

Unfortunately, the would-be terrorist in this novel turns out to be a completely unbelievable individual: more robot than human being and such a cliché that the reader cannot help suspecting that Mr. Updike found the idea of such a person so incomprehensible that he at some point abandoned any earnest attempt to depict his inner life and settled instead for giving us a static, one-dimensional stereotype.

I don't know--I've never read much Updike aside from his looong short stories in the New Yorker; but I did hear him on the radio the other day talking about his new book, and he struck me as an intelligent, well-meaning but slightly befuddled man, someone who has to do research to find out that airport luggage-scanning machines aren't anything like x-rays and display in living color (reminds me of President Bush I and his supermarket scanners). I'm not sure how good he is at getting into the heads of people who aren't like him and his friends; in the same way that Thomas Wolfe's Charlotte Simmons reportedly read like an old man's idea of what young people are like.

It would once upon a time have mattered more that writers like Talese, Updike and Wolfe may no longer understand America, a society that to some extent has been shaped by their generation's literary works. But American letters is no longer dependent on their wise old heads; as evidenced by Toni Morrison's Beloved being chosen as the answer to the Times' question, What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?

It's an interesting choice--I've never read anything by Morrison, but it struck me that, as A.O. Scott wrote in the essay that accompanies the list (wait, when did he move from reviewing moving images to the written word?!),

With remarkable speed, "Beloved" has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition, since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain.

That kind of ambition, almost cold in its ambition, was the hallmark of the post WWII generation of great white male writers. It'd be fascinating to have been at the meeting where they broke the news that a black female, according to their own bible no less, wound up with the crown.

I think as the pool of American writers becomes ever-more diverse, the old boys club will be seen for what it was--a specific type of men who wrote certain types of books, that while notable and often inventive in their own right nevertheless painted a view of American society that was in reality their squinty look from where they sat.

Yes, some of them were great writers--I for one found Philip Roth's The Plot Against America just a step below some of Salman Rushdie's works. But they had the stage to themselves for a long time; and the critics of their day didn't see what they omitted and misunderstood because they themselves were guilty of the same sin, that of being all alike and thinking alike but mistakenly believing they spoke for America.

It does make me smile that men like Talese and Updike aren't going gently into the good night, but are at least making a belated effort to do things like visit China and examine Islam. They still have things to say, I think; and things worth hearing.

But it's nice that we're no longer dependant on a handful of white males of a certain age to tell us about our world.

Getty photo of Gay Talese, left, with E. L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer at a gathering in support of Salman Rushdie held by the PEN writers' group, Feb. 22, 1989 from the Times.

Like a Jhumpa story

Usha-Kiran Ghia and Rahul Rajkumar

The Times wedding section: Usha-Kiran Ghia, a daughter of Urmila Ghia and Kirti Ghia of Cincinnati, was married on Thursday morning to Dr. Rahul Rajkumar, the son of Dr. Urmil Aneja Gupta and Dr. Raj Kumar Gupta of Somers, N.Y. Mayor Thomas C. Rink of Indian Hill, Ohio, officiated in his office. Today, Pandit Navin Trivedi, a Hindu priest, is to perform a traditional Vedic ceremony at the Manor House, an estate in Cincinnati. ...

The bride and bridegroom met six years ago, when Ms. Ghia needed a ride from Westchester County Airport back to Yale after a vacation. A friend who knew them both had suggested calling Mr. Rajkumar because he lived close to the airport. "Out of the blue, I asked him if he didn't mind picking me up there," she said.

For his part, "I thought she was beautiful, charming and had a natural glow about her," he said. They soon became friends.

"One night I brought her a cup of coffee while she was up late writing a paper," Dr. Rajkumar remembered. "I was looking through some of her notebooks and saw my name written in beginner Hindi in one of them. That propelled me to ask her out. From then on, we knew."

Five years later, on another visit to the Westchester airport, he proposed.

I guess it's just the wedding pages, but the Times missed the story here. He lived close to the airport--but where did she live?

Assuming she lived at or near Yale, the school's travel services says Westchester airport is 59 miles away!

So this man with a law and medical degree agreed to drive out of the blue 120 miles round-trip for a stranger? My gosh... his friend must've emphasized her extreme cuteness. And what kindof a girl is she, to allow him to do that for her?

I'm very curious what the dynamics of their married life are like.

'Honey, would you mind driving to the next state to get me some chapstick?'

Photo of Usha-Kiran and Kirti by Steve Lyons photography via the Times.

Clear-eyed but tender

On the basis of her collection of short stories and her novel, Jhumpa Lahiri is one of my favorite authors. Her stories all feel immediately familiar; their subject matter and her style leave no barrier between the page and me.

You could say they're a little too carefully written, there's none of the torrent, sloppiness and glancing genius of Rushdie or Roth. Or the overreaching boisterousness and larger-than-life truths of a Bollywood film.

But I don't know; for me, she's in the Jane Austen school of well-crafted stories within a certain world that she brings to life. Her characters are so believable, and there are no ugly missteps that yank you out of the story. Her tone is so crisp and clean, she gets right words to describe the exact emotion and recall the precise situation and there's always something underneath the story.

I love reading them, and they linger and rattle around in my head afterwards.

Here are some parts of a new short story in the New Yorker, Once in a Lifetime--about an Indian family that goes back to India, only to return and stay with the narrator's family--that caught my ear:

Here they shopped together for groceries, and complained about their husbands, and cooked at either our stove or yours, dividing up the dishes for our respective families when they were done. They knitted together, switching projects when one of them got bored. When I was born, your parents were the only friends to visit the hospital. I was fed in your old high chair, pushed along the streets in your old pram. ...

Whatever the reason you were coming, I gathered from my parents’ talk that it was regarded as a wavering, a weakness. “They should have known it’s impossible to go back,” they said to their friends, condemning your parents for having failed at both ends. We had stuck it out as immigrants while you had fled; had we been the ones to go back to India, my parents seemed to suggest, we would have stuck it out there as well. ...

Cinema of a certain period was the one thing my mother loved wholeheartedly about the West. She herself never wore a skirt—she considered it indecent—but she could recall, scene by scene, the outfits that Audrey Hepburn had worn in any given movie. ...

I did my homework at the dining table, unable to use the desk in my room. I worked on my ancient-Rome report, something that had interested me until your arrival. Now it seemed silly, given that you’d been there. I longed to work on it in privacy, but your father talked to me at length about the structural aspects of the Colosseum. His civil engineer’s explanations went over my head, were irrelevant to my needs, but to be polite I listened. I worried that he would want to see whether I had incorporated the things he said, but he never bothered me about that. He hunted through his bags and showed me postcards he’d purchased, and though it had nothing to do with my report, he gave me a two-lire coin.

Photo of Jhumpa Lahiri by Robert Deutsch in USA Today

PEN ends

The final event I saw at the PEN World Voices New York Festival of International Literature was A Believer Nighttime Event. Described as:

A literary “variety show” presented by The Believer—a monthly books and culture magazine published by McSweeney’s—and hosted by writer and performer John Hodgman. In addition to a conversation between artist Matthew Ritchie and novelist Ben Marcus, a panel called "The Secret Life of Secrets" and surprise guests guarantee an eclectic night of entertainment.

John Hodgman got things started with a hilarious deadpan introduction. Audience was rolling; something about his delivery is just funny, plus he had a well-written text. He knew he was being funny, but it was still funny.

Next was an odd power-point presentation on something related to theories of time, by someone who's name isn't in the official program. It was like 15 minutes, about 1:40 of which was funny. People at first thought the whole thing was gonna be funny, when you're in the mood to laugh it really is too bad when you can't.

Then a panel, on Secrets (kindof). Hodgman briefly introduced each author with some true biographical facts, then an over-the-top line from a 60s-era spy novel. Panelists were:

Samantha Hunt, who doesn't appear in the PEN program. Her weird website says she's a writer living in New York; I felt bad for her, it was a totally packed auditorium and people like Salman Rushdie were there, almost felt like someone defending their graduate thesis. She really tried hard to be a good moderator, and actually I think she was, just turned red every so often and the strings were a little too visible. All the panelists addressed their remarks to her, instead of the audience--either because they really like her question, or maybe because they were for the most part young panel members, or because there's something about someone who earnestly wants things to go well that makes you want to help out somehow.

Israeli Etgar Keret, an intense young guy who I liked instantly, maybe because it was obvious writing was really important to him and he really liked talking about it. His line from Hodgman was he knew over 200 ways to kill someone using what was in a typical hotel room... Keret said he was still mentally trying to add it all up, only had like 20, and was already using soap as a weapon. Hunt, who seemed to really know the panelists' works, asked him about his past comments that he's not a political writer. He said well, given the way Israel is, to be a non-political writer in an intensely political society is itself political. Near the end he said for him, it was like he embedded personal experiences in his writing, but in a code--aka everything was slant--so he knew, but nobody else did, which saved him much embarrasment.

Chinese now American Yiyun Li, who said she came to writing late and whose bio says she came to the U.S. originally to study medicine was good-natured, but underneath you could tell she was made of steel. She responded to Hunt's question about if our society today is losing imagination by saying she didn't think kids in general every really had much imagination, relating the story of how she asked her son how come he didn't play with this girl whom apparently everyone also ignored, to which he replied because I don't have time. She then asked him if he could imagine what it'd be like to have no friends, and he said 'No.' I think she's right in one sense, actually, it's hard for kids to have a feel for others in a realistic or authentic way, unless they themselves have had an experience to base it on. Not much empathy among kids, although there's a lot of natural niceness. She later said there's this Chinese saying that everything happens twice; she's more interested in how things mirror or slant the second time through.

Argentinian Rodrigo Fresán seemed like your typical wound-up author, letting statements loose in little bursts. He, also in response to a Hunt question about doubles in his writing, said by the way, I have a double out there--a guy on the Internet who pretends to be him, and writes a blog about 'his' experiences. He gave a little laugh, said it was bothersome, but also sometimes good since the guy online seems to have a much more boring life than he does.

Nigerian/British Helen Oyeyemi, who's a Cambridge student who wrote her book at age 19 had a lot of cool energy, wonderful accent and a joyful feel; she clearly was just floating through the whole thing, really made me think wow, anyone with something real to say can be a novelist. It's like how democratic marathons have become. She talked about the genesis of her book in an imaginary friend she had growing up, until one day he was hit by a car. No follow-up to that comment, unfortunately. I didn't get the feeling she's someone to watch, necessarily; seemed to me to be a happy person, studying political science and finding out about the world. Then again, she may have been hiding her light under a bushel.

Croatian/Dutch Dubravka Ugresic, an older, kindof sour-faced woman who didn't quite fit on this panel of mostly fresh-faced, certainly free-spirited authors. She was blunt, and apparently takes writing quite seriously. You get the feeling she writes to get it out.

Salman Rushdie got up after the panel to read a selection from his novel Shalimar the Clown. I like Rushdie's writing, quite a lot--I count his Midnight's Children trilogy (Shame, and Satanic Verses) as among the best books of the past--100? 200? years. I also liked Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

But in the political realm, the guy's very inconsistant. As the leader of PEN, and the person who came up with the idea for this festival and personally made it happen, he's great. But his op-ed pieces on topics like Islamic fundamentalism tend to be preachy and politically ill-informed.

I don't begrudge him that side, though--he obviously has had personal reasons to speak out on these topics. It's just another example though of these almost autistic geniuses, who can be so subtle in their chosen field and yet totally tone-deaf in others.

And I don't think genius is too strong a word for Rushdie. He has an immediately recognizable style that's complicated in its seeming-stream-of-consciousness. He has a really good feel for words, for rhythmns; plus he's funny, and cutting and quite insightful in his fiction. His books make you laugh, and think, at 80 mph going around hairpin curves.

At any rate, his reading was interesting--he's good at it, does vocal inflections and other little things to keep the listener entertained. His prose, though, begs to be reread, and he didn't obviously do that, so the delightful savoring had to be done in your head, by which time he was already on to 50 other flights of fancy.

Still, it was appropriate for me to end my PEN fest marathon with the man who started it all. Curious to see how, with all of Rushdie's pet topics in the news all the time, what he writes next.

Maybe something about the fashion world.

Glimpse into a life

The third panel I saw at the PEN World Voices New York Festival of International Literature was The Global City. The panel was structured around this:

With the majority of the world’s population now inhabiting urban areas, what is the future of the global city? Writers from six very different cities—Bombay, Rome, Cairo, Istanbul, and Mexico City—talk about constructing the metropolis with words.

I'm not sure I've ever liked a group of panelists more, everyone came across as warm, thoughtful, and interesting. It made you feel at home. They were:

Moderator Suketu Mehta, an earnest and totally likeable guy who's oneof those genius Indians. He wrote Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, and his bio says: "He is currently writing an original screenplay for The Goddess, a Merchant-Ivory film starring Tina Turner. Mehta also cowrote Mission Kashmir, a Bollywood movie." I mean, wow! When he went to the lectern and started his remarks, I almost cringed, fearing it was going to go on too long and be too thorough. But it was really interesting; said for the first time in human history more people live in cities than villages; cities have stratified into being either for the rich--New York, London, Paris--or the poor--Bombay, Mexico City, Cairo. And that literature about the world's cities matters more now than ever, since the next generation of New Yorkers is being born in Lagos today. He quoted Woody Allen--a city dweller is at two with nature--and mentioned Jane Jacobs.

Plus, he introduced each panelist with a quotation from their work or an interview, several of them expressed astonishment that he'd been able to find the quote, which all seemed to fit really well. Unfortunately, the structure of this panel had each panelist reading for 10 minutes from their work--which was great for five minutes, but really dragged after a while, the pace was made especially glacial since English was clearly their second languages.

Egyptian Alaa Al-Aswany, who's also a dentist apparently, and is a large, jovial guy, not like his photo. He read from The Yacoubian Building, a novel about the residents of an apartment building in Cairo. It made me think, of course, of Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo trilogy, just like every book about a boy magician will always be compared to Harry Potter. The excerpt he read was about the old European part of Cairo, formerly forbidden to ordinary Egyptians, later transformed into a warren of illicit and increasingly shabby bars. His voice was rich and commanding, but also warm.

Brazilian Paulo Lins is a slight, wiry man with a shaved head, who had an interpreter. Lins came across as gentle yet also made of steel; he read from Cidade de Deus, City of God, a novel about the slums of Rio he came out of that was made into an astonishingly gripping movie and is now being translated into English. The excerpt he read was about the aspiring photographer who contemplates crime as the only way to get out of poverty. His voice had a light, playful quality to it, but you could feel his sharpness and drive. His translator, incidentally, spoke into a little hand-held mike that connected to an earpiece Lins had; the translator only translated the remarks and asides of the other authors, not their reading of their work. Testament to how densely packed the written word is, in contrast to speech.

Italian Melania G. Mazzucco was the only panelist I wouldn't call extraordinary--she was a curly-haired woman who seemed to me to have found a nice niche for herself, writing about Rome and New York City. It was like a panel of intellectuals, and her; she seems like a good writer but in the way people on the best-seller lists might be, rather than someone who'll be read 100 years from now. She read from Vita, about a group of Italian kids growing up in turn of the century New York City.

Mexican Carlos Monsiváis, an elderly journalist and author with large glasses who came across as a salt of the earth type you'd trust about anything. He said he was so nervous he was just going to take recourse in reading his poor article, but that was just him being modest. His article was about Mexico City, a sense of the amazing squalor yet sheer scope of the place. Two lines in particular stuck with me: describing the hurry of the harried city he said humans are "a species hoping to arrive late at the Last Judgment". And he called Mexico City "the post-apocalyptic city", "the worst has already happened, but somehow the city functions".

Turk Orhan Pamuk, the famous novelist and now political figure, looking suave and distinguished--not at all like his goofy picture. Also a bit nervous, I think, he kindof wasn't paying attention when the others were reading, like a kid anxious to get his turn over with. He apparently lives and writes in the same building that he grew up in; he read an excerpt from a memoir, Istanbul, that was essentially one long, amazing sentence, very Walt Whitman-esque in that it was just one phrase and image after another, each preceded by 'Of', describing his beloved Istanbul. My favorite was: "of everything being broken, worn-out, past its prime." He started out wanting to be an artist and photographer, can totally tell, each phrase was like a little photograph.

He also said he thought a word that summed up the Turkish people was their equivalent of the word 'melancholy', but the Turkish word apparently connotes also a 'nobility of failure' meaning, essentially the entire country was living in the ruins of an empire, but it was somehow okay, not to be celebrated, but nothing to be ashamed of, either, just sad.

After everyone read there wasn't much time left, Mehta had asked the audience to write up and pass in questions that he'd select from, but as it was the panel only had time to answer two of his questions each. He asked Monsiváis about the ongoing immigration protests in the U.S. and what he thought of it, quoting him as once writing that "the heart of the Mexican dream is Los Angeles." Monsiváis was astounded he'd found the quote but said it fit to a T, calling L.A. the second Mexican city, after Mexico City. He didn't seem that concerned about the protests, I think at this point it'd be like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.

Lins was asked how he started writing City of God--he said originally, in college he wanted to be a poet. But he said the novel was because of the U.S. Embassy. At the time, he was one of only four students at his university who came from the slums of Rio--where at the time there were 150,000 people; the U.S. government, as part of it's Partnership for Peace program in the 60s and 70s, had created the slums, having moved them out of downtown Rio to outside the city, 60 kilometers away. An anthropology student had asked him to help her with an oral history project on the slums, since he was there--he said he didn't want to do it, but she was cute, so he did.... He had no interest in anthropology, but his job was to interview people and then transcribe the interviews; for the final report, he tried writing up some of the interviews as a long poem, which eventually he reshaped as a novel.

Al-Aswany then jumped in that his novel also owed its birth to the U.S. Embassy--apparently in Cairo the embassy wanted to clear the ground next to its building, and as the demolition of the neighboring building began Al-Aswany walked by and saw that the entire front wall of the building had been taken down, leaving all the interior apartments--whose residents had in their haste to leave left many items behind--totally exposed. He started imagining what events must have taken places in these buildings, from arguments to quiet dinners to parties, and wrote the novel from there.

The other panelists related other anecdotes about their novels; unfortunately, with the lack of time we never got to hear them talk more about their cities, or how they compared or didn't compare to each other.

Nevertheless, although it's hard to describe precisely, I think everyone left the panel feeling like we'd seen something special. All these great authors from such different places who obviously didn't know each other beforehand, up on stage discovering each other and interacting, all played out in front of us. You got the sense that they had a lot of respect for each other--it was the camaraderie that veterans have.

Somehow the chemistry on the panel meshed; I really wish it could've gone on for hours. This was definitely my favorite panel in terms of which one I'd most enjoy having dinner with afterwards--I imagine everyone being generally mellow, with lots of interesting insights and unexpected knowledge, and just a cool vibe. And good manners.