ENDER'S GAME

Many years ago I was duped into an evening of indoor paintball.

I remember distinctly the feel of the 'gun' in my hands, the claustrophobia-inducing full-face mask, the darkened warehouse that was our battlefield and the pounding metal music that contributed to my disorientation. I also remember the adrenalin surge to my heart and the shortness of breath as the wargames began. "Surrender or Die" was the cry heard just prior to being fired upon. People in the game were badly injured. In fact, all of us were hurt to some extent: abrasions, contusions, pulled muscles and strained backs were some of the physical damage. But what interested me most was the emotional damage. After the initial fatigue wore off and the adrenalin was pumped out of our system we all seemed to be left with a kind of embarrassment. The beer and forced bonhomie covered our discomfort, but I was left with a distinct sense that we all left that night with varying levels of humiliation. It may have been that we were all a bit too old to be playing 'army'. Or perhaps it was that we knew we were all to face each other the next morning at work. Maybe it was the weekend warrior's acute sense that this level of intense activity made him feel old - he was more tired that he ought to have been after the game. Or could it have been the sense that at this time in history, at this point in our evolution, at this stage of development we were ashamed at our ability to have fun miming death, destruction and war. Was it as if we had staged a fake rape and were haunted by our enjoyment of it? Being the recalcitrant snob that I am, I never ascribed that level of self-awareness to my co-workers, but I may have been wrong.

Orson Scott Card's wargames novel, Ender's Game, left me feeling somewhat similar to how I felt after my night of murder mayhem. Feelings of catharsis and expurgation aside, Card's book left me a bit embarrassed about identifying with his child-protagonist Ender Wiggin. Its corollary is, of course, the feeling of walking out of a movie such as Star Wars with the adrenalin rush of the destruction of the Death Star still pumping through your body. Like Ender I had temporarily revelled in the chase, the game, but ended up also disturbed by taking the pleasure of the moment. One reviewer calls Ender's Game pornography. It's a slightly overwrought expression, but it is none-the-less a comprehensible one.

If Card were a more sentimental writer we could dismiss his main premise - children saving the human race - as romantic twaddle. However, while his adults are unfailingly stupid, weak or machiavellian, Card saves the irony of messianic children by writing them as flawed as their literal and figurative parentals. Few of Cards characters, of course, rise beyond their two-dimensional status and are just figures to fill in the story, but the three primaries (Ender, Valentine and Peter) are complicated enough to keep us from the 'our-children-are-our-future' nonsense.

Ender's Game is, as one would expect of a military school novel, full of the homoerotic subtext of any bloody, buddy story. (There is a girl at Battle School, but she is only a place-marker who only underscore this particular theme. She is also the only soldier to finally collapse.) The enemy is known colloquially as 'buggers' which in itself would be unsubtle, but when the main target of their buggery is known as 'Ender' the unsubtlety rolls over into camp. Ender's brother and political genius is named Peter as a phallic indictment of his type of power. In addition, the naked boys (a state of pre-warrior innocence that is utterly unconvincing) and the threat of death in the showers don't help.

As far as the adult names go, it is enough to note the Commander of Battle School is know as 'Graff'. He is, as a graph should show, interested in inputs and outputs, what stimulus causes what outcome. He is mechanical and his later show of emotion towards Ender is undone by his earlier behaviour.

All-in-all, Ender's Game is what Lord of the Flies was for boys of my generation. (Card is only a faint shadow of William Golding and I would quickly substitute Flies for Ender with any adolescent, but Ender is a start.) The philosophies are not for adults, they are for children who will try on the characters and then, we hope, abandon them in favor of maturity. Reading is one way we 'come of age' like Ender. It is a way of maturing, of learning how our lives work. Every true Reader identifies with a character or a book. It instresses (to use the Hopkinsian term) our lives in a way that only the life of the mind can. Sometimes we discard our Book and adopt a new one, but we do so in order to reorient ourselves in a world that would deny us.

Unfortunately, Mr. Bush and, particularly, Mr. Cheney live in Ender and Ralph's worlds. Their willingness to sacrifice lives for the cause is without regret or even irony. They believe in messianic, winner-take-all worlds where the only truth is domination. For them Armageddon is the goal, not the penalty for living by the sword. In true Imaginative Literature tradition, I would transport them to a fully contained holo-world where they can live out their 20th century wargame fantasies without destroying the rest of us. In the meantime, another book for the Presidential Library.

CATCHING THE LIMIT

G. M. Hopkins, I think it was, postulated in his private writings that poetry grew out of the rhythms of dance. What could be a better metaphor than that for a poetry of nature? Combining the rhythms of body movement with the rhythms of nature and learning to coordinate, to combine, to find the nexus where the two grow into each other seems the physical reality of a certain kind of poetry. Deeper: consider that body movement is an outward expression of the internal rhythms of blood moving, of heart and lungs concussing and we have completed a full circle; high concept to body awareness to environment and back again.

But I bristle at the 'one with Nature' Mother Earthers. Instead, the impulse should be to acknowledge our place, not become an undifferentiated consciousness. Ken Wilbur (quoting Arthur Koestler) uses the term 'holon' to refer to "an entity that is itself a whole and simultaneously a part of some other whole." Whether Mark Thalman is aware of the term or just somehow groks it on his own, he makes it a central point in Catching the Limit.

After dinner dishes have been washed and put away,
I walk down to the dock.

Clouds hover against snow-capped peaks.
The sun, already below the horizon, turns glaciers pink.

Shadows stretch across the hills
like blankets being drawn up for the night.

Along the distant shore,
one last fisherman trolls for kokanee...

Below my feet, trout meander between pilings--
glide over dappled stones.

The moon rises. On the water,
it is shattered by each wave.

With cupped hands, I scoop up a brilliant shard
and wash my face with wet light.

Soon, the wind dies, and the moon is again whole.
Pale stars, floating lanterns, dot the lake.

I untie my boat, shove off,
and lifting the oars, row across the heavens.

Moving Into Night

Eschewing sameness but not participation, the poem lets us keep our wholeness while submersing ourselves, like the speaker who cups his hands in the water and washes his face, in the environment. Moving into Night is almost an inverted epithalamion, where the speaker departs from domesticity and embraces something less structured, but still organized along a deeper pattern. It is, of course, not a rejection but an inclusion. Everything is whole and everything is a part.

They were born here.
The fire chief delivered them
on a makeshift table in the station.
Since their fathers went to work in the sawmill,
they went to work in the sawmill.
When the economy wore thin,
unraveling easily as an old rope,
the mill shut down. Five years later,
the men still sit home or in the bars,
waiting out the winter like fishermen.
Many have never left this town.
Many will never leave.
The graveyard is full of small imaginations.

Westfir

Westfir is also a kind of domesticity, though a painfully failed one. I think the appeal of these poems lies in Thalman's effort to embrace and combine worlds which we have been taught are 'in here' and 'out there'. They can be merged, they can be experienced as one without the Cartesian absurdities and without losing wholeness. In other words, he seems to be fighting a kind of numbing compartmentalism. (The ironic reference to the 'fire chief' in Westfir is harshly funny as Thalman commonly makes reference to the Indian heritage of Oregon. New things are old things.)

But I want to quote more of Catching the Limit. Having read it repeatedly over the past month or so, much of it has stuck in my mind and wandered around in there caroming off other poetry, other moments. I'll restrain myself here though.

Here's your challenge: poetry must be read aloud. Find a bench in the park and sit with Thalman's poems. Read them out loud. In fact, read them very loudly. Yes, people will think you a bit balmy, but you will get ten times the pleasure from it and that is at least one purpose of all poetry.

I seriously doubt one could wring a single poem out of the prosaic and unimaginative Bushites. That's just the way they are. Likely enough, if they caught you reading poems out loud, in public, they would have you locked up as some kind of deviant or subversive. Well, there's no getting around it - if you are reading poems you are a subversive. Read more. Fill your pockets with books of poems and put them on the shelf of our once fearless leader's library. Subvert the Republican hagiography. That's what we are here for.

SCOOP

All great satires are conspiratorial. The author must bring us in on the secret sarcasm he is unleashing on his hapless target. The genre requires subtlety, insight, wit and an absolute mastery of the language. It doesn't hurt to have a firm grasp of the straight or unbent. Without an abiding sense of normalcy, even an errant one, writing satire is difficult, to say the least. If one doesn't know instinctively what's wrong (bent), one cannot proffer what is right (straight).

Well, this is just my pedantic way of praising Evenly Waugh and his masterpiece, Scoop. A perfectly rifled satire of imperial journalism, Scoop is simply without match in its prose, its wit and its aim.

William and Corker went to the Press Bureau. Dr. Benito, the director, was away but his clerk entered their names in his ledger and gave them cards of identity. They were small orange documents, originally printed for the registration of prostitutes. The space for thumb-print was now filled with a passport photograph and at the head the word 'journalist' substituted in neat Ishmaelite characters.

Waugh has a gift for names: His hero William Boot, is mistaken for novelist John Boot whose name easily and hilariously translates into 'jackboot'. Boot's cohort in the press corp is simply called 'Corker'. Waugh's press baron, Lord Copper is named for the pissy wealth he accrues. The leader of the coup in Ishmaelia, Dr. Benito, who acts for the Marxist Russians, has Mussolini's charm. And the trio of competing journalists Waugh uproariously calls Shumble, Pigge and Whelper.

Waugh is accused unfairly, I believe, of racism; the truth is, he reviled all races, creeds and nationalities equally.

... William was tired. He ate his dinner and strolled home. When he reached his room he found it filled with tobacco smoke; a cheroot, one of his cheroots, glowed in the darkness. A voice, with a strong German accent, said: "Close the shutters, please, before you turn on the light."
William did as he was asked. A man rose from the armchair, clicked his heels and made a guttural sound. He was a large blond man of military but somewhat dilapidated appearance. He wore khaki shorts and an open shirt, boots ragged and splashed with mud. His head, once shaven, was covered with stubble, uniform with his chin, like a clipped yew in a neglected garden.
"I beg your pardon?" said William. The man clicked his heels again and made the same throaty sound, adding, "That is my name."

White, black, German, Russian or British - it's all the same to him.

Every book of Waugh's has been ordered for the shelves of our former President's library. He won't read them, much less understand them. However, in contrast to the great destroyer of English we set Mr. Evelyn Waugh and his pitch-perfect prose. For only a true master could write, "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole..."

LE CITTÀ INVISIBILI

So, Marco Polo visits the many cities of Kublai Khan's vast empire returning to tell the Mongolian of the oddities he commands. It is meant to remind us of the travellers who returned to Europe five or six centuries ago with stories about weird animals and even weirder people. We read those stories of unicorns and men with their heads in their abdomens with a particular kind of modern skepticism. We know better about the world.

Polo begins by energetically miming his finds and later, as his command of the Khan's language improves, stringing tales like beads on a thin gold wire to divert his patron. Finally, Polo and the Khan end with an inversion of the process where the emperor tells the adventurer of the cities he imagines and asking if they have been discovered yet.

Of course, the telling of the city is the creation of the city. Nothing imagined fails to exist.
But not all signs demand interpretation. Not all literature is about puzzles needing a solution. Not all history requires an applied theory to chart the evolution of consciousness.

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (the English title) creates a sine wave that defines a cityscape; no wait, it loops back in on itself so that the cities are all the same city; no, still not right - Polo is describing his own home, Venice in ways that will intrigue the Khan in a kind of Thousand and One Arabian Nights sort of way. The theories are endless.

Therefore, the inhabitants still believe they live in an Aglaura which grows only with the name Aglaura and they do not notice the Aglaura that grows on the ground. And even I, who would like to keep the two cities distinct in my memory, can speak only of the one, because the recollection of the other, in the lack of words to fix it, has been lost.

We lose the cities, too, for lack of words. Calvino has set the words to paper and our attempt to recreate the book with theory is an impossible Gallileo-like attempt to make for ourselves a model of what has already been made. Or, like Borges' Pierre Menard, we write the tales over again in the same exact words to make a new Invisible Cities.

Perhaps it would be better to leave it innocent of theory and simply read it over and over again for the unadulterated pleasure of the experience - that is, for the joy of it. I don't ask that you not read it closely - it deserves at least that much - but do resist the temptation to tie it up in a nice red satin ribbon and try reading it the way you might 'read' a Turner seascape or 'interpret' a Rodin.

"Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little."

Must we 'unpack our hearts with words' and thus murder the moment? So...

The cities of my memories are my own. I'll not share them with the imperialists who would conquer and take away what is mine. Neither will I, Marco Polo-like, describe my visions to my enemies. Imagination creates; lies destroy. So, this act of creation by Calvino will go on the shelves of Mr. Bush's library. Perhaps some of the destruction can be redeemed.

Tell me about your city.

THE SEA AND THE MIRROR

It seems appropriate that W. H. Auden, after gracing us with The Enchafèd Flood, should have to pony up a demonstration of his aesthetic in his own work. Particularly appropriate is that the work is an interpretation of what is properly a story of the sea and the desert. That is, The Tempest.

The Sea and the Mirror is a number of things actually. Not least it is a statement of Christian aesthetics or, at least, Auden's attempt at such. It is also a retelling or interpretation or setting of Good Will's sea shanty. I think that Auden's deep thinking and criticism of Romantic images is one of the catalysts for this work. That may be just me projecting onto a poor, defenseless, dead poet, but it makes sense. The Tempest had a profound impact on the romantic poets, obviously, and Auden is directly in the center of that tradition. It also seems to me that The Tempest is essentially a sea story in these ways: The title is ambivalent. While most of the action takes place on dry ground, the vital center of the story is generated by the storm at sea. Yes, the tempest refers to a number of emotional, political, sexual, spiritual and aesthetic hurricanes, the original one is that which appears to sink the ship at the outset. The assorted issues within the play are resolved, if not by setting out to sea once again then at least when almost everyone (poor Caliban) is back on board and journeying home. And, with a little squinting, it could almost be taken as a chapter in Ulysses, which is undoubtedly a sea story.

But, this post is purportedly about Auden's book, not Will's play. At least, not primarily.

Auden wants to fault Shakespeare for his 'manichaeanism' as all the academics point out, only then to qualify that by arguing he was blaming Will for suggesting that the physical sullies the spiritual which isn't exactly the same thing. It certainly wasn't for Shakespeare who, while maybe playing a little too fast and loose with dualism in The Tempest, seems to make a point of giving Prospero his freedom only when he abandons his magic. But Auden liked schematics and opposing/echoing pairs. He ultimately believed himself to be abandoning those absolute truths when he embraced Christianity, but they clearly were an organizing principle of his poetry and his mind; he never really left them behind.

I am glad I have freed you, says Prospero to Ariel in a heartbreaking speech Auden puts in the magician's mouth, So at last I can really believe I shall die. Auden really thinks, I believe, that he has transcended Will here, but it just isn't so. Shakespeare gives us a Prospero who knows fully that he is 'stepping out of the air.' Auden doesn't give Ariel the opportunity to reply, but if he had there might have been more truth to this speech.

The second set in The Sea and the Mirror has the assorted characters of the play asserting their independence from Prospero. He who is pulling the levers and tugging the puppet strings is here lectured by his creations. We are our own men and women Auden has them say. A little demotic irony for us, it seems.

Antonio

As I exist so you shall be denied,
Forced to remain our melancholy mentor,
The grown-up man, the adult in his pride...

Your all is partial, Prospero;
My will is all my own:
Your need to love shall never know
Me: I am I, Antonio,
By choice myself alone

The poetry is beautiful in this chapter. I read it over and over again. But my repetitive obsession is an avoidance mechanism to keep me alee of that last chapter: Caliban's Jamesian address to the Audience.

I get flashes of insight from Caliban's intense, entwinèd speech, but its whole eludes me and I never read but I am frustrated and want to go back and reread the earlier sections. Auden is saying something important here, but God knows I am ignorant of what it might be.

Still, read the poem. It's readily available in a nicely done edition from Princeton University Press with excellent editing, introduction and notes by Arthur Kirsch.

Religion and culture seem to be represented by a catholic belief that something is lacking which must be found, but as to what that something is, the keys of heaven, the missing heir, genius, the smells of childhood, or a sense of humour, why it is lacking, whether it has been deliberately stolen, or accidentally lost or just hidden for a lark, and who is responsible, our ancestors, ourselves, the social structure, or mysterious wicked powers, there are as many faiths as there are searchers, and clues can be found behind every clock, under every stone, and in every hollow tree to support all of them.

Save for the 'hollow tree' reference to Ariel's imprisonment I am mostly lost here. Something very important is being said, maybe about original sin, but I am innocent of it. Sigh...

So here it is, smuggled onto the shelves of his library. He won't read it. Perhaps, like Caliban, he can't read it. But there it is reminding us of nothing so much as how bleak and small Mr. Bush's world was and how like a deserted island without Ariel and all the rest it was. Desolate was the brain that led us into temptation.

DIE REISE MIT DER ZEITMASCHINE

Sitting in my favorite cafe inside my favorite bookstore which is in turn inside another coffee shop/mall - an extra self disconcertedly aware of the absurdity thanks to Mr. Fforde - reading Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, I came across an essay on a turn-of-the-20th century Austrian intellectual named Egon Friedell. (I often violently disagree with James, but this collection of his essays is a treasure and is often the first book I cadge from the bookstore to read with my coffee.)

James refers to Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (A Cultural History of the Modern Age) which intrigued me. The bookstore catalogue showed three books by Friedell: a single volume of the cultural history at a steep $45, Kulturgeschichte Griechenlands at a steeper price yet, and a cheap paperback translated into English as The Return of the Time Machine to be found on the Science Fiction shelves. Convinced that this was another Egon Friedell, I never-the-less went looking.

The Return of the Time Machine was first published in 1946, the year Wells himself died, so no one can know if he ever read this ironic followup to his masterpiece. But Friedell seems to have been a reader of Wells, as his Cultural History echoes strongly echoes Wells' own The Outline of History. Friedell's time machine book has been called a sequel, a tribute, an homage to Well's classic; it is nothing of the sort.

It is a common mistake to believe that a sendup of something implies scorn by the author. Clearly this is nonsense. Look at Monty Python's much beloved roustings of British culture. Without a true affection for the quirks and absurdities of their own people, without an immersion in the silliness which befogs British culture, the Pythons would fail miserably. They are obviously fond of their compatriots. As additional proof, look also at the cartooning that American Terry Gilliam created as bumper material for the sketches - it is rather crass and mean and outside the brilliance of the rest of the satire. Now, I like Terry Gilliam, but in this instance he just doesn't seem to get it. (Later, his direction of the Python's Holy Grail is inspired, but the early cartooning just isn't.) Friedell must have loved Wells' Time Machine, he captures it so inerrantly, but his book is a sly sendup of the original.

... I hold no such high respect for curiosity as you seem to. One of the most typical cases in world history, the indiscretion of Columbus, who poked around in the Atlantic Ocean long enough to finally discover America, turned out to be an expensive lesson in the long run. Christian science, color segregation, nicotine poisoning, syphilis, trusts: these are some of the leading contributions this continent has brought us, not to forget the American Way of Life. That's enough for me. And I don't eat potatoes.

This is uproariously wrong and even more uproariously funny. It is put in the mouth of the journalist who sits silently in Wells' original which is funnier yet.

Most reviewers recognize the satire in the early, forged letters Friedell places as preface to the story of the time machine, but they are gulled later by the author into believing that he has resorted to sentimental fawning over Wells' original. Friedell, who wrote intelligently on Einstein's relativity theories, slyly mocks Wells with convoluted hypotheses of 'earth time', 'time-energy', and 'time resistance' and pokey mathematical models of how the time machine is supposed to work.

"Don't you understand it at all?" he exclaimed. "The case was damned clear. I had journeyed into a time when my machine hadn't been invented yet! How is it possible that I - who call myself a scientifically thinking person - hadn't thought about this primitive fact! I could hardly travel with my Time Machine to a time when it didn't exist! Now you'll smile, and probably I would have done so myself, if the matter hadn't been so vital to me..."

Friedell isn't very gentle with Wells here, but he is to the point. Wells authorial convention of representing the factualness of his scientific fantasy (didn't Shelley do the same thing with Frankenstein?) by 'reproducing' letters and telling the time-traveller's story as if it were Shackleton's true journey, is self-satirizing.

So, to make a long story short, this Friedell was the same Egon Friedell of James' essay and this Friedell jumped to his death from his apartment window as the S.S. officers were at his door arguing with his housekeeper for entrance. So irony will never really protect you, satire will not keep the Nazis from the door, but jumping will always stick a big, fat thumb in the eye of the ones who, like the Bushites, want to take everything away from you and make you kneel at the doors of the gas chamber. Oh, yeah. That'll show 'em.

PRESENT INDICATIVE

Biographies are tiresome and memoirs are worse. One more tale of difficulties overcome and devastating poverty and I might start taking hostages.

Noël Coward's memoir turns the genre upon its head in a charming, self-deprecative way which is a treat. Covering just the first thirty or so years of his life and the first twenty of his career he ends this part of his memoir with an escape from fame to Rio.

The whole world seemed remarkably empty to me, probably because the last weeks had been so full... The tempo of everything had increased alarmingly. If I had been working all these years merely for the outward trappings of success, I had certainly achieved my destiny, and there was nothing left for me to do but hop over the side of the ship and triumphantly drown.
I was almost surprised that my incorrigible sense of the right moment didn't force me to do it.

In spite of the present-day demand that our celebrities be depressive and self-destructive, this is nothing of the sort. There is no internal chemical imbalance, but only a feeling that external pressure could ruin the moment if allowed. Coward is self-consciously trowelling the strains of success over a foundation of failure and want. It inverts the usual rags-to-riches tale by accepting the early want without accusation or blame. He wants to be successful in the theater and he achieves it. But he manages to do it with a generosity that sparkles with wit and sincerity. His praises never seemed forced and he gives everyone, including himself, full credit for his successes.

Conceit is more often than not an outward manifestation of an inward sense of inferiority. Stupid people are frequently conceited because they are subconsciously frightened of being found out; scared that some perceptive eye will pierce through their façade and discover the timid confusion behind it. As a general rule, the most uppish people I have met have been those who have never achieved anything whatsoever.
I am neither stupid nor scared, and my sense of my own importance to the world is relatively small. On the other hand, my sense of my importance to myself is tremendous... It is not the eyes of others that I am wary of, but my own... I find that the fewer illusions that I have about me or the world around me, the better company I am for myself.

(I am going to resist commentary here. Coward is perfect.)

Much of Present Indicative is given over to theater talk that includes names most of us will not recognize. I don't think it was name-dropping even at the time it was published; it is too unself-conscious to be a flaunting effort. Later we hear of Olivier and Gielgud and Cole Porter, but most of the rest will not be household names. But the talk is lightly engaging. This was fun.

Coward acknowledges with a kind of abashed candor that he is a bit oblivious regarding the events of the world that usually color memoirs from this period. He was invalided out of the soldier ranks in WWI; he doesn't so much as mention the Crash and subsequent Depression of 1929; even the Royal family make only a bare entrance onto this Englishman's stage. It's a kind of relief, frankly

When I was six I was sent to a day school which was kept by a Miss Willington who wore blouses with puffed sleeves, plaid skirts, and her hair done over a pad. I didn't care for her. On one occasion when she had been irritating me over some little question of English grammar I bit her arm right through to the bone, an action which I have never for an instant regretted.

Here, an embarrassed giggle.

This is the kind of world which is usually valued for the wrong reasons. Entertainment headlines no longer lead with reviews and notices. Instead, we get tales of weekend grosses and how wealthy the actors, directors and producers are. This is the reality of the so-called Reagan Revolution and the Bush Bullshit. Let 'em have their money. I'll go back to the little community theater that presented Blithe Spirit with almost no money and a competent refreshingly amateur cast. It was a lovely evening that didn't include anyone you would know.

TITUS GROAN

By my definition, all books model reality. Their success or failure is the extent to which their hypothesis (in the scientific sense) is accurate.

I think I have mentioned before that Galileo did not get into trouble because he insisted that the earth orbited the sun and was therefore not the center of the universe. Galileo got into trouble for empiricism, for the insistence that he could, by observation, provide a single model of nature which redeemed the appearances so accurately it was equal to reality. Empiricism was predicate to hypothesis, not the other way around as had been asserted by the Church. He said he could, we all could, become God the Creator. This is what books do - they make the writer (and us, the readers) Gods of Creation. Did the book in your hand recreate the world in way which stands close reading? If it did, it succeeded, if not, well...

Fantasy literature does the same thing with a slight difference. It must embrace all four of the known dimensions and include them in a fifth and new dimension. In other words, Fantasy must accept all the limitations of our everyday world, but add something extra. Nothing we know can be left out, but the extra-dimensional must have an extra dimension. Simple, eh?

All the world is there in Mervyn Peake's first Gormenghast novel, but the proportions are completely off. Sections of the castle with roofs that take an entire night to circumnavigate and towers that have trees large enough to have tea parties on the limbs that grow out the windows hundreds of feet above the ground and Lady Groan whose vastness allows full-grown cats to be hospitalized in her immense bosom all distort the world we expect. How are we expected to compromise our expectations to these facts?

Anthony Burgess, in his introduction to the edition I have, insists: "Titus Groan is aggressively three-dimensional." But he goes on to contradict the assertion and beat me to the punchline of supra-dimensionality, "But around the solidity is an extra dimension..."

At one point within the Outer Wall, a few feet from the earth, the great stones of which the wall itself was constructed, jutted forward in the form of a massive shelf stretching from east to west for about two hundred to three hundred feet.

One can no more get one's consciousness around such vastness that one can comprehend the 'billions and billions' of stars of the universe. And therein lies Peake's treachery towards us. We deny and yet instantly embrace the metaphor. He knows we cannot cope, and furthermore, doesn't care. It's his universe thank you very much.

I must make a slight excursion into your own expectations here and insist that just because the Gormenghast books are called Fantasy, you should not buy a copy for your eight-year-old nephew to read with you. There are no Care Bears in Wonderland, no unicorns or pastel rainbows, and certainly no happy people here, except perhaps for the villain. Precocious magicians do not bare their teeth, wave their wands and miraculously save everyone. This is murder, arson, suicide and insanity. Some will insist that I cavil and am leading you astray by calling Titus Groan 'Fantasy', they would say it should be 'Gothic Novel'. Fine, but it is at least both. In fact, have you ever read a so-called Fantasy that was all sweetness and light? Prof. Tolkien's was certainly a dark and dismal affair with enough bloodshed for a whole megaplex of slasher movies. Even his friend Prof. Lewis wrote a fantasy series that was
more avatar than avuncular.

But this may be more a function of Western literature which has no conventions of happy domesticity than a strange corollary of Fantasy per se.

I wager that the first thing most readers will notice is not the brobdingnagian proportions or even the dim, dry atmosphere of Peake's world. No, I think the first thing a reader will be aware of is the names, at first humorous, then sinister, and finally terrifying. Burgess slyly refers to these proper pronouns as Dickensian which instantly provokes an alert reader to protest: "No! They are Shakespearean!" It's a devious bit of work, but it is successful: Dr. Prunesquallor (often referred to as 'Prune' or simply Dr. Squallor), Steerpike (scheming, aiming everyone to his own violent ends), Flay (the dry, old, fleshless retainer), Swelter (the vast, sweaty lord of the kitchen), and so on, and so on. Don't you hear Dogberry, Abhorson, Mistress Quickly, Sir Toby Belch and, of course, Falstaff, in these names?

(I don't know if I'm being superstitious here or what exactly, but I am dodging the truth that Titus Groan made my spine turn to jelly. This book petrified me. I have read books that gave me the creeping willies (Melmoth, the Wanderer or Turn of the Screw) but no nightmare has ever haunted me so thoroughly as this story of the Groan dynasty. There, I said it. But now I worry that the terrors will return.)

At the northern extremity of this chill province the gold plate of the Groans, pranked across the shining black of the long table, smoulders as though it contains fire; the cultery glitters with a bluish note; the napkins twisted into the shape of doves, detach themselves from their surroundings for very whiteness , and appear to be unsupported. The great hall is empty and there is no sound save the regular dripping of rainwater from a dark patch in the cavernous ceiling. It has been raining since the early hours of the morning and by now a small lake is reflecting dimly an irregular section of the welkin where a faded cluster of cherubs lie asleep in the bosom of a mildew'd cloud. It is to this cloud, darkened with real rain, that the drops cling sluggishly and fall at intervals through the half-lit air to the glaze of water below.

Outside is in, inside is out. Lakes grow in empty halls, trees root in distant rooms. Everything is wrong and very, very disconcerting.

My recurring nightmare of this presidential library: Lost, wandering amongst Möbian shelves filled with Dobson, quarterly reports of the Halliburton Corp. and endlessly thumbed copies of The Turner Diaries, I turn a corner and find Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney dressed as Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee sitting on the floor with snub-nose scissors carefully and with great concentration cutting up pages of books in long strips. I recognize titles from the books we have placed on the shelves here. There are mounds of shredded paper all around them, mountains of empty bindings and boxes of sharpened scissors waiting. Two faces look up from their work at me. One smiles stupidly and goes back to his work; the other sneers and barks, "Go fuck yourself."

Please, oh god, let me wake up.

Carpe noctem.

INHERENT VICE

It's midnight, Monday August 3. Thomas Pynchon's newest, Inherent Vice, comes out tomorrow and I've just finished reading it. Don't ask.

Any fool who steps onto the rolling log that is a Pynchon book and attempts his or her own spin deserves (at the very least) what they will surely get: banged up, splintered and possibly drowned.

It seems ungenerous to be disinterested in the accuracy of the pop culture details in which Pynchon saturates his books, but I am willing to take him at his word and move on. For every one I catch, someone else catches two. For every one I doubt (the spelling of the S. S. Minnow, for example) my pathetic research shows Pynchon right and me, well, wrong again (Newton Minow, the chairman of the FCC, spelled his name with a single N.) So, let us admit to the fact though not, perhaps, agree as to the meaning.

Art is metaphor, simile, allegory, allusion, symbol, image, reference, rhyme, etc. which comes down to a sort of ironic paranoia. What are the connections? Where are the connections made? What does it mean? Pynchon's is a deeply suspicious mind and he draws us into his paranoid fantasies, partly with the ubiquitous cultural references and their uncertain implications and partly through the foggy beachfront atmosphere that makes it hard to see anything clearly. We are left like Doc, to try to follow the taillights of the cars in front of us.

He crept along till he finally found another car to settle in behind. After a while in his rearview mirror he saw somebody else fall in behind him. He was in a convoy of unknown size, each car keeping the one ahead in taillight range, like a caravan in a desert of perception, gathered awhile for safety in getting across a patch of blindness. It was one of the few things he'd ever seen anybody in this town, except hippies, do for free.

The image nicely undercuts all the deal-making that has led up to the final pages. All the myriad connections, the A/C loyalties, the trembling alliances, the deft/daft conspiracies, and at the center, unfaithful loves, all boil down to the need to keep someone in view and allow someone else to follow while we cross the desert of perception. And thanks to the dope even the perceptions can't be trusted. The slang getting polluted for intoxication of every kind reflects the pollutions of environment, law enforcement, social contract and, again, perception. The drugs don't 'fling wide the doors of perception' so much as just give us more information to sift through and verify, like the proto-web ARPAnet.

...he gets on this ARPAnet trip, and I swear it's like acid, a whole 'nother strange world - time, space, all that shit.

But it's the paranoia that matters. The closer you try to look behind things the less you see.

"I'm wonderin what's behind those masks."
"Resolution goes all to hell," Farley shrugged, "but I guess you could try."

And Pynchon does try.

Doc got out his lens and gazed into each image till one by one they began to float apart into little blobs of color. It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbidden because it didn't have to be.

The hard-boiled detective novel that Pynchon slings at us is perception perfected. Stacks of clues, weird connections between places and people, impossible-to-follow leads and all the rest are rather like Pynchon's reality. Look too closely at the pieces and all you get are little blobs of color. It has to remind us of the Impressionist painters or pointilists who wanted to show us what we really saw and not what our minds made of it; they gave us eye-vision, not brain-vision, or at least they tried.

For Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

That's not Pynchon, but rather G. K. Chesterton in one of those passages from The Man Who Was Thursday where I dissent from his otherwise spectacular nightmare vision. It isn't that the Impressionists found no floor to the universe but that the floor of the universe might be much, much closer than one would think.

The charge that Inherent Vice doesn't give us much of the Vietnam War debate that was ravaging the times is specious. In a way, the entire book is only about the '60s, especially the war and our discontents with it. Set in the spring of the first year of the next decade, in other words, just out of reach of the mythopoeic 60's, Pynchon writes of a period that broke when used which is, sort of, the definition of 'inherent vice'. Cargo that cannot be insured against doing what it is designed to do is rather the point here. Periods of revolution cannot be redeemed or forced to do what they are not made for. It's Pynchon's condemnation of the nostalgia for the Golden Era of the late 20th century. His image of what the period is about comes late in the novel as Doc Sportello is desperately trying to hold off the impending violence of the Golden Fang, a (perhaps) mythical übermob-cum-hypercapitalist cabal (hmm, problem there) . He has struck a deal to turn over a large amount of drugs to the Fang in return for a promise of protection for his friends and himself. But the trade goes down with a particularly Pynchonite irony.

The Golden Fang operatives were cleverly disguised tonight as a wholesome blond California family in a '53 Buick Estate Wagon, the last woodie that ever rolled out of Detroit, a nostalgic advertisement for the sort of suburban consensus that Crocker and his associates prayed for day and night to settle over the Southland, with all non-homeowning infidels sent off to some crowded exile far away, where they could be safely forgotten. The boy was six and already looked like a Marine. His sister, a couple years older, had a possible future in drug abuse but wasn't saying much, content to sit staring at Doc while focused inside on thoughts of her own he was just as happy not to know about. Mom and Dad were all business.

The dad had on a short-sleeved shirt which revealed, maybe by design, a complete absence of tracks. The mom was a sleek-enough California blonde in a species of tennis dress, smoking some white-chick filter cigarette.

I've met people like this. Frankly, they scare the shit out of me. But how Pynchonesque to manage two decades in one satirical image. The authentic 50's car and family, and the 60's facade of domestic tranquility sustaining both the drug trade and the war in Vietnam which was covertly financed by dope transactions. Lovely.

We bought a pig in a poke when we hired Mr. Bush to run the dope business that is American democracy. Those who voted for him believed, and still believe I suspect, that they were getting one thing when, in reality, they were getting something much different. Let's hear it for ironic paranoia. Pull Pynchon from the shelf and give Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and all the rest a good dose of what Alex got in A Clockwork Orange. A little aversion therapy is good clean fun, eh?

BEING THERE

Jerzy Kosinski was a fraud.

There is just no way around it. His novels were plagiarized and ghost-written; his autobiography was a sham; his personal life was a thicket of intemperance and perversity. The Bantam paperback of Being There I have at hand includes a biography that tells tales of Nazi persecution of a nearly feral six-year-old who is rendered mute for five years after his ordeal, periods of spectacular academic success in Warsaw and Moscow, clever and intricate plots to befuddle the Soviet power structure and escape to America and a stunning rise to the top of literary and society lists in his new home country.

Such a self-serving myth could be funny if it were offered with the same irony as that which masks his protagonist in Being There, but it wasn't. It was the basis of his claims for his novels and his life, and he never wavered in his assertion that it was all true.

Enough, though. We are interested in a book, not so much a personal fantasy. Chance the gardener, expelled from his walled garden by the death of 'the old man' who was his protector and possibly his father, is thrust upon a fallen world in a scene that includes two 'angels' who prevent him from remaining in his Edenic paradise. Yes it's broad, but not without charm. We like the unlikely Chance and fear for his future. It's just all so unfair. How could a loving father turn his back on his child even in death?

Chance is innocent in all ways, but he is also an idiot savant in the manner of the Dustin Hoffman character in Rainman. But unlike Rainman, Chance is utterly inoculated to the world: television is the antigen that has mediated the infectious properties of the world and ironic expulsion from Eden. Everyman is turned on his head. It is therefore also a nasty image of democracy. It is television eunuchs uttering naif pronouncements to syncophantic politicians. It is two-dimensional Teletubbies ordering others about in a three-dimensional world. Is your television talking to you?

Chance was confused when she said that he wasn't really American. Why should she say that? On TV, he had often seen the dirty, hairy, noisy men and women who openly declared themselves anti-American, or were declared so by police, well-dressed officials of the government and businessmen, neat people who called themselves American.

Kosinski's book was apparently plagiarized from a pre-WWII Czech novel called The Career of Nicodemus Dyzman by Tadeusz Dolega-Mostowicz. Perhaps, but it may make little or no difference to the reader of Being There. Even apart from the well-known Peter Sellers film (how did that get made in Hollywood?) it carries the kind of bland generalities of the well-trained television psychic which we can apply haplessly to our own present:

A distinguished-looking man in pince-nez addressed Chance: "All right, Mr. Gardiner," he said, "the President's speech was reassuring. Still and all, these are the facts: unemployment is approaching catastrophic proportions, unprecedented in this country; the market continues to fall toward 1929 levels; some of the largest and finest companies in our country have collapsed. Tell me, sir, do you honestly believe that the President will be able to halt this downward trend?
"Mr. Rand said that the President knows what he is doing," said Chance slowly.

And then the remark with heavy Orwellian overtones of distant conflict:

"Alas," the woman said, "in this country, when we dream of reality, television wakes us. To millions, the war, I suppose, is just another TV program. But out there, at the front, real men are giving their lives."

It's just a little too pat, too self-congratulatory, but Kosinski is nothing if not sentimental.

Ah, here we are: Fiction; the K's; Kafka first, then down the shelf to Kosinski. Hmm, doesn't seem to have been one of the books read by the recently departed administration. Wait - there's a note in the margin of the biography at the back: "Dick - See! They'll believe anything! KR." No, I don't know what it means either.

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN

If there are two more disparate characters from Victorian England than Walter Pater and Lewis Carroll, I don't know who they might be. But I can't quite dispel the odd feeling that Marius the Epicurean and Sylvie and Bruno come from the same kind of consciousness.
These are 'novels' only in the most abstruse sense. They bend the conventions of the three-volume Victorian novel until it snaps and crumbles in their writer's hands. Almost dreamily wandering about in a far world each suddenly deforms time and space to reach out to a parallel universe - not our reality, but another that glides along beside us, mimicking and mocking our broken-down mess. They are both experimenting with the novel to see what impression it can provoke, I think.

Pater's philosphical novel, novel of sensibility, aesthetic novel, whatever it is works hard to keep us in ancient Rome until it doesn't any more.

All critical estimate of this bold hope, as sincere apparently as it was audacious in its claims, being set aside, here at least, carried further than ever before, was that pious, systematic commemoration of the dead, which, in its chivalrous refusal to forget or finally desert the helpless, had ever counted with Marius as the central exponent or symbol of all natural duty.
The stern soul of the excellent Jonathan Edwards, applying the faulty theology of John Calvin, afforded him, we know, the vision of infants not a span long, on the floor of hell. Every visitor to the Catacombs must have observed, in a very different theological connexion, the numerous children's graves there -- beds of infants, but a span long indeed, lowly "prisoners of hope," on these sacred floors.

Yes, the prose is just so ubiquitously complex. The visceral jarring of the introduction of Calvinism in Pater's glorious account of the pagan-tinged loveliness of early Christian practice nearly makes me sick to my stomach. Pater wrenches back to the realities of Victorian Christianity in a way that undermines the beauty of the image he has created. It is something like acknowledging the ironies of his utopia within the bounds of the story itself. Et in arcadia ego.

It isn't hard to make the imaginative leap to Lagerkvist's Barabbas either. But Marius, while propitiatorily dying for his friend Cornelius, is no Christian. Nor is he a Christ figure. He is a Paterian Epicurean which also means he is no hedonist, but rather a carefully organized recorder of the sensations he experiences while heroically holding to an evenness of life, a temperamental modesty that allows the very least of the usual highs and lows that rollercoaster the less divine of us through life. Marius is all 'preparation to receive' and much less 'reaction to'. To misquote the Prince, '... the readiness is all.'

Women in Marius are either related (his mother), socially distant (the emperor's family), or outside his philosophical boundaries (Cecilia the Christian philanthrophist). This book is interested in a classical model of male devotion. Pater carefully alludes to how these friendships manifest, since after all it is Victorian England he lives in and not ancient Rome.

The great temple of the place, as he could remember it, on turning back once for a last look from an angle of his homeward road, counting its tall gray columns between the flue of the bay and the blue fields of blossoming flax beyond; the harbour and its lights; the foreign ships lying there; the sailors' chapel of Venus, and her gilded image, hung with votive gifts... the boy's superficial delight in the broad light and shadow of all that was mingled with the sense of power, of unknown distance, of the danger of storm and possible death.

Well, perhaps it would be a bit much to look for latent homosexuality in such a passage if it weren't for the title of the chapter: The Tree of Knowledge which reminds us of some unnamed sexual temptation.

He had seen Flavian for the first time the day on which he had come to Pisa, at the moment when his mind was full of wistful thoughts regarding the new life to begin for him tomorrow, and he gazed curiously at the crowd of hustling scholars as they came from their classes. There was something in Flavian a shade disdainful, as he stood isolated from the others for a moment, explained in part by his stature and the distinction of the low, broad forehead; though there was pleasantness also for the newcomer in the roving blue eyes which seemed somehow to take a fuller hold upon things around than is usual with boys.

Pater needed to be subtle to avoid the charge that he was corrupting the youth of Oxford University where he taught and was worshipped by his students, including the young Oscar Wilde.

Marius the Epicurean really is a novel of the boy's 'sensations and ideas' and Pater is unmatched in creating a mood, not of ancient Rome exactly, but of a nostalgic, melancholy, ironic time that might have been. He makes this kind of epicureanism very appealing. Not that it is attainable, but what of merit is in this besmirched world?

And here we are again at the point where I place the book on the shelf of our departed leader's mythological library and express my wish that he had read it at some point in his life. My own melancholy wish for the ideal republic drives me to loathe the damage done by Mr. Bush to what little we had. It is now gone and maybe not to be recovered. So I will continue to lurk in the stacks and sneak books onto the shelves until they come to get me and escort my sorry carcass from the building. In the meantime read Marius for yourself.

SHAKESPEARE IS HARD, BUT SO IS LIFE

Fintan O'Toole's little book on the four big tragedies of Good Will has been charged with being a bit too much 'School of Resentment' for some tastes, but it isn't entirely true. I think I would offer O'Toole's book to a clever high schooler or an impressionable college freshman in hopes of provoking a damn good argument about THE MEANING OF SHAKESPEARE (James Earl Jones' voice here, I think.)

It would, of course, be... outrageous to see Othello as a play about racism in the modern sense.

...and then the caveat:

At the same time, though, Shakespeare was certainly conscious of race.

But O'toole is much more interested in wealth, class and power.

Lear's earlier speech about the 'poor naked wretches' and Gloucester's giving away of his money could be taken as examples of the feudal concern for a balance within society... Lear's speech at 4,6,150, though, goes well beyond any such piety to attack the stupidity of authority and the hypocrisy of justice.

Fortuitously I attended a performance of King Lear the evening after I read O'toole's chapter on the play. O'toole's claim that Will is interested in the differences between rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots, was thoroughly vindicated. Having seen a few live performances of Lear I was unprepared for this reading to play out before me. We all watch and listen for the 'nothings' and the 'eyes' and 'seeing'. We are all ready for the correlation between pairs of characters, Cordelia and the Fool being the most obvious. But I was unready for a reading of the play that sabotaged authority itself.

One excess, the excessive wealth of the rich and powerful, is linked to the other - the excessive suffering of Lear and Cordelia. So long as there is no justice in humanity, there can be no justice for individual humans.

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man That slaves your ordinance, that will not see Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly, So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough. (Lear 4,1,61...)

It is weak mis-reading of the play, as are all and it suffers from O'toole's fish-eyed leftist lens, but it isn't totally without merit. All lusts whether of money or other markers are of interest to Shakespeare, but they aren't all he is interested in either.

Of the readings of the other three plays in the book (Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet) O'toole is weakest on Macbeth. He overreaches to the detriment of the entire book, which is a pity. But as I said, I would give O'toole's book to an enthusiastic young newcomer to Will's masterpieces and let the battle commence.

I, of course, wish for an entire wing of Mr. Bush's library dedicated to mis-readings of Shakespeare's poems. I would lock the major players in his administration there and make them read, listen to, and watch the plays until only one emerged alive - my guess is that Mr. Cheney would come out alone, unconverted and still fantasizing about ultimate power. "To't luxury, pell mell - I lack soldiers."

GILGAMESH

This will be a short post since I have already written about this epic Sumerian poem.

But I can't help myself.

Can you help me?

Perhaps, the boatman said, but I have questions
To ask first. Why are your cheeks so thin?
Your eyes so full of grief?
What have you known of loss
That makes you different from other men?

Herbert Mason's translation is extraordinary in a way almost exactly opposite to that of Stephen Mitchell's version. Mitchell's lush recounting is beautiful and even lavish; Mason's is austere and brittle and heartbreakingly lovely. Each must be read while in the proper mood.

A Boston University professor of just-about-everything, Mason has made for us a Gilgamesh so accessible, so readable it would be a crime to reserve it only for the classroom. Let's make everyone read it.

It is an old story
But one that can still be told
About a man who loved
And lost a friend to death
And learned he lacked the power
To bring him back to life.
It is the story of Gilgamesh
And his friend Enkidu.

I can hear in my head a great storyteller with a Paul Robeson voice, telling the tale of Gilgamesh and Enkidu over and over again in the, no doubt, marbled Great Hall of the Bush Presidential Library where we will all stand transfixed, remembering our own losses and grief.

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE

Try an experiment: In a small gathering of your peers, suggest that you enjoy opera, go to the ballet, read Shakespeare or, god forbid, don't like televised sports. Not exactly the kind of anti-intellectualism Prof. Hofstadter is talking about in his book, but none-the-less their likely responses are indicative of the sentiment a demonstration of a little intellect provokes.

Anti-intellectualism... is founded in the democratic institutions and the egalitarian sentiments of this country.

Richard Hofstadter historicizes the great failing of a great nation. As Prof. Berman has demonstrated in several books, American ideals are also its flaws. Tracing the antecedents of anti-intellectualism in politics, business, education, and religion, Hofstadter shows us how the central tenets of each are inimical to a kind of typical, left-leaning, rebellious, alienated intellectualism.

The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice, and the "purely" theoretical mind is so much disesteemed. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect, and by extension for the intellectual, is lost. Who cares to risk sacrificing the warmth of emotion, solidity of character, practical capacity, or democratic sentiment in order to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous?

It is an impossible situation for anyone who demonstrates any inclination towards the "precision and imagination" Hofstadter obliquely refers to as the province of the intellectual.

As a young man trying to choose an institute of higher learning, I was told by the fundamentalist, evangelical members of my church that I would "lose my salvation" if I attended the local state university which was the non-ag cohort of the other major school in my state. It was an outright condemnation of any kind of learning that strayed from the purely practical. Educators who taught anything other than animal husbandry, forestry or engineering were doomed to lead astray the tender young souls of the world. The message was clear: learning was suspect.

It is to certain peculiarities of American religious life - above all to its lack of firm institutional establishments hospitable to intellectuals and to the competitive sectarianism of its evangelical denomination - that American anti-intellectualism owes much of its strength and pervasiveness.


There is virtually no intellectual grounding for American evangelicalism. No Papal See dictates and monitors doctrine or thought; there is no central tenet that reigns in intellectually wayward congregations or ministers. These strip-mall congregations commonly claim Martin Luther's rejection of priestly interference in favor of 'straight bible teaching' without irony. Their adoption of the cult of personality in place of priestly authority leaves them susceptible to simply unbelievable levels of spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and often sexual and fiscal abuse. Their inherent sectarianism makes for intense suspicion and out-of-hand dismissal of all competing ideas.

As Reinhold Niebuhr has remarked: "Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of skepticism has entered the soul of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt."

Or, conversely, those things which we question most thoroughly are those things which we believe most completely.

Published in 1962, Hofstadter's book discusses the mythical affiliation and affection for communism that the Right associates with intellectualism. With little effort 'communism' could be substituted with 'terrorism' and the analysis would readily stand. It betrays the need for a demonizing mantra by all anti-intellectuals. Not that intellectuals aren't prone to the same need for a goat. Pop culture gets the red flag for intellectuals, and they cannot help themselves when it is waved before them; it is a signal for a full-on attack.

Hofstadter may have been the first to acknowledge the secularization of the evangelicals and their second conversion to politics driven by a puritanism that cannot leave its neighbors alone.

Like almost everything else in our world, fundamentalism itself has been considerably secularized, and this process of secularization has yielded a type of pseudo-political mentality whose way of thought is best understood against the historical background of the revivalist preacher and the camp meeting... But in politics, the secularized fundamentalism of our time has found a new kind of force and a new punitive capacity.

Hofstadter notes the horrible joke in such pseudo-politics:

It seems a melancholy irony that a union which the common bonds of Christian fraternity could not achieve has been formed by the ecumenicism of hatred.

Catholic and Protestant, Mormon and JW all now stand together in a loathing of modernity.

Despite my own prejudices, Hofstadter's book is not a jeremiad against religionists or against any one group, for that matter. It is a careful history of a nation. Hofstadter uses the 'precision and imagination' of the intellectual to analyze the separate strains of anti-intellectualism, how they came to be and their relation to each other. It is a prophetic book in the sense that it tells the truth and gives us a prediction of what our culture will be like if we continue on our current track which now seems inevitable. Unlike Jonah, I don't believe Hofstadter would have figuratively sat sulking under a bush in the hot sun had he been proven wrong in his expectations, but he demonstrates little hope for a change and the tone of this book is somehow melancholy.

It is not hard to follow the history of the anti-intellectualism of Mr. Bush and his minions. All the elements are there: the sentimentalized politics, the crony capitalism, the cynical promotion of religion over science, and the denigration of education. So we will place Hofstadter's book at the beginning of every shelf in the American history section as context for our own story. I agree with Prof. Hofstadter: we are a victim of our own ideals.

THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS

I always have trouble imagining exactly what these portmanteau creatures are supposed to look like.

In Babylon, Ezekiel had a vision of four "living creatures" or angels, "and every one had four faces, and every one had four wings," and "as for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side, and they four had the face of an ox on the left side: they four also had the face of an eagle."

Apart from the bizarre punctuation of this paragraph, I defy anyone to give me an image of said creature which isn't an unmitigated mess. Yes, that may be part of the point, but this theme repeats often in Borges' book of monsters, faeries, and assorted benign beings.

We are, of course, supposed to be reminded of medieval bestiaries when we pick up Borges' book, but unlike the lists of creatures organized hierarchically from the top (God) down, here the order is reversed. This is, if you will, a humanist bestiary. It starts with us and builds. The obvious question is, what does it build to? Where the original bestiary gives the glory to the Creator of all things and His perfect order, here Borges acknowledges the supremacy of human imagination. Abolishing the hierarchy, he orders the beings alphabetically. It is the structure of the mind, the language of humanity. It actually doesn't build, it expands. Horizontal, in a way, takes over from vertical. However much we embrace these imaginary beings correlates to the broadening of our minds and human souls. It is subversive and enlightening at once.

Borges doesn't leave us without clues, however.

"Siren: an imaginary marine animal," we read in one particularly uncouth dictionary.

The fact that the entry is terse and erroneous isn't the point. It is in poor taste to declare the non-being of these creatures. Borges' title tells us that. It is a book of, yes, imaginary beings. It is their being-ness that concerns Borges. He is far too astute to disregard their existence. The irony is that once the beings are thought up, they exist. Otherwise why would we be a bit unhinged by their descriptions? To misquote someone whom I cannot recall, "The veil between fact and imagination is very dark, but very thin." Do I expect to meet a dragon tomorrow or the next day? Absolutely. For not only does the being exist in my imagination, it exemplifies aspects of the world I live in. In fact, some of the human beings I encounter are indeed, dragons. Gird your loins to face a world inhabited by imaginary beings. If you don't, your fate is sealed. Dragons will consume you.

"the devil is called a dragon because of his treachery, for he doth treacherously feed upon men to destroy them."

So we have a dilemma: embrace the imagination, but beware the beings it spawns. Borges carefully organizes his bestiary. It is a means of discipline and control of imagination. We are supreme over our creations, as God was supreme over His. The responsibility Borges confers is immense, but exhilirating.

The Bush Library is crawling with these creatures. They hide in the stacks; they hang from the ceilings; they beckon from the windows. Do not be fooled! Every last one is there, seeking whom he or she may devour. The ugliness and stupidity of that evil era spawned beings which, for good or ill, we will live with for the foreseeable future. Contend with them, defeat the most evil ones and learn to live with the rest. Carpe noctem.

THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE

We have made much of Holmes, haven't we?

There is an impulse in some writers to revise strong characters in order to show aspects of their personalities that the original author never intended to exhibit. Often what is left out of sight by authors tells us as much about the character as what is chosen for exposure.

(I am desperately trying here to avoid silly stereotypes that will plague me later.)

Elizabeth orders Good Will to show Falstaff in love and, as ordered, we have The Merry Wives of Windsor. In fact we have Shakespeare himself (truly a character as Keats pointed out) outed in the Hollywood manner in Shakespeare in Love - a film that must have been inspired by that possibly apocryphal Elizabethan command. Perhaps we could subtitle Laurie R. King's book 'Holmes in Love'.

Sometimes these exercises feel something like taking a strong female character and turning her into, Oh I don't know, a stripper.

King's book manages the whole thing without damaging Sherlock Holmes too much. Though she clearly allows the great detective enough awareness to see his own transformation.

"Twenty years ago," he murmured. "Even ten. But here? Now?"

We are instantly aware that King is talking about love, but with the able hand of a true practitioner she doubles the image and makes it a comment on taking an apprentice.

So, what is left? The tale takes off in a believably Holmesian way on a minor adventure or two to allow King's female protagonist, Mary Russell, to flex her detection and logic muscles. Then we get a romantic interlude with Russell and Holmes wandering about the Promised Land (a bit unsubtle, perhaps) and then back into the thick of Edwardian things to save their own lives and defeat another criminal mastermind. We have all the necessary tropes: Watson, Mycroft, (some of) the Irregulars, disguises, obscure clues, absurdly detailed forensics and lots of smoke. It's all good fun. Nothing too heavy or intense, but good fun none-the-less.

As an aside, I don't know if King deliberately had Jeremy Brett's Holmes in mind when she wrote these books (yes, there's more than just this one), but his face and mannerisms as Sherlock clearly animate the detective in my mind, at least. Brett's is the best television or film Holmes and I will never think of the character again without picturing his sallow face and piercing eyes.

It goes without saying that all of Conan Doyles' tales belong in Mr. Bush's library. They are the foundation upon which all our detection/adventure books, films, and television dramas are built. Without Holmes we can discover nothing. Somehow I don't think Mr. Cheney and his Charlie McCarthy read much Conan Doyle before sitting in the big chair.

THE DANCING WU LI MASTERS

Students of popular science... are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.

G. K. Chesterton
The Blatchford Controversies

I am going to incur the wrath of a large number of pop-science enthusiasts here, not least that of a very good friend who is an ardent proselytizer for Gary Zukav's best-selling conflation of quantum physics and Eastern mysticism.

Fairly, Zukav covers some aspects of these non-classical theories of physics quite well. The willful confusion over Einstein's theories of relativity is mostly set aside in favor of a simplistic, but clear exposition of what he was actually saying.

The special theory of relativity applies only to frames of reference that move uniformly, relative to each other. Most movement, unfortunately, is neither constant nor ideally smooth. In other words, the special theory of relativity is built upon an idealization. It is limited to and premised upon the special situation of uniform motion.

This is Zukav's succint summary of the points he was making regarding special relativity. He is at his best here.

Unfortunately his attempts to fuse Einstein and Buddhism are not so adept or accurate.

The last and the most famous aspect of the special theory of relativity is the revelation that mass is a form of energy, and that energy has mass.

Yeah! Simple, clear and accurate.

In the East, however, there never has been much philosophical or religious confusion about matter and energy... The way it really is cannot be communicated verbally, but in the attempt to talk around it, eastern literature speaks repeatedly of dancing energy and transient, impermanent forms. This is strikingly similar to the picture of physical reality emerging from high-energy particle physics.

Not so much.

I am always skeptical when someone insists that their ideas cannot be communicated. Language fails, but they need to use language to express the fact that language fails. Theories fail to describe the world, but their theories fail in exactly the same way. See! They are wrong, but we agree with them. Wow! It's almost eery.

I am not an expert in any sense on physics or eastern mysticism, but given enough time even I can tell a hawk from a handsaw. Despite Zukav's fuzzy insistence, no physicist of merit argues that reality is subject to will, intent, imagination or thought. That isn't the lesson of quantum mechanics.

I can't speculate on Zukav's intentions, but his methods are impressive. He writes glibly enough in the mysticism sections to nearly make us fall for his argument. It is likely that he is simply overexuberant about his spirituality and, like the evangelical who wants to include dinosaurs on Noah's Ark, is merely overextended. The Dancing Wu Li Masters doesn't have any taint of cynicism, only too much excitement and too little analysis, at least in the mystical connections.

"Reality" is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.

Whew! What we take to be profound and insightful depends upon some framework of thought and logic. This has neither.

Zukav's book is a relatively good introduction to some basic physics and history of science. To a point. Ignore the mysticism, or at least pursue it independently and don't conflate it with the science. Neither is the better for it.

We have had an unfortunate demonstration in the past eight years of what happens when science and religion are commingled and the first is based on the tenets of the second. Politicizing science is one thing, but Mr. Bush tried to make it subservient to religion and damaged both faith and thought. We'll put a copy of The Dancing Wu Li Masters in the Bush Presidential Library without warning labels, revisions or excisions, for that is how this all works. Read, think and criticize, but never hesitate to read first.

GILGAMESH

Steven Mitchell's version (not really a translation) is a marvel.

I have wrestled with Gilgamesh a few times and never made the kind of connection necessary for entrance into the story.

Mitchell's verse conquers us as Enkidu is taken by Shamhat. Our innocence and virginity are taken from us in sacred seduction.

He turned back to Shamhat, and as he walked he knew that his mind had somehow grown larger, he knew things now that an animal can't know.

Lost purity, rejection by the natural world, holy sex, a mind made self-aware, becoming civilized... these are just the cusp of meaning of Enkidu's evolution. Nothing could be more plain: Our own minds expand as we read this oldest story of mankind.

I read this through entirely while standing on a crowded bus. Noise, stops, starts, cold, crying children, smelly teenagers all vanished - nothing was but the rhythm of the language and the ancient story.

Gilgamesh wept over Enkidu his friend, bitterly he wept through the wilderness. "Must I die too? Must I be as lifeless as Enkidu? How can I bear this sorrow that gnaws at my belly, this fear of death that restlessly drives me onward? If only I could find the one man whom the gods made immortal, I would ask him how to overcome death."

The fear of death. What could be more basal? Either we embrace our own death or spend a lifetime fighting it and poisoning our lives in the struggle. Which will it be for us, for Gilgamesh?

I will let you look for the details of this ancient text. They are readily available to us - perhaps too readily available. It seems to me the weight of the story should reward the struggle to attain it. In other words, the close reading may be the struggle and reward, but I almost feel that there should be greater pain in gaining the achievement.



He had seen everything, had experienced all emotions,
from exaltation to despair, had been granted a vision
into the great mystery, the secret places,
the primeval days before the Flood. He had journeyed
to the edge of the world and made his way back, exhausted
but whole. He had carved his trials on stone tablets,
had restored the holy Eanna Temple and the massive
wall of Uruk, which no city on earth can equal.

Find the cornerstone and under it the copper box
that is marked with his name. Unlock it. Open the lid.
Take out the tablet of lapis lazuli. Read
how Gilgamesh suffered all and accomplished all.

If you can resist that invitation, then you may not be human. Go drink clear water with the animals; eat grass with the gazelle; kneel beside the antelope and deer, for you have lost your humanity and become what Enkidu was before laying with the priestess of Ishtar. Go.

I can't say enough about Steven Mitchell's version of Gilgamesh. It is equal to Heaney's Beowulf. But I'm not the first to make the comparison. This is one of a small handful of texts without which one cannot live fruitfully in the West. And that is not an overstatement.

So prop up the uneven tables in the Bush Presidential Library with copies of Mitchell's Gilgamesh. Stack them by the hundreds on the empty and wanting shelves. Plaster images of Gilgamesh and Enkidu throughout the hallways and maybe, just maybe one lost soul for whom the reminder of eight years of dissipation is too painful will find this tale of the West worth reading.

HUMAN SMOKE

This book ends on December 31, 1941. Most of the people who died in the Second World War were at that moment still alive.

Nicholson Baker's book, subtitled The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (oddly punctuated, eh?) is compelling but not convincing.

I dedicate this to the memory of... American and British pacifists...They failed, but they were right.

The reviewers who all but leave saliva stains on the page whilst vituperating against this book, are the best boosters on Baker's behalf. The desperate demand that Roosevelt and, especially, Churchill be revered and that everyone who was on the 'side' of the Allied Powers be hallowed, begets a suspicion on the part of those who, Cordelia-like, don't enoy being emotionally bullied.

Was everything about WWII wonderful, heroic, brave and, above all, ineluctable?

Baker points to the manipulations, the backroom ploys and deals, the pulled strings and the intentional sacrifices of innocents by Churchill and Roosevelt that begat this war.

In Washington that night, Edgar Mowrer couldn't sleep... "If a member of the Maritime Commission knew the destination of the Japancess fleet, why had the President, why had Knox and Stimson and Hull who were expecting war, not known it and taken the necessary precautions?" And the Mower realized: "Nothing but a direct attack could have brought the United States into the War! Here was the 'break' for which both Churchill and T. V. Soong had been waiting."

Hitler and the Nazis perpetrated an abomination on the world which must never be denied or minimized. The revisionists, anti-Semites, skinheads, hate-mongering shits, new Aryan theorists and other racists must be allowed to live inside their tiny little skulls, but never be allowed to spew their venom onto the world again. (Do you truly believe that the Holocaust never happened? Then you are an evil idiot and should keep such ridiculous shit to yourself.)

James G. McDonald, of the Foreign Policy Association, gave a speech at the Chaqaugua festival... It was July 10, 1933... "The war, the Versailles treaty and the treatment of Germany since the war (WWI) have made Germans turn to new leaders," he said. "Hitlerism is in a very real sense a gift of the Allies and the United States."

That's the caveat that the Greatest Generation can never acknowledge.

Baker gives no introduction, no foreword. He gives us a two page Afterword. There are no chapters, no headings. The writing seems spare and unadorned, mostly. Occasionally Baker's non-commital tone cracks and he adds an adjective that is meant to be arch or wry. It usually seems just pointless and mean. The subject is ugly enough. The quotations, citations and events are presented as chronologically as is archivally possible which purveys a sense of escalating anxiety. It is an effective technique, but also cynical.

No entry is much more than a page long. Many pages contain as many as three entries. Baker may be offering a reference to his own subtitle. Has civilization deconstructed to the point where the only histories we can grok are written one or two paragraphs at a time? I am sympathetic to the idea, but the connection isn't made and I think I am reaching to get that far. (Of course, I am subject perhaps to a similar criticism.) The book is facile and the effect of the abbreviated-entry technique is to rile us with the quick addition of one stone on our moral scales after another.

Was it a "good war"? Did waging it help anyone who needed help?

Baker is one of the earliest of the Greatest Generation skeptics. It will become a much more popular position than it has been until now for obvious reasons. The question should be asked; it's a part of the process of writing history. But this isn't the way to ask it. Also, it's a bit too cunning and post-something-or-other to prevent one's critics from writing that the author 'failed, but he is right' by putting it in one's own afterword. It ruins much of what came before. There may really only be one imperative for an author: Never explain yourself. But Baker just can't resist.

Still it's a book that belongs on the shelves of the ex-President's eventual library. He worked hard to ally himself to his father's generation and explain his wars in terms they would understand. It was a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma requiring both to maintain their respective innocence in order to win the historical game.

The revisionists have already begun giving us a rejiggered history that attempts to put a shine on Mr. Bush's shit. They are as wrong as those other revisionists who tell us the horror never happened.

UNLITERACY

Here is the epitaph on eight long years:

Karen Hughes, one of Mr. Bush's closest advisers, “rarely read books and distrusted people who did.”

Quoted in The Economist

These postings will continue. There is a legacy to be had and, God knows, we've been had. We will continue to put books on the shelves until they board up the windows and set fire to the place. Which may be just the thing. Wet ashes smoldering in a pile may be the only image that fits this soon-to-be-ex-president.

Carpe noctem.

FIN DE PARTIE

Great art almost always leaves us feeling as if we have been taken. The strangeness of a new play, like Samuel Beckett's Endgame, makes us wonder if there isn't a great joke being played on us. We feel the pain of the victim of a confidence game. It also makes us feel taken as a pawn in a game of chess - we have been captured and are now bewilderingly sitting out the remainder of the game in a state of suspension or death. (Vonnegut made the joke rather broadly in a story from Welcome to the Monkey House.)

This isn't pleasant.

Today is another move in the endgame of an era - the contests overlap. We are blind and cannot stand; we are helpless and cannot sit. We are confined by walls not of our own making, used to deny us a view of perhaps nothingness. The smoke and mirrors of Hamlet were all to keep the Prince from seeing something. Our sight has been taken, though we may have given it up willingly and Beckett offers us no solace for our stupidity.

... Shakespeare remains scripture, and Endgame remains commentary.

Oh, that Prof. Bloom. Everything is Shakespeare. Almost everything is Hamlet.

Hamm:
Last night I saw inside my breast. There was a big sore.

Well, perhaps he is right after all.

I could live a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.

But Hamlet can't and neither can Hamm of Beckett's little play. The limitations gall and there is nothing outside. Consciousness is never enough and we yearn to make it more. Those who hear only the buzz in their skulls of an annoyed self-awareness can sit in their ashcans like Nagg and Nell.

Hamm:
But what in God's name do you imagine? That the earth will awake in spring? That the rivers and seas will run with fish again? That there's manna in heaven still for imbeciles like you?
...
Clov:
There's a rat in the kitchen!

Well, here we are at the end. The pieces have been taken. We have been taken. If there was a con game, it wasn't in the literature at all. It was Three-card Monte with one card and a gun. You pay your money and you take your chances.

NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS

The title is ambiguous to say the least.

It isn't THE New Arabian Nights. It isn't New 1001 Arabian Nights, though it clearly was a reference to the soon-to-appear Burton translation and release of the original. Many critics, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, consider this volume to be the first book of short stories in the English language. So, why the slightly vague title? It certainly modernizes (for the time) the original title while salvaging the mystique of the old. The title gives a slightly confused reader the idea that there is a kind of commonality amongst the tales that holds them together, however loosely. But I think there is another reason as well.

Stevenson was an adventurer himself. His travels feel like a kind of rebellion against a careful upbringing as an ill child in a household of devout people whose religion he rejected. Europe, or at least England during the Industrial Revolution, was becoming suffocating to the young Stevenson and he responded, I believe, to this spiritual claustrophobia with his own exploring and with outrageous tales set in civilized cities. Adventures were still to be had if one knew where to look. Prince Florizel of Bohemia was exotica right in the heart of London.

Although of a placid temper in ordinary circumstances, and accustomed to take the world with as much philosophy as any ploughman, the Prince of Bohemia was not without a taste for the ways of life more adventurous and eccentric than that to which he was destined by his birth. Now and then, when he fell into a low humor, when there was no laughable play to witness in any of the London theatres, and when the season of the year was unsuitable to those field sports in which he excelled all competitors, he would summon his confidant and Master of the Horse, Colonel Geraldine, and bid him prepare himself against an evening ramble.

It is a perfect balance of duty, boredom, work, play and reference to the kind of nasty weather that keeps an ill child like Stevenson indoors when there are places to go and things to be done.

The Suicide Club and The Rajah's Diamond tell the Prince's tale, The Pavilion on the Links (which Conan Doyle considered Stevenson's best work) takes up another tale of almost gothic intensity and mystery and finally an odd story of the poet and criminal Francis Villon, A Lodging for the Night, finishes the book.

This last story is the gem of the book. Paterian in its telling of a decadent, delicate artist, A Lodging for the Night, inverts the murder mystery giving us the killing first and the mystery last. Villon's swagger and off-hand comment at the finish are the biggest puzzle of all. The atmosphere is horrible and the suspense unbearable and yet the tale is beautiful and fragile like Villon's life. This final short story feels like a kind of recursion, a reinterpretation from life of the tales Stevenson tells in the rest of the book. If it isn't recursion, it is, at least, coda which is always a kind of commentary on what has gone before.

"You think I have no sense of honor!" he cried. "I'm poor enough, God knows! It's hard to see rich people with their gloves, and you blowing in your hands. An empty belly is a bitter thing, although you speak so lightly of it. If you had had as many as I, perhaps you would change your tune. Anyway I'm a thief - make the most of that - but I'm not a devil from hell, God strike me dead. I would have you to know I've an honor of my own, as good as yours, though I don't prate about it all day long, as if it was a God's miracle to have any. It seems quite natural to me; I keep it in its box till it's wanted."

You will find Stevenson in Chesterton, Shaw, Conan Doyle, Borges and even Wilde. He may be one of the most influential writers of the past three or four hundred years, though his influence is subtle and odd.

There is not really any moral for Mr. Bush in this. It's a book, taken for all, and that's enough. I would have all such books continue as they are. Put them in a treasury like the House of Bush in Crawford and savor each. There are pleasures to be had in them even in the darkest hour.

LE MISANTHROPE

There are places and times in history in which one truly wants to be for just a few minutes. Outside the theater as the audience was exiting Molière's The Misanthrope is just one of many. Expecting a farce, a comedy and getting the subtle, almost tragic sendup of cosmopolitan manners must have been unsettling.

Alceste and Célimène, married, would have become Jane Austen's Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. She pining for the trappings of Society and he hiding in his library discharging his witty and melancholy comments on his family and acting with perfect mannerliness towards his neighbors. Mr. Bennet clearly was taken by Mrs. Bennet's, um, charms as Alceste is taken by Célimène's. Mr. Bennet's doleful demeanor is a demonstration of Alceste married - regretful and self-loathing. It is one of those odd moments in literature when two discrete texts comment on one another.

Rousseau's criticism of Alceste's character is, rather obviously, a clumsy misreading of the play. Alceste must be as flawed as the Society characters he abuses so beautifully. There is no doubt we are drawn to him, but he ought at the same time to make us dreadfully uncomfortable. I pride myself, frankly, on being what my family calls a COG (Cranky Old Git.) The irony of my chosen face is roundly satirized by Molière here, and the play would be much weaker if Alceste were merely a snarky commentator floating above the fray. Falstaff wouldn't excite our sympathies and admiration if he weren't so mangled himself.

As John Wood points out in his introduction to the Penguin edition of the play, Molière is pointedly adopting the conventions of respectable theater in his play as an additional element of the satire on the manners of sophistication. It is a turning of the poniard on his audience and their expectations. Just lovely.

It is not patronizing to say of Molière that this play excites just as Shakespeare's sometimes satiric comedies excite. The levels of, I don't know what - meaning, metaphor, awareness, satire, seem endless.

... people are wrong, ... there's always justification for being annoyed with them, because they are invariably as misguided in their praise as they are rash in their condemnation.

I have used the word 'excite' or its variants several times here. Le Misanthrope is oddly exciting. Drawings rooms should be placid, serene islands in a world of chaos. Molière's is a battlefield with a Shavian conclusion. More, I think.

I hate all mankind, some because they are wicked and perverse, others because they tolerate wickedness - because they don't show the unrelenting detestation that virtue owes to vice... Gad! It breaks my heart to see how men compound with vice! There are times when a sudden longing comes over me to seek some solitary place and flee the approach of men.

This is the self-satirizing rant of all COG's and the exquisite use of the word 'show' undermines the sentiment.

Oh, before I forget, I have quoted a prose translation of this play. That is as great a crime as if I had used a modernized paraphrase of Good Sir William. Mea culpa! I'll do better next time.

So, for the soon-to-depart Mr. Bush, here's a play to tuck in his pocket and put on the shelves of his Texan library. He ought to read it first, of course. This is a time when the specific tragedy transcends the particulars of the plot and reaches into the details of our lives. Make what amends you may, Mr. Bush.

LIBRARIAN'S NOTE ON THE UPCOMING DEPARTURE OF MR. BUSH

Let's not have the legacy of Mr. Bush and his friends defined by lying letters, erroneous email and doctored documents. In just ten days the inauguration will bring us a new president and great hope. Let us continue to define the history of the grim days we have suffered and battle the attempts by this administration and their friends to tell us how they remade the world in their own image.

Mr. Bush, et al, will not go quietly. Shine a light into the dark corners of their dungeons and oubliettes. They are ogres, goblins, trolls and like kinds of monsters - not angels. Expel them from civilized lands and make enemies of them. Read and read and read and recognize them for what they are.

It's time to gather buckets of clean, fresh water and wash away the filth.

Read the George MacDonald Princess and Curdie books. They may be children's fantasies, but they tell a truth.

Carpe noctem...

THE NAME OF THE ROSE

Signs, Signs, everywhere a sign,
Blocking out the scenery breaking my mind,
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?

I can't help considering The Honour of Israel Gow, the unsettling Father Brown mystery when I read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Too many theories, too many suspects, too many signs. Father Brown conjures and exorcises each representation of the crimes of Israel Gow to the wonder of his friends. Each theory is complete, each model of the crimes 'saves the appearances', and, until the end, each explanation is utterly wrong.

Gow's crime, of course, is literalism which takes a priest to interpret accurately. Ah! the irony.

Eco works in a similar, but subtly different mode. His detective-monk, William of Baskerville, creates an idea of the murders committed in this ancient monastery and applying a kind of Scholastic wisdom dispenses with them when they don't fit the context. It is Eco's image of what a reader enacts as she reads. She consumes details, at various levels of comprehension depending on her ability to read closely, and arranges story as she proceeds creating meaning by the act of reading. It is all very empirical. The irony here is that the Roman Church condemned empiricism at the trial of Galileo and her representatives in the novel are condemning it again in the figure of Brother William.

Galileo's crime was not that he posited a different structure of the universe, or displaced Earth's hold at the center of creation, but that he argued that a model of nature can be constructed which excludes all other models. In other words, the scientist can create (hypothesize) something equal to God's original masterpiece. Galileo removed equivalencies and replaced them with empirically established equations. He became equal to God himself.

How can I discover the universal bond that orders all things if I cannot lift a finger without creating an infinity of new entitites? For with such a movement all the relations of position between my finger and all other objects change. The relations are the ways in which my mind perceives the connections between single entities, but what is the guarantee that this is universal and stable?

It is a nice question of scholastics and quantum theory.

"Did or did not Jesus own his own clothing?" The papal debate is set and the representatives of the Church and the emperor will arrive soon and William has little time to reveal a murderer, find a lost book, solve a library/labyrinth and put off the Holy Inquisition.

But this is a book about books, not about theology or science.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...

Eco makes The Name of the Rose a book about the father of all books, Aristotle. And about a book that doesn't exist. In other words, Eco makes us create a book of our own out of his book. We must have a copy of Aristotle's Comedy in our heads in order to understand The Name of the Rose. It is an impossible situation for a reader to find herself in. It is indeed a labyrinth of a library.

Then higher truths can be expressed while the letter is lying.

Poor Adso. And poor Mr. Bush. This is just too much truth for an evangelical Christian who believes in the inerrancy of the Scriptures. It's bad enough that he has to read and remember scripture, but then he must interpret it too? Oh, the horror. Of course, hermeneutics is a demanding art and prone to misuse, rather like literary theory of all sorts. Where, then, shall truth be found? Well, for one, I will look to the libraries, wander the labyrinths and watch for the signs. Here's a sign, or collection of them, for the Bush Presidential Library - The Name of the Rose, a title which means nothing.

MOONRAKER

Commander Bond. James Bond. Clearly a conceited young man like so many of them in the Secret Service... He could probably shoot all right, and talk foreign languages and do a lot of tricks... he was certainly good-looking... Rather like Hoagy Carmichael in a way. That black hair falling down over the right eyebrow... But there was something a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold.

(Hoagy Carmichael? That's him there, to the right. Not exactly Daniel Craig, eh? Or Sean Connery for that matter.)

This is Gala Brand's (the Bond girl in Moonraker) first impression of 007 in Sir Ian Fleming's fourth spy novel. But unlike in the movies, the girl gets away. She's engaged to someone else and Bond is left with: And now what? wondered Bond. He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure - the pain of failure that is so much greater than the pleasure of success... There must be no regrets. No false sentiment. He must play the role which she expected of him. The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette. Sentimental dross, but much less annoying than his silver counterparts.

Also the author of the gelatinous Chitty, Chitty Bang, Bang, Fleming made his name on the exploits of Bond after JFK named From Russia, With Love as one of his favorite novels.

This Bond gets badly beaten, burned, wrecked, feels the effects of too much alcohol and tobacco, uses drugs and, in the end, doesn't get the girl. Of course, he saves England, but there is a real cost to the man himself. Fleming insisted on it. I don't mean to say these adventure tales are in the least real, but they give us a kind of balance woefully unrepresented in most spy thrillers. I rather like that.

Well, here's a little fun for the presidential library. Everyone needs a little respite from the cares of the world, a little romanticizing of their daily grind. Read this, Mr. Bush, and maybe feel a little like M and understand that international intrigue comes with a price that someone must pay. Or just enjoy the story. Even that is asking a lot these days.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Please note that this is a contrarian alert. If you are feeling warm, fuzzy, shockingly sentimental and wish all the world a happy Christmas, you may want to forgo this posting.

You see, I like Ebenezer. That is, I like Scrooge before the ghosts. It's a bit hard, to my mind, to badger a man to distraction with puritanical platitudes and guilt-laden sentimentalities and then accuse him of a failure of human kindness.

When the Great Way is lost, we get benevolence and righteousness. Lao Tse: XVIII

Now, I'm not suggesting that Scrooge is some sort of Zen master pursuing the Great Way. He's a cranky, mean, tightwad. Or, as Dickens has it: ... he was tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. Scrooge isn't seeing some greater good by being a miserly old skinflint, but he also isn't faking a happy, sentimental urge to help when he doesn't feel it. What could be more hypocritical than the Victorian gentleman 'helping out' at Christmas while supporting the workhouses the rest of the year? I don't think it's so, but I can't help imagining sometimes that Dickens was yanking our chain with this little tale of sap and cinders.

This is an obviously anti-semitic tale: Ebenezer is a money-lender; his name is meant to evoke Jewishness; he doesn't celebrate Christmas; Scrooge is a 'covetous, old sinner', but Dickens rails at the slighted man for his failures while ignoring the harsh treatment Victorian England meted out to the Jewish community the rest of the year.

Don't misunderstand. Scrooge is hard on poor Cratchit, which is inexcusable. But, all told, he simply wants to be left alone which is understandable. He doesn't want to be bullyragged. He doesn't want to be dragged to family dinners, which Dickens disingenuously portrays as wonders of love and fellowship (take a look at his own domestic arrangements some time.) He simply wants to be left alone. His past is painful: dumped by a hypocritical woman who goes on to her own middle-class Victorian life after accusing Scrooge of wanting enough to be comfortable and safe himself; stranded by a harsh father at a fifth-rate boarding school where, apparently, he didn't even get enough to eat; and surrounded by all the trappings of Fezziwidgian comfort, but shunned for his heritage by 19th c. England. It's all a bit much, in my mind. The man wants to be left alone at Christmas as he is left alone the rest of the year. Fair enough!

So here's a sentimental, sappy Christmas tale for the White House. It's a perfect shell for the phony blessings wished on a nation in distress. Inflicting pain and suffering on a populace all the year and then condemning their lack of holiday spirit is as harsh as being dragged by ghosts through the cold streets and then dumped at a graveyard. It's all so sanctimonious! Be generous all the year or not at all. One day does not a redemption make.

BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL

In 2013 I will be publishing my long-awaited 1,731 page study of literary allusion. Doris Lessing's book will be reviewed extensively second only to the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I rolled with the waves of literary reference in Briefing For A Descent Into Hell - Homer, Plato, St. Paul, St. John, Dante, Borges, C. S. Lewis' Perelandra Trilogy, and on and on - until I was lost at sea myself. I found myself cast up on a shore far from home and wondering how I had arrived in this strange land. Exhausted, sickened unto death and desperate for fresh water I lay on the white sands, my skin burning in the tropical sun.

Oh, wait. That was someone else.

Briefing is neither fish nor fowl; neither psychodrama nor science fiction; neither novel nor memoir, though it would be all these and more.

You will lose nearly all memory of your past existence. You will each of you come to yourselves, perhaps alone, perhaps in the company of each other, but with only a vague feeling of recognition, and probably disassociated, disoriented, ill, discouraged, and unable to believe, when you are told what your task really is. You will wake up, as it were, but there will be a period while you are waking which will be like the recovery from an illness, or like the emergence into good air from a poisoned one. Some o fyou may choose not to wake, for the waking will be so painful, and the knowledge of your condition and Earth's condition so agonising, you will be like drug addicts: you may prefer to continue to breathe in oblivion.

The Olympians are thus sent to redeem us, a very Christian image. They become one of us; again the Christ allegory wrenches the Classical gods to new positions. But this is just one moment of a journey into what Lessing calls inner-space or the mind of a man. Lessing is one of those who seems to sentimentalize the insane. Her man-of-the-hour is amnesiac, but also something else - maybe a kind of bi-polar personality. She, like the medievals and others, wants to find the meaning of life in the broken minds of humans who are merely sick. It may be a profitable labor, there are certainly worse places to look.

Why do I have this sense of urgency? It's familiar. It's not something I've had only since I lost my memory. No. I had it before. Now I think I know what it is. And not only that. There are lots of things in our ordinary life that are - shadows. Like coincidences, or dreaming, the kinds of things that are an angle to ordinary life...

Lessing gives her amnesiac a glimpse into Gnostic Sophia and then gives him barbaric electroshock therapy. An appropriate image of just missing the knowledge we need and being smacked down by reality, or its moral equivalent.

The mad we will always have with us, Mr. Bush. Go down among them and minister to their needs for, according to Ms. Lessing, they are us and we ignore them at our peril, at your peril. I think the service to the ill may be worth more than the insight we get from those we serve, but who am I to say? Begin doing something to atone for the abuses of the past, specifically your past. Show us a soul. And place a copy of Ms. Lessing's book in your library.

THE SHAKESPEARE WARS

One of the things I wanted to attempt in this book was to be a kind of guide -- leading the reader, like Virgil in Dante, down into the scholarly inferno, hoping to illuminate some of the genuine intellectual - and visceral - delights, the tormenting conflicts, the unbearable pleasures to be found therein.

I think it only fair to take a man at his word, at least until you catch him lying. But Ron Rosenbaum is an honest broker. He wants to share these exact things with us. This book is like nothing so much as a long weekend with a happy monomaniac in a large, well-stocked library. Once you have reconciled yourself to the journey, you can settle back and thoroughly enjoy the route you take there.

Recoiling from this threat, from the identity-shattering bottomless abyss of pleasure that close reading opened up... many felt the need to find distance and the illusion of mastery over this threat by using the leaden jargon of Theory to shield themselves from the virtually radioactive danger of bottomless pleasure.

(Did I not use the word monomaniac?) Rosenbaum hates 'Theory' as much as the vaunted Harold Bloom - and take that sentence in both respects. He fairly finds Bloom infuriating, while also finding fault (like Bloom) with the deconstructionist, new historicist, post-modernists that erect a containment field around Shakespeare to restrain him. Rosenbaum harrumphs them and plays Barnardine to their Abhorson.

Rosenbaum conveys a Chestertonian humility: he continues talking when a proud man would sit down and shut up to save his ego from counter-attack. It is a charming trait. All books about Good Will are really about the author who threw them to us. The Shakespeare Wars is simply no exception, but it comes with a lack of self regard that is downright boyish. Unfortunately, Rosenbaum also has the Chestertonian tendency to quote apparently from memory and no editor saved him from embarrassment. But this worries us little. The errors, misprisions and overstatements are symptoms of an unfashionable earnestness. So be it. Let the reviewers note the problems and leave it to us to take the lessons.

The icing on the cake: A final chapter on The Unexpected Pleasures of Forgiveness. How utterly un-post-modern of Mr. Rosenbaum. I cry every time Cordelia is on stage - sorry, I just do. Her "No cause, no cause" breaks my heart and I have to stifle sobs to avoid looking a fool before strangers. But when I surreptitiously steal glances I invariably see wet faces and shining eyes. Debt and justice, mercy and forgiveness. What better note upon which to end a book on Shakespeare?

This Library we are constructing for Mr. Bush contains imperfect books. Maybe all books are imperfect. But so is the founder, and vastly so. We just so desperately want some sign the current leader of the free world reads anything - anything! Tell us what you have read, Mr. President. Please.

A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE WORLD

Using my imaginary powers of absolute rule over the lands of America, I am hereby ordering that a copy of Sir Ernst Gombrich's A Little History of the World be placed in the hands of every citizen. Furthermore, I am ordering that all citizens who choose to run for national office be required to read and take a test of my design on the contents of said Little History. Any individual who fails to achieve a score of 90% on said test (as graded by myself, of course) is banned from running for any public office and will be required to submit a signed statement for public consumption indicating that they are unfit for service.

It's a bad idea to prevent people from knowing their own history. If you want to do anything new you must first make sure you know what people have tried before.

It's a worse idea to simply be ignorant of one's own history.

The literary device of a narrative which unfolds or creates reality as it is read rarely is successful. We are always aware of being outside the story and trying to recreate the doubled image as we read. We are supra-textual in a way that induces an excess of self-awareness. The Little History succeeds in this narrative unfolding in two ways: first, we are inside the narrative itself. This is our own reality we are following. Second, Gombrich isn't trying trying to achieve the effect. He is as inside the narrative as we are. None-the-less, we are are the happy beneficiaries.

And what we call our fate is no more than our struggle in that great multitude of droplets in the rise and fall of one wave. But we must make use of that moment. It is worth the effort.

This is, as you might infer from the title, a history for children. Either my education was utterly bereft of this level of instruction or the title is a sly nudge to all adults who pride ourselves on our worldliness. And read it to your children and grandchildren, it makes a great bedtime story.

Sir Ernst was the Owen Barfield of the visual arts, tracking the evolution of human consciousness through painting, sculpture and architecture. We all have a copy of his History of Art on our shelves though we probably haven't bothered to read it since our undergraduate days. (What? Oh for god's sake, go buy a copy and read it right this instant.) Get back to it on occasion for your own good.

But what you must never forget is the importance for our own lives of tolerance, reason and humanity - the three fundamental principles of the Enlightenment. Because of them we no longer take someone suspected of having committed a crime and torture them inhumanely on the rack until, half out of their wits, they confess to anything we want. Reason has taught us that there's no such thing as witchcraft, so no more witches are burnt at the stake... Diseases are no longer fought by superstitious means, but mainly through cleanliness and the scientific investigation of their causes... All citizens are subject to the same laws and women have the same rights as men. All this we owe to the brave citizens and writers who dared stand up for these ideas.

I do wish the gatekeepers at the Bush Presidential Library would hand out a copy of A Little History of the World to every person who visits this memorial to incompetence, intransigence, injustice, intolerance and inhumanity, but that is a vain hope. Perhaps we could just get Mr. Bush to spend the next two months locked away in the private residence reading it and keep him away from the levers of power. Oh, and Mr. Cheney we should just lock away for the foreseeable future.

... we still have the right to go on hoping for a better future.

THE SON OF TARZAN

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
With half-shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream!
To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,
Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;
To hear each other’s whisper’d speech;
Eating the Lotos day by day,
To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray;
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood and live again in memory,
With those old faces of our infancy
Heap’d over with a mound of grass,
Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

The Lotos-Eaters
Tennyson

We are nostalgic not for the days of an idealized Africa but for a time when it still could be idealized. We are melancholy for a time when we knew less than we know now.

"His sole interests seem to be feats of physical prowess and the reading of every thing that he can get hold of relative to savage beasts and the lives and customs of uncivilized peoples; but particularly do stories of animals appeal to him. He will sit for hours together poring over the work of some African explorer, and upon two occasions I have found him setting up in bed at night reading Carl Hagenbeck's book on men and beasts."

It is a ripping good yarn (as is usually said of such things) with Homeric tones of memory, melancholy, longing, adventure, reconciliation and the long way home. What could be better?

Mostly free of sentimentality, but dripping in romanticism this tale avoids the faux spirituality that infects most late 20th century stories of nature. There is no Gaia here. It is all Darwin; evil is dealt with as is weakness. Behave yourself in this jungle of life or you'll be et.

"Remember always that there may be an enemy behind every bush, in every tree and amongst every clump of jungle grass. While you are avoiding Numa do not run into the jaws of Sabor, his mate."

But if you do, well then you get what you deserve.


I do loathe the puritanical streak which hangs every activity with moral instruction. Can't we just have a good time once in a while? (Of course, for Mr. Bush there must be a moral at the end because he has no compass of his own to follow. And if you can't lecture stupid leaders, then who can you lecture?) Video games, dumb, dumb and dumber movies and all the rest of the noisy electronica that dulls our wits and leaves us open to be eaten do not count. In order to enjoy we have to feel; all the rest is just analgesics.

Be sure to find the 1917 McClurg or the 1918 A. L. Burt edition with the wonderful line drawings of J. Allen St. John. It will amply reward the effort.

But on to Mr. Bush who desperately needs his very limited horizons extended. This lightweight tale might help a little. Who knows? It may even lead him on to read another book. This one will be in the library along with all the other Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure books: the jungle, the lost world, Mars. It all enlivens us and the sadness he might just possibly feel for a lost childhood could do him great good. On Tantor! There are adventures to be had!

THE END OF AMERICA Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

Pamphleteering has a long and creditable history in our country. It is a valid way to persuade and propagandize the rest of us who wait to be so influenced. Naomi Wolf deftly puts the technique to good use.

I am writing this because we have an emergency.

A crisis is required, whether real or manufactured, and a warning is sounded. 'Arise! Slumber no longer! Gird thyself and prepare for the fight.'

Bullies are cowards: Time and again, when people have awakened to danger and risen together to confront those who have sought to oppress them, citizens in their thousands have crumbled the walls and broken open massive prisons. In our own nation, in times of eclipse, patriots have become rebels again and said: "No; the nation is not going down, not on my watch." When that happens, there is no power that can hold these patriots back. I hope this emboldens you.

Wolf warns us of 'Fascist Shift'; a slippery slope oiled by the abuses of the current administration that threatens to pitch us headlong into a uniquely American authoritarianism. It is a fair characterization colored with typically (for pamphlets) strained analogies and shaded with historical examples. Not that that is a bad thing. Wolf is not trying to be Zakaria or Berman. She is attempting a kind of pyromania, lighting minor activists on fire and hoping for a great conflagration.

Hiding these little sparks throughout the presidential library may indeed start a great fire, but you may be certain that Mr. Bush will find himself fiddling while it burns, even if Mr. Cheney and the jackbooted firefighters do not.

THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE

It is true that The Allegory of Love was C. S. Lewis' breakthrough book garnering much academic respect. It is also true that he cavilled a bit later regarding its merits. None of this interests me much.

Symbolism is a mode of thought, but allegory is a mode of expression.

Far more enticing is Lewis' redemption of allegory. Our symbolist leanings give us a cynical reading of allegory as a bad tool applied to story-telling. Nothing could be further from the truth.

When every one feels it natural to attempt the same kind of writing, that kind is in danger. Its characteristics are formalized. A stereotyped monotony, unnoticed by contemporaries but cruelly apparent to posterity, begins to pervade it.

Allegory had to be rescued from its lesser lights.

... (allegory) was originally forced into existence by a profound moral revolution occurring in the latter days of paganism... men's gaze was turned inward. But a gaze so turned sees... the contending forces which cannot be described at all except by allegory. Hence the development of allegory, to supply the subjective element in literature, to paint the inner world...

Lewis uses the splendid Latin phrase bellum intestinum, which needs no literal translation, to limn the Psychomachia that was the best of allegory. The view internal, which is the moral revolution he speaks of, we take as a Freudian absolute. But was it always so? Heavily influenced by his friend Owen Barfield, Lewis is unsure. Or rather, he wants us to be unsure. Drenched in Barfieldian theory, The Allegory of Love wants us to reconsider our moorings. What we think, even how we think follows from what men thought before us. And where better to look into that consciousness than in the conventions of romantic love?

Allegory, besides being many other things, is the subjectivism of an objective age.

Consciousness, despite our dogmas, is not alike in all ages. The mind of man changes and with it... but that is a topic for another time. We musn't assume.

The blind faith, the fallacy that all men are alike has led our President into a quagmire. His utter indifference to modes of thought other than his own has dragged all of us along with him into the pit. The only resolution is scepticism. Those things which we doubt most deeply, we hold most dearly. Certainty is the enemy and contentment is the failure of the soul. We put Lewis' book deep in the library for some exploring mind to find. Pity it probably won't be the one for whom it would do the most good.

THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM

Strangely, none of the critics (at least the ones I have read) of Fareed Zakaria's analysis of illiberal democracy have offered anything other than weak objections to his claim of excessive democracy in America. As Zakaria predicts they beat their chests - and ours - and demand more. They are quick to point out that his favored apolitical commissions and courts have been manipulated, but give insufficient weight to the fact that elections, referenda, lobbyist-legislators and the voters have been manipulated even more.

Like the campaign-finance reform efforts, initiatives and referenda were undone largely by the superior power of business, which turned them away from the ends they were supposed to serve.

Foreign Affairs

The remainder of the article argues uneasily for more democracy for Americans.

America's masses have always been for illiberal democracy. In the main our puritanical soul has demanded less liberty for others while demanding more for ourselves. So the question becomes, 'How do we obtain liberal democracy in an illiberal society?' Of course, so-called libertarians claim to claim liberty for all. But, frankly, they are self-deluded idiots.

When a government taxes people it has to provide benefits in return, beginning with services, accountability, and good governance but ending up with liberty and representation. This reciprocal bargain... is what gives governments legitimacy in the modern world.

Please, let's return the libertarians to a simpler, less governed time and let them live out their individualistic, survivalist fantasies far far away. (That's my puritanical soul talking.)

The main benefit of Zakaria's analysis may be that someone has removed a brick from the cathedral of democracy and now a little light may be let in. It doesn't mean we are tearing down the church, just perhaps getting a clearer glimpse of what's inside with an eye to reorienting the pews. A little wood soap on the lectern wouldn't hurt either.

Politics did not work well when kings ruled by fiat and it does not work well when the people do the same.

With an eye toward current events, Zakaria's analysis of populist idiot-savantism is particularly timely.

If you were to argue in the business world that any amateur could run a large company because experience in business has no bearing on one's ability to do the job, you would be ridiculed. Say that about government and you are a sage.

There is one quite fair complaint about The Future of Freedom. Arguing that market capitalism (which is two-thirds consumer driven) is the historical way to liberal democracy while arguing that illiberal democracy must be constrained is an Escherian stairwell. Is the little man going up or down? Despite its shortcomings it is possible that Chestertonian Distributivism had it right: let government govern, just don't let it tell parents how to raise their children. Democracy must be allowed to graze freely in the field, but tethered when left near the oats.

This too-lengthy entry must end with the appropriate recommendation for our own illiberal undemocratic leader. Let's put Mr. Zakaria's book on the shelf for future generations who, we hope, will be free to read it. In the meantime, let's put to rest the stupid assertion that ignorance and ineptitude are the way to run a great country. Experto credite.

FLATLAND/CLASS

Coincidence - the unintended juxtaposition of events from which we randomly select elements that seem similar to us - disturbs.

I recently had the odd, unintended, experience of reading Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions and Paul Fussell's Class: A Painfully Accurate Guide Through the American Status System concurrently.

It's down among the mid- and low proles that features some might find offensive begin to show themselves. These are the people who feel bitter about their work, often because they are closely supervised and regulated and generally treated like wayward children.

Class

Then the wretched rabble of the Isosceles, planless and leaderless, are either transfixed without resistance by the small body of their brethren whom the Chief Circle keeps in pay for emergencies of this kind; or else more often, by means of jealousies and suspicions skillfully fomented among them by the Circular party, they are stirred to mutual warfare.

Flatland


Published exactly one hundred years apart (1884 and 1984) these two books are viciously satirical riffs on hierarchies and social conventions. Abbott and Fussell both manage to make us deeply uncomfortable with our assumptions. Perspective is the only truth in Americaland and Flatland. How you see is what you are.

Charmingly, Abbott was best known for his Shakespearean scholarship - also studies in perspective at the very least. Fussell's Shakespeareanism is a harsh, personal criticism of the glorification of war. These are a nice pair, coincidentally of course.

Flatland, which Jasper Fforde calls the only new plot in Western literature to come along in centuries, achieves its effect through a pseudo-rigorous scientism that pretends to discuss biology, social contracts, theology, etc. in technical-sounding academy language. Class takes a diametrically opposed tack. Fussell's prose is familiar, popular, slangy, and his comments smack of an SNL superiority and snarkiness. All's fair in the service of cultural criticism.

Speaking of which, both books will be shelved by the Librarian under the category of "Don't read this - you won't like it at all." Yes, yes - it's an inelegant, amateurish attempt at reverse psychology (if there is such a thing.) Who knows? It might work. Word on the street is that Mr. Bush is considering converting to Roman Catholicism after his term too. Diabolical, those papists!

DARK AGES AMERICA

The Empire we so greatly desire is the destruction we ultimately obtain.

That is the essential center of Morris Berman's deeply distressing Dark Ages America. Subtitled The Final Phase of Empire, this more completely documented follow up to The Twilight of American Culture sears. Absolutely Hegelian in argument, Dark Ages reminds us that, in the words of the proverb, chickens will come home to roost or, (for the more biblically minded) as ye sew, so shall ye reap. It should not surprise us that the result of our freedom would indicate the uses we made of it.

This was the glory of America: to be a land of great promise, a refuge from political tyranny, a place of immense creative energy, and the world locus of political freedom. But the glory had a shadow, a set of structural problems that were present quite early on and that eventually landed us in a very different, and inglorious, place. Those of us who now have different values from the country may have to look elsewhere for hope, quality, humanism and - possibly - freedom, which is not exactly what we had in mind when we were growing up. And although it would be a fabulous turn of events, it is nevertheless very unlikely that the solution to the American dilemma can come from within America itself.

Reminiscent of Harrington's The Twilight of Capitalism in its argument that our difficulties are not created by a cabal of insiders plotting against our freedoms, but are the result of the choices we have made with those freedoms. "Don't tell me what your values are; show me what you do and I'll tell you what you value." What we say is important to us is very clearly a lie we tell ourselves to keep from looking at the shadow Berman finds behind our glories.

As W. H. Auden put it many years ago in his poem "The Age of Anxiety," "We would rather be ruined than changed."

Berman (and, of course, Auden) are absolutely right. We are in a very disturbing way, content with who we are. We claim dissatisfaction as our birthright, but not even we want to truly change what we have. As a library full of writers have told us, it's just too painful to face who we are and make changes.

Once again, my favorite line on the topic of patriotism comes from Mr. Chesterton, "One must hate one's country enough to want to change it, and love it enough to think it worth changing." Berman clearly loves the idea of America and would put us back on track if it were possible.

What it would take now to pull back from the edge, let alone reverse course, requires a grace, a flexibility, and an imagination that I suspect we simply don't possess.

The current leadership is a stunning reflection of the gracelessness we have engendered in ourselves. What would a book like Berman's be doing in a library like this one? Accusing us, and Mr. Bush, like a Jeremiah. True prophets never told us what our future is, only what it would be if we refused to change our ways. In other words, they told the truth and it was never, never pleasant to hear.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H. L. Mencken
"Bayard vs. Lionheart" Baltimore Evening Sun, 26 July 1920

IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY

A short, densely argued treatise, Prof. M. Nemo's little history of the 20th c. tells us why we live the way we live, and why (as the title puts it) It Didn't Have to be This Way.

An introduction describing what's to come, five carefully articulated chapters with grand titles (transportation, military, cities, food and health care) and capped with a sort of Ur-topia that takes us back to the beginning of the century and allows us to try again, is all there is in this slight book with great pretensions. Think of it as SimCountry for the bourgeoisie.

Nothing is what it seems. Nothing is given. Your entire life is one rickety construct of bad decisions and horrific consequences. What if we could go back and, with the power of experience, do it all over again? What could we fix? What went wrong with this grand experiment that was the modern era?

Prof. Nemo tasks us with our own dissatisfaction and then walks us through to a new Canaan. Treating modern life like a scene from that execrable science fixation film The Matrix, Nemo tells us that what we see can be manipulated, or could have been, to make a civilization that doesn't gall us at every turn. It's just too bad for us that it turned out this way.

The reactionary reformers of BushWorld should be kept as far from this book as is possible. The retrospective of bad decisions of the 20th c. would be like catnip for their kind. So, after Armageddon, we will add a copy of the good professor's little work to the shelves of the Library. Anonymously, of course.

Librarian's Note: Unfortunately, mine was a publisher's review copy which I have since lost, the publisher has gone out of business and, most tragically, Prof. M. Nemo has passed away.

FROM BEOWULF TO VIRGINIA WOOLF

There is a truism amongst vocalists, I'm told. In order to sing badly one has to have been trained to sing well first.

At the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1702 John Dryden honored her assent to the British throne with a rime royal entitled Anna Mirabilis, a coronach celebrating the domestic virtues of the new monarch. Thereafter peace and prosperity raged throughout the island for more than a decade.

A true horrification of mechanical learning. Prof. Robert Manson Myers deserves full credit for remanding us in, chains, to the custody of a Beowulf of the mind.

By some accounts Prof. Myers was a tyrant in the classroom, though other victims claim him as their inspiration. Somehow both seem likely. This kind of learned abuse can readily provoke both responses.

An early Victorious prose writer of no small extinction was Thomas Carlyle, a Scotsman whose wife, Jane, was Welsh. As professor of Things in General at the University of Teufelsdröckh Carlyle was quarrelsome and dyspeptic, while his wife was of the opposite sex.

I hesitate to add this to the stacks of our fairless leader's library for obvious reasons. He needs no help in evangelizing facts and reaching erogenous conclusions. Perhaps we will just hide it under our coat and slip it onto a shelf in the dank corners for others of our caustic ilk to discover and enjoy.

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

It is computed, that eleven thousand persons have, at several times, suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.

We rise to the bait of the overtly rational 'computing' and bristle at the juxtaposition between the academic weight of the word and the idea of dying for the cause of the little-endians. How absurd!

But Swift goes on to raise the spectacle of our own ridiculous behaviour, stating our folly in Brobdingnagian terms. Abetted by the credulousness of his varied captors Gulliver draws a caricature of his fellow Yahoos that we abashedly recognize.

... the bulk of our people were forced to live miserably, by labouring every day for small wages to make a few live plentifully.

I confess I much prefer the Voyage to Brobdingnag to Lilliput, and the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms most of all. But who wouldn't? Swift's satire is broad, his Yahoos in every place recognizable and grotesque, and in the end, like Gulliver we find that looking in the glass at our own reflection is abhorrent.

So, here we are again in the stacks of the Presidential library, looking for something to read. The eight years of the Clan have made this kind of satire redundant. As Lilly Tomlin put it, "No matter how cynical you get, it's hard to keep up." Maybe I'll read a good Jane Austen novel instead.

NEWS FROM NOWHERE

William Morris's socialist utopia is so charming we happily forget or refuse to notice how absolutely absurd it actually is. Written in 1890 and set in our century, News From Nowhere (lovely title) indulges Morris's pastoral fantasies of a life lived in near-perfect harmony by a common class in control of its own means of production and distribution (the latter being a vital point that we often miss.)

"But no reward of labour?" said Hammond, gravely. "The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough?"

We can't ignore that it is a valid question particularly in our day of unpleasant, unloved work. We work for a living, supposedly, but more often we simply work for... what? We seem to work literally for our things. For all our love of our apparent creature comforts everyone notes how unhappy we are. Do we like modern health and dental care? Well, yes, but we ignore what it teaches us. Do we love our modern mechanical conveniences? Again, yes, but we are enthralled to them. It is an old, old argument with much to say on both sides.

It is clear from all that we hear and read, that in the last age of civilisation men had got into a vicious circle in the matter of production of wares. They had reached a wonderful facility of production, and in order to make the most of that facility they had gradually created (or allowed to grow, rather) a most elaborate system of buying and selling, which has been called the World-Market; and that World Market, once set a-going, forced them to go on making more and more of these wares, whether they needed them or not. So that while (of course) they could not free themselves from the toil of making real necessities, they created in a never-ending series sham or artificial necessaries, which became, under the iron rule of the aforesaid World-Market, of equal importance to them with the real necessaries which supported life. By all this they burdened themselves with a prodigious mass of work merely for the sake of keeping their wretched system going.

I have never been able to get beyond the idea that globalism and colonialism are two sides of the same coin. Here we are, once again, bringing enlightenment to the dark continents and the backward peoples. Not content with foisting Christianity on them, we now insist that Capitalism is the new saving grace and they must convert - it's for their own good, of course. And if we can sell them a few tsotchkes in the process, well!

Tediously talky at times, News is nonetheless a sweet book and great fun for those of us who tend to loathe most of the trappings of modern life - the noise, the helter-skelter and the endless, endless, endless stupidity.

I would bequeath a Morris room for this President's library. One filled with tapestries, paintings and books from Morris's own hand. It would be neglected and left to moulder because we have been taught by modernity to disdain beauty, or more accurately, we have been trained to think things beautiful that clearly are not. Mr. President, seal yourself in this new room and look at the walls and read the books and learn what beauty is. Ruskin was right. It will make you want to be a better man.

LIBRARIAN'S NOTE

Dear readers --

I have rather obviously changed the format of the Library.

I hope you are not discomfited.

Please take a moment to recommend books for the stacks here. I have put so few on the shelves and there are so many that would do quite nicely.

Twilight is upon us; a new dark ages is come. Let us build an edifice and name it with a miserable irony: The George W. Bush Presidential Library.

Carpe noctem...

KING ARTHUR'S DEATH

I have a particular volume on my shelves that includes two superb poems from the Arthurian cycle: The Stanzaic Morte Arthur and the Alliterative Morte Arthure. The first is very French (as the Introduction notes, it is a condensation of the prose romance La Mort Artu); the second very English.

Lordinges that are lef and dere
Listeneth, and I shall you tell,
By olde dayes what aunters were
Among our eldres that befell;
In Arthur dayes, that noble king,
Befell aunters ferly fele,
And I shall tell of their ending,
That mikel wiste of wo and wele.

Stanzaic Morte Arthur

(Lords, who are beloved and dear, listen and I shall tell you about the old days, what adventures there were that happened among our elders: in the days of Arthur, that noble king, many wondrous adventures happened, and I shall tell of the end of those knights who knew much of woe and joy.)

But my love is for the second poem, the Alliterative Morte Arthure:

He clekes out Caliburn, full clenlich burnisht,
Graithes him to Golopas, that greved him most,
Cuttes him even by the knees clenly in sonder;
"Come down," quod the king, "and carp to they feres!
Thou are too high by the half..."

Alliterative Morte Arthure

The king, cutting off the giant at the knees with the shout "Come down! You are too high by half!" is so obviously Pythonesque that we nearly forget the age of the joke.

Speak this out loud (yes, your family will think you at least a bit insane) - it is the way this must be read. Give the crashing alliteration your full throat and damned be the sane who sit quietly in their chairs reading bloodless modern novels. Live and die with Arthur, it is your birthright.

Again, here's where we chide the President for his own bloodlessness. He couldn't himself be bothered to even show up for the Air Guard duty (or whatever the hell it was) that kept him from battle. There is no Arthur in him, I think.

I nearly forgot to acknowledge my debt to the University of Exeter edition, edited by Larry D. Benson. These poems, as he noted, have been too hard to find and having them both in this volume with a good introduction is a treat. Trust your own ear for the pronunciations and rhythms.

THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES

Of course it's stupid, because it's a dream...

Shakespeare knew that dreams were stupid, too. But he also knew that they told the truth.

Borges wrote in his introduction to the Spanish edition of The Martian Chronicles: How can these fantasies move me, and in such an intimate manner?

Aldous Huxley, Bradbury himself guilelessly reports, called the author 'a poet' after reading The Martian Chronicles.

These beaded stories do provoke the feeling of strangeness in us that Owen Barfield saw as peculiar to poetry. They are elegiacal - from Borges again - which is to say they strike a tone of melancholy, even pessimism for humans. The extinction of the Martians here is just the huge irony (pun intended) that lies beneath the feet of the new conquistadors. The penultimate story is one of failed technology on earth; of death and lost innocence and disappointed expectation. It is a sad frame for the novel which ends in a fragile, desperate epilogue titled The Million-Year Picnic where the characters rise from the ashes of the atomically burned earth. We must be aware of the tragic cycle that is human history.

And here was Mars like a sea under which they trudged in the guise of submarine biologists, seeking life.

In these days of news from the Red Planet, we must sometimes remind ourselves just how miraculous the achievement is. Despite the bad, sincere theology of the current White Housian, we must keep in mind the importance of these leaps and discoveries and feel the fire that comes from the heart of a humanness that must stretch itself. Put this book in the Library and remember that we may fail, but that doesn't allow us the luxury of not trying.

HERETICS

...obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox.

Kipling, Shaw, Wells, and a variety of persons, movements and institutions that few now remember are Chesterton's heretics - lucid, sincere, even well-meaning believers in philosophies that he argues are very wrong.

I am not concerned with (George Bernard Shaw) as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive; I am concerned with him as a Heretic - that is to say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong.

Shaw and Chesterton carried on a merry battle of wits in Edwardian London, publicly debating their philosophies, their dogmas. Shaw insisted that his friend and contré was the only one who understood him.

It is a grievous thing that we have no Gilbert Keith today. If there was ever a time when a mind of such enormity was needed, it is now. Size matters.

In real life the people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.

Such an irony of the new century is almost too large to even see. This edifice is built of spit and toothpicks and its eponymous honoree runs about trying desperately to shore it up. The venality of he and his handlers is displayed in their utter lack of conviction. Chesterton would have noted first that these bullies believe nothing which allows them to do anything. A paradox upon them!

THE NIGGER OF THE 'NARCISSUS'

The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land; and when He sends there the messengers of His might it is not in terrible wrath against crime, presumption, and folly, but paternally, to chasten simple hearts - ignorant hearts that know nothing of life, and beat undisturbed by envy or greed.

No matter our own sympathies with or antipathies towards whichever of the crew of the Narcissus, Conrad loves them all. They are the people of the earth or, more properly, of the sea and each is his own person with his own virtues, vanities and foibles. Conrad spends no time passing judgement; he tells us their tale like his creature Marlow from Heart of Darkness: ... to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze...

From the Literary Impressionism manifesto that precedes this tale, Conrad declares: Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off. It is the cry of the artist that we hear forever. We hear it from Chaucer half a millenium earlier: The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne. It is the Paterian yearning for perfection. Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism... all these gods must, after a short period of fellowship, abandon him - even on the very threshold of the temple - to the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the difficulties of his work.

But back to the Narcissus. Unavailable to allegorical interpretation, Conrad's story of deception and death works us hard. Wait! he shouts which also may mean defer or pause - give a moment before you decide what he means. It is his name, but also his plea. So even when faced with the enormous lie that hinders this boat, we must anxiously Wait!

Falsehood triumphed. It triumphed through doubt, through stupidity, through pity, through sentimentalism. We set ourselves to bolster it up, from compassion, from recklessness, from a sense of fun.

Triumphant falsehood! A phrase for the ages, I think. Anyway, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' ought to be in every library, to say nothing of this particular library. To show his sincerity this President will no doubt amend the title to save our sensibilities. We recoil at all the wrong things these days.

TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA

...I saw over again all my existence on board the Nautilus; every incident, either happy or unfortunate, which had happened since my disappearance from the Abraham Lincoln... Then Captain Nemo seemed to grow enormously, his features to assume super-human proportions. He was no longer my equal, but a man of the waters, the genie of the sea.

Verne prepares us for this vision of the anthropo-titan just a few pages earlier when he invokes the vision of A. Gordon Pym. Suddenly, casting back, we are overwhelmed with the outrageousness of the tale just read. Despite the adventures we had become a sort of Ned Land, bored by the wonders and anxious for the end of our story. Verne, master of effect, draws back the plates that have partially hidden the wonders from our sight and lets us look with marvel at the meaning. This is a 'classic science fiction tale' no longer, it has become something other, something numinous.

Nemo (Latin for no one or no man) is our Homeric Ulysses with no home to return to. He is a Dantean figure doomed forever to roam in a kind of marvellous Purgatory cum Paradise. Nemo is our god of the Underworld dispensing justice, mercy and promising us a place in a better world if we learn how to achieve it.

The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the 'Living Infinite,' as one of your poets has said... The globe began with sea, so to speak; and who knows if it will not end with it?

Read here an adventure story or, if you can, go beneath the surface like the Nautilus and become Nemo; become No One and become everything.

For a president who is all surfaces, I bequeath a special, shark-skin bound copy of Verne for his library with a warning: Read, if you will or can, but fear finding your soul.

BABAR'S BATTLE

One lovely day, when Babar, the king of the elephants, and Celeste, his queen, were out for a walk with their children, Babar happened to think of Rataxes, who ruled the rhinos. "That Rataxes is a bad one," he said, "but he hasn't bothered us for a long time."

And so it begins.

Babar (well, actually, his creator Jean de Brunhoff) has been accused of neo-colonialism, of being politically and morally offensive, and of being excessively nostalgic (vile! vile!), but no one has suggested the books lack charm.

At the palace, when Celeste began to fill the tub for Isabelle's bath, no water came out of the faucet. Isabelle found that amusing, but Celeste was worried.

A kind of environmental parable - though de Brunhoff the younger pointedly has the elephants use a power saw to cut down a tree and rescue the rhino king - this lesser Babar book (but the one I have on my shelves) gives us a war that doesn't really happen, an assassination that doesn't happen at all and a bath that is narrowly escaped. All pretty dire stuff for small children, to say nothing at all of their parents.

But Babar's cleverness wins out in the end and we are spared any bloodshed... well, almost any.

I really could wish our own fine elephantile leader would spend the remainder of his term sitting in the library with a hot cup of chocolate at his right hand and a nice afghan on his lap while Mr. Cheney reads Babar's adventures out loud to him. It would be so good for all of us.

CYMBELINE

Will Shakespeare's Cymbeline is a happy thumb in everyone's eye, not least his own.

'Tis still a dream: or else such stuff as madmen Tongue and brain not: either both, or nothing. Or senseless speaking, or a speaking such As sense cannot untie. Be what it is; The action of my life is like it, which I'll keep, if but for sympathy.

Critics, readers and playgoers, we scratch our heads and wonder if good Will were talking about himself or just leading us along one more time down the perverse path of failed, self-revealing interpretation.

Goddard overreaches more than a little by finding a nationalistic allegory in Cymbeline. Granville-Barker tried to redeem the play by foisting the worst writing onto an unnamed co-author (likely, but a little labored) and Prof. Bloom argues that Cymbeline is self-parody.

The miasma of fatigue and disgust that hovers on the edges of the high tragedies and the problem comedies has drifted to the center of Cymbeline... (Bloom, Shakespeare - The Invention of the Human)

I'm with Bloom here. The characters feel like little parodies of Shakespeare's own literary offspring. Everyone notes, for example, that the clumsy villain who attempts to ruin the marriage of Imogen and Posthumus is named 'Iachimo' - that is, Little Iago. Take a look at the dramatis personae and try to convince yourself that this isn't all a joke on Shakespeare's part.

By the ending, Cymbeline, rather than make grandiose pronouncements of how he will arrange the future à la Prospero, instead simply forgives. Pardon's the word to all. We are redeemed.

I hope that someone somewhere has staged an absurdist version of Cymbeline. It deserves such treatment and I would happily pay to watch the outcome.

The Presidential Library, I believe, has been bequeathed a number of editions of the Bard. Here is a single volume edition of this too-little regarded play. Pardon's the word, Mr. Bush.

THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM

Borges called A. Gordon Pym Poe's greatest piece of fiction. Of course, he also referred to Chesterton as Poe's literary successor, to which I truly cannot reconcile myself.

Every writer who has flensed this short novel has noticed the same things: Arthur Gordon Pym is a surrogate for Edgar Allan Poe. Borges even goes to the trouble of matching the names to their Saxon and Scottish originals. The novel itself is of no specific genre. The novel has multiple structures. Sometimes it is a straightforward adventure story; sometimes it is a metaphysical puzzle. The Narrative is self-consciously following Coleridge and the Romantics. Poe uses the quality of whiteness in a way similar to Melville; it is an objective correlative, if you will.

March 8th. -- To-day there floated by us one of the white animals whose appearance upon the beach at Tsalal had occasioned so wild a connection among the savages. I would have picked it up, but there came over me a sudden listlessness, and I forbore.

We all seem to see the elements, but putting them together in a way that clarifies eludes us. All good literature is enigmatic; all bad literature is sincere. So I am not certain that the mystery of The Narrative isn't its greatest part. We walk away from the reading with clear images, but bewildered by the whole. We are as lost as Pym in the cataract.

... it appears to me a thousand wonders that I am alive today.


As an aside, I include a reproduction of J.M.W. Turner's Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth as the image that backgrounds The Narrative in my mind. Both the painting itself and the myth behind it add to the uneasiness of Poe's story for me.

My dreams were of the most terrific description. Every species of calamity and horror befell me... deserts, limitless, and of the most forlorn and awe-inspiring character, spread themselves out before me. Immensely tall trunks of trees, gray and leafless, rose up in endless succession as far as the eye could reach. Their roots were concealed in wide-spreading morasses, whose dreary water lay intensely black, still, and altogether terrible, beneath.

In moments of obscene clarity and stillness we are overtaken by the awareness of life as an iceberg. There is a tiny bit visible to us, but a vast bulk of something beneath, unknowable. We float in an abyss, icy cold waters harboring horrible life-forms in darkness and cold. We push against the surfaces to hold ourselves up and pray unceasingly that we continue to float and not slip beneath the beautiful blue expanse.

The recesses of the library are dark and jumbled and I would be a fool if I wasn't repulsed by the thought of those inky corners. Childhood fears are put behind us, not out of maturity, but because they do make us afraid and we loathe the feeling. Do you feel the darkness, Mr. President?

CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER

Not the opium-eater, but the opium, is the true hero of the tale.

My original complaint in reading this confession, was that the comprehension of the tale was tarnished by the past forty or fifty years of pop chemical culture. The story, I thought, was tainted by the saturation of the drug ethos with which we live. Our images, language and apprehension of addiction made it impossible to accurately read de Quincey's short chemography. Even, it seemed, modern confessional poetry colored my reading.

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.

De Quincey, with Rousseau, is the progenitor; we are the descendants.

I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chatted at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed.

But the genetic link does not begin and end in the hallucinations. De Quincey gives us benign intoxication, withdrawal, cravings, detoxification, addict's lies and much more. His tale is the modern one, ours the ancient.

There are, perhaps, worse addictions than opium. For a president who refuses to meaningfully acknowledge his own chemical past, I offer de Quincey's book. The lies of an addict are never confined to their chemical.

THE MANUSCRIPT OF SOULS

St. Micheal d'Contre may or may not have left us the Manuscript of Souls which points toward a mystical bookshelf in the as-yet undiscovered villa of the Lady of Distaff which contains the lost scrolls of the librarian of Alexandria. Distaff's possession of said manuscript and scrolls, if she or they did indeed exist, is just another of the grand mysteries left behind with the skull and second metatarsal of our revered saint/angel.

This Menardian re-visioning, with index and footnotes, of the manuscript by the thoroughly unknown and unremarked Spaniard Don Redouto, is currently languishing at the publishing house of Brown, Next and Peabody. Pressure must be brought to release this book without further delay, Don Redouto's refusal to submit the final chapter notwithstanding.

The Gnostic mythology of the Unshakeable Race is perhaps undermined by d'Contre's improbable journeys back and forth between this leaden creation and higher heaven which is clearly implied by our own universe. Did he return from one such journey with the Book? How did he carry it? Is it overdue? And just what does Leonardo Da Vinci have to do with all this? We may, as humans, never know. Where will it all end?

Lady Distaff failed to refer to the Manuscript of Souls as a kind of gnostic Domesday Book containing the names of every human who would eventually be reunited with the true God and freed from the sulphurous influence of the Archon of this world. This failure is at the heart of the mystery of d'Contre's unlikely manuscript.

If the manuscript does exist on our planet and has not been taken up into the heavens like the Ark in the Indiana Jones movie, where is it? Did Lady Distaff destroy it? Has it been left at Victoria Station in a handbag? Is it hidden in the Mormon Temple as claimed by the Latter Day Saint demi-prophet J. Huntingdon Fudge? And what is a demi-prophet?

In the grand scheme of things, this may be the only book that truly matters. Why can't our illustrious President extend his full executive powers and find this sacred and missing text? His legacy is at stake. A place of honour in the great library is waiting.

BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME

The Cubans have me, I'm afraid.

Puritans would hate this set-in-the-Fifties-but-really-about-the-Sixties book by Richard Fariña, brother-in-law to Joan Baez, but they would be wrong.

The subversion in Fariña's book may be in the wanton poisonousness of his own nostalgia. Been Down watches the society necessary for Gnossos' freewheeling life collapse of its own weight. He (Gnossos Pappadopoulis, Fariña's alter-ego/protagonist) knows (his name means knowing, as in someone with a knowing look about him) he is washing away the sand from under his own feet. And in the end he is sold for silver by the maternal egg, Oeuf. Oh, and true love gives us the clap.

The sky changed, the entire translucent dome stunned by the swiftness of the shimmering atomic flash. The light drove their once tiny shadows to a terrifying distance in the desert, making them seem like titans.

Fariña does make us feel like gods of our own demise. Dead two days after the publication of Been Down, Fariña might have become a very, very good writer. The seeds of promise are here. And while this book is callow, its exuberance covers a multitude of sins. We have to lament what might have been. Been Down is the stone for Fariña denied Heffalump.

Oh la.
Bump bump bump,
down the funny stairs.

For those of the Bush/Cheney ilk, I would have Been Down added to their reading lists and placed among the stacks alongside other paeans to the golden age of the Fifties. The 'values' they champion may seem sweet, but there's a 'sell-by' date to take into account when paying for the product. Oh la.

THREE MEN IN A BOAT (to say nothing of the dog)

There's no Adam Sandler here.

Will Ferrell will make no appearance.

No one farts or gets their penis stuck in their zipper, so go away now.

Jerome K. Jerome said "The world has been very kind to this book." The truth is that this book has been very cruel to the world. It has set the bar for perfectly balanced humor so absurdly high that no one can possibly reach it. Bryson tried with A Walk in the Woods and stumbled. Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's made the travelguide attempt and spun off into wildly-inspired absurdity, but couldn't quite maintain the fine equilibrium of Jerome's little wonder. And while P. G. Wodehouse gave us the genius of Jeeves, he wins the prize for portraying bumbling young men at their peak of disablement mostly by sheer volume.

I knew a young man once, he was a most conscientious fellow and, when he took to fly-fishing, he determined never to exaggerate his hauls by more than twenty-five per cent. 'When I have caught forty fish,' said he, 'then I will tell people that I have caught fifty, and so on. But I will not lie any more than that, because it is sinful to lie.' But the twenty-five per cent plan did not work well at all. He never was able to use it. The greatest number of fish he ever caught in one day was three, and you can't add twenty-five per cent to three - at least, not in fish.

Floating down the Thames with J and his (the word is unavoidable) hapless friends, to say nothing of the dog, is the best trip anyone can take and stay moderately dry.

In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill circular, I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being 'a general disinclination to work of any kind.' What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy I have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for a day. They did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical science was in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down to laziness.

Here's to humor for the library because everyone needs a good laugh these days.

THE CAT IN THE HAT

Dr. Seuss.

I would bet that his name is one of the very few which is known without exception by every American. His verses and images are instantly recognizable. He is proof-positive that we have at least an atrophied capacity for poetry.

The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
All that cold, cold wet day.

A few observations: There are virtually no polysyllabic words in this book. Mother is one, little is another (as is another.) The little girl is named Sally, but the little boy apparently has no name at all. The nameless little boy is our narrator; he is the first-person of the story. The stand-in parent (the annoying fish) is utterly impotent. All he (I assume it's a he - hmm, no Mother at home, only an ineffectual father-figure?) can do is whine about the mess and the morality.

This is all pointless though in the face of a really nice little read. Go pick up a Seuss (we all have our favorites) and read it out loud. You will gather a crowd. And many of us will speak the verses along with you.

So, all of Dr. Seuss's works in the Presidential Library so we have something to read when it's too wet to play and we have to sit in the house on a cold, cold wet day.

LISTEN, LITTLE MAN

Wilhelm Reich died in jail in 1957.

By the time of his death he had been denounced by the psychiatric community to which he had contributed some of its most profound ideas. But Reich had spun off into the kind of Teslan weirdness that the scientific community hates. At least it is hated until some of the weirdness is validated.

Listen, Little Man was written by Reich most probably between 1943 and 1946 rather pointedly as a diatribe against the German people who, he believed, had allowed the rise of Hitler due to their syncophantic adulation of power.

The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it.

But Reich saw the German failings as symptomatic. His years refining Freud's psychoanalytic technique convinced him that we are all 'little men' toadying to slightly bigger 'little men' and giving up our true freedom for a pathetic security.

Happiness wants to be worked for and earned... It runs away because it doesn't want to be be consumed by you... You want only to be a consumer and a patriot.

Listen, Little Man is a snide, harsh book that would awaken us to our failings and smallness. It offers no real road to the freedom that Reich claims for us, except to demand that we learn a laser-like honesty and turn it unflinchingly on our own weakness. Clearly Reich knew it was a quixotic quest to liberate humanity, but he tried anyway. Listen, Little Man is brilliantly illustrated (in both senses of the word) by William Steig.

If given your choice between a library and a fight, you'll undoubtedly go to the fight.

I would happily include this little volume in our fearless leader's library. What is more difficult for an individual or a nation than a brutal self-revealing honesty? How do we achieve such awareness? Is it through fighting or through the library? Dr. Johnson wrote, "It is more honourable to save a citizen than to kill an enemy" (have I quoted this line here before?) Reich's book may be as right about us as it was about Germany.

MANGA HAMLET

My limited DVD/VHS collection includes probably six or eight abbreviated versions of Hamlet, some lasting less than a minute. All are recognizable as the play itself. It's as if, to use C. S. Lewis' definition, Hamlet has achieved status as myth transcending mere story, becoming symbol able to be arranged and delivered in a variety of guises.


For this reason I love Manga Hamlet. Truncated and retold as post-apocalyptic cybervision, Emma Vieceli's version of Shakespeare achieves the kind of visceral telling that good theatrical performances should aspire to. It is exemplary of Harold Bloom's 'global universal' Shakespeare which is a faux-academic way of raising pop culture to a more glorified level, I suppose. In other words: sheer snobbery.


(Turning this graphic novel into a film would be no more heretical than the casting of Jack Lemmon (still a painful memory) and Robin Williams in Kenneth Branagh's four-hour spectacle.)

So the question remains: Why is Hamlet so readily recognized even in its most bowdlerized forms? Memory, allusion, myth, symbol, metaphor, allegory and all the other language we use to explain the phenomenon do little more than label it without explaining the mechanism, if mechanism it is. Perhaps it less mechanism than it is biology.

I will forgo snarky comments suggesting that Mr. Bush hasn't, but should, read Hamlet. I take that as a given. But I would not have Manga Hamlet delivered up as some kind of 'pre-Shakespeare' for the uninitiated. It ought to be read on its own. Hamlet is there, in those pages and drawings. Shakespeare makes it impossible to forget it.

BLEAK HOUSE

In the early 1900's Charles Dickens' reputation was redeemed by Gilbert Keith Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. Somehow, unbelievably, Dickens works were being relegated to second-class status. Shaw and Chesterton, friends and adversaries and co-admirers of the great Victorian novelist, worked together to bring Dickens' works the recognition they deserved.

The greatest of these books is Bleak House.

Without doubt the description of the fog pervading Temple Bar is the best depiction of hoary weather, bar none. Dickens' opening chapter gives us Chancery and sets the cold fog about our hearts.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs, fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck.

Chancery ruins everything it touches. "Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!" Dickens gives us an institution that rivals anything in Kafka. The only characters who survive the labyrinthine terrors of Chancery are Esther Summerson and John Jarndyce who, Barnardine-like, turn their back on it and refuse to acknowledge its authority. And 0nly they survive to bring us the news.

Characters in Bleak House are truly Dickensian: Mr. Krook, who spontaneously combusts, lonely Lady Dedlock, the mysterious Nemo and the despicable Skimpole. It is a feast.

Darkness rests upon Tom-all-Alone's.... There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high.

Those in power who claim to despise government, never-the-less use it malignantly. Let us turn our backs on them and pray fervently that they will also combust spontaneously. In Mr. Bush's library justice may be found amongst the transcripts of tragedies general and particular.

HAMLET - POEM UNLIMITED

Prof. Bloom is currently unfashionable.

There is a curmudgeonliness about his writing and thinking that evokes antipathy in the class of critics with whom he profoundly disagrees. Their bluster does nothing to lessen Bloom's critical stature. In their writing he becomes the icon against whom they vainly rail. It is his harmless fantasy that he is Falstaff to their Prince Hal.

Hamlet Poem Unlimited is another of those critical illusions; a kind of literary sleight of hand. A tiny little volume that reads quickly and lightly, Poem Unlimited hides a Krellian machinery underneath its serene surface. It is itself a poem representing a lifetime of reading and thinking.

What matters most about Hamlet is his genius, which is for consciousness itself. He is aware that his inner self perpetually augments, and that he must go on overhearing an ever-burgeoning self-consciousness. Only annihilation is the alternative to self-overhearing, for nothing else can stop Hamlet's astonishing gift of awareness.

Prof. Bloom has pricked the skin of his Hamlet and let a trickle of blood seep out. We are now infected and must, must, must follow the flow back to the heart to feel what he feels, see what he sees.

We go back to Hamlet because we cannot achieve enough consciousness, even at the expense of a sickening self-consciousness.

The main charge to make against the leader of the free world is that he has no insides. He is the modern hollow man; the anti-Hamlet. I suppose it is too much to ask that Mr. Bush would go to Hamlet and make for himself (and as our exemplar, for us) a self-consciousness of any kind.

PARTRIDGE'S CONCISE DICTIONARY OF SLANG AND UNCONVENTIONAL ENGLISH

And while I'm on the subject...

Eric Partridge is a star in my firmament. Author of Shakespeare's Bawdy, A Dictionary of the Underworld, and Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English among others, Partridge gives us a history of the language as we use it. As his editor for this book, Paul Beale, points out our slang is sometimes incredibly old.

bugger, n. A man; fellow; chap: 1719, D'Urfey. In S.E. (Standard English) (c.16...), a sodomite.

This shorter and more affordable version of a much longer scholarly work should sit proudly on your shelf next to all the other language and writing guides you own. Don't hesitate to open Partridge's as often as Garner's or your prized conventional dictionaries.

mother-in-law, A mixture of stout and bitter: Aus. and Brit. public-houses': since ca. 1945, B., 1953.

In an administration which values anti-intellectualism as much this one, such a guide to slang ought to be invaluable. It might be nice if those who defy proper use of the language knew what they were actually saying. So we'll add this one to the Collection and hope the nuke-yoo-ler president has a look.

bush bunny, A simpleton; a dupe: Aus. c.: since ca. 1920

GARNER'S MODERN AMERICAN USAGE

Bryan A. Garner quotes F. W. Bateson in his essay "Making Peace in the Language Wars" at the beginning of this style guide: "...style (is) the best words in the best order." It is so typical of Garner that he finds the perfect citation to define the purpose of his book.

To educate people about the conventions of writing is good for them. Why? Because writing well requires disciplined thinking. Learning to write is a part of anyone's education.

A disciple of Fowler's Modern English Usage, Garner follows in his intellectual mentor's lead in writing passages that are concise, illustrative and entertaining. (Let it be said here that it is impossible to write about a style guide without leaving oneself open to the application of the principles therein.)

pianist is pronounced either /pee-an-ist/ or /pee-ə-nist/. The first is the traditional and unpretentious AmE pronunciation; the second is the traditional BrE one. If you use the latter, be sure to pronounce the final -t!

Accessible and, as the quotation above demonstrates, amusing, Garner's Modern American Usage is intoxicating for any lover of our fair language.

The Librarian has no patience for those who describe English as an incomplete, broken or inadequate tool for expression. Those who find it thus are undisciplined writers, thinkers and speakers. Poor students should not be proud of their ignorance.

Speaking of which, our namesake needs a copy of Garner's to keep his copy of Fowler's company. No doubt they will both gather dust on the shelves of this library, neglected in the dark recesses of the stacks.

EMERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson may be America's gnostic prophet of the divine inner spark. He writes and thinks what seems instantly true, resonating to a deep string within us though we don't remember ever having thought his words before. Why this is so is to do with something that thousands of years of mystical writers have tried to explain to us. We don't understand and we don't know that we don't understand. We don't learn easily - to our detriment.



The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therfore, to us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure. As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him? Yet this may show us what discord is between man and nature, for you cannot freely admire a noble landscape if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight until he is out of the sight of men.

The idea of a divine something within us seems at odds with the Western story of the Creation and the Fall, as well it should. It is a direct contradiction to the idea that we are inherently separated from God and require intervention to bridge that divide. Christianity understands this, but it has the sayings of Jesus to contend with. How may the two be reconciled? They may not. It seems that it is one or the other and we must decide which of the two is the most truth-full. Attempts at compromise are bootless.

Jesus speaks always from within and in a degree that transcends all others. In that is the miracle. I believe beforehand that it ought so to be.

This is simply another addition to the Catalog. I really wish the founder of the edifice would go within (however that may be) and read. Just read. The wealth of humanity is available for the edification of the individual.

ARTHUR REX

Antidote for the saccharine King Arthur (with the ill-starred Clive Owen); eradicant of that execrable First Knight (with the venal, but charming Sean Connery), Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex is shockingly modern and tonally cognate with Malory or the Alliterative Morte D'Arthur or any one of the early versions of the great cycle.

Now Gawaine understood that he had been tricked and mostly by himself, for he had come here voluntarily and unarmored and unweaponed. But being the truest of knights, what he feared was not the death that he might well be dealt here (for he expected to be killed on the morrow by the Green Knight, and we each of us owe God but one life), but rather that if he were not alive to meet his appointment with the verdant giant he would cause great shame to be brought upon the Round Table, for death were never a good excuse for breaking a pledge.

Hilariously impious, Berger bets on the earthiness of the times but keeps the high honor of the Courtly Love tradition. Only a virtuoso writer with a remarkable ear could manage it. This is just one of the masterpieces of a writer who simply doesn't get enough attention.

And striving to keep back his tears Sir Percival held his friend in his arms, and he said, "Yea, Galahad, Sir Launcelot doth live! For where could he ever meet his match on the entire earth! Rest here awhile, for he must deal with the remaining felons, and I must go to join him. Then I shall fetch him to thee." And Sir Galahad smiled, and he said, "Tell him I could not tarry, and one day I shall kiss him in Heaven." And then he died.

There is no better version of the Arthurian story accessible to a modern audience (and I say that without irony) for I believe few will go back and read the early stories. So pick up Arthur Rex, forget the atrocities committed on this great king by modern bowdlerizers, and read Berger's fine book.

The Catalog now has another addition which won't be read by the man whose name graces the cyber-edifice. Pity, really. There's so much to learn about integrity, honor, valor, love and courage in this book. More than a pity.

A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

To the Christian who desperately needs to wed the pagan with the modern sacred this opening sentence performs the feat for him to perfection. Holy and raw and child-like, Thomas's prose tears a hole in our hearts and, if we are not benumbed by Christmas excess, softens and prepares us for the celebration.

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs where the gas meter ticked.

Utterly and completely without sentimentality, this tale is told in a scant thirty or forty pages and may be only a moment's memory between sleep and waking.

We have taken this out and read it to each other on a frozen Christmas eve, revelling in the words and remembering our own child-Christmases. It frames the specialness of the night and restores a kind of ancient respect for the celebration.

So here's a ghost story of sorts for the Library. Perhaps some cold winter's night some time in the distant future a restless old man will wander the stacks and find this. There is always an element of melancholy in nostalgia and maybe this one night he will feel the loss in his own soul from a life lived crookedly.

One last librarian's note: If you can lay your hands on a recording of Thomas reading A Child's Christmas, listen to it. The rich Welsh tones in the poet's own voice repay the effort made to find this rare recording.

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD

Whatever became of the moment, when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. Must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality, before we know the word for it, before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that before all the points of a compass, there is only one direction, and time, is its only measure.

Tom Stoppard's work has suffused my generation with a more than vague sense of our own mortality, as if we needed help.

I don't know why non-native speakers of English are often the best writers in the language, Stoppard and Joseph Conrad are two obvious examples, but it is true. Stoppard has an ear for our language that is pitch-perfect. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead hauls us through a staging of a particular perspective of Hamlet. It is as if the two friends, clowns, choristers are parked center stage and the play is ebbing and flowing around them. There is no off-stage or backstage for the two. They must merely stand and let it (whatever 'it' is) happen to them until their pathetic deaths.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

I don't know why this should be a drama particular to Thanksgiving. Perhaps it just drops a dark, shrouded curtain behind our protestations of gratitude. I know I always feel the intense pressure to perform a feat of oral turpitude ("I am grateful for...")on this dreary, sports- and calorie-laden day. It isn't that the day is so painful, I just bridle against the demand to be particularly contented on this one day. What about all the others? I am feeling a Cordelia moment, I suppose.

Add this one drama to the Catalog. List it under 'Thanksgiving Sermons' and move on with this uncertain life.

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?

BEOWULF

The upcoming film travesty of this primal poem (Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother? - how could it be other than a travesty?) drove me back to Seamus Heaney's great translation.

... Then an extraordinary
wail arose, and bewildering fear
came over the Danes. Everyone felt it
who heard that cry as it echoed off the wall,
a God-cursed scream and strain of catastrophe,
the howl of the loser, the lament of the hell-serf
keening his wound. He was overwhelmed,
manacled tight by the man who of all men
was foremost and strongest in the days of this life.

ll 781 - 789

The Christian references in the poem seem alien, the belated additions of scribes anxious to sanctify the pagan thrust. But I am not a textual scholar and it may not matter that much. The
rhythm of the lines and of the tale itself surge in us and we feel the uncanniness of the drama. It is so far from our daily lives and yet so central to how we feel that it nearly tears us apart on repeated readings. I dare you to dig into this poem in the dead of a stormy night without being overwhelmed by dread and horror and pathos. If you are made of stone perhaps Beowulf will not reach you, but if so then I would suggest you need it more than most.

"You are the last of us, the only one left
of the Waegmundings. Fate swept us away,
sent my whole brave high-born clan
to their final doom. Now I must follow them."
That was the warrior's last word.

ll 2813 - 2817

Is this more than the shelves of the Library can support? I am not honestly certain. Maybe it should sit on a pedestal by itself at the very center of the stacks. But then I would put our illustrious leader there with it, reading through all eternity.

Librarian's note: I would also recommend Stanley B. Greenfield's A Readable Beowulf. I like his translation, it isn't a bad way to begin reading the poem.

Seamus Heaney

A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA

Ursula K. Le Guin is a living treasure.

Author of the shocking Left Hand of Darkness and the bittersweet Lathe of Heaven as well as a raft of poetry, children's books, essays and much more, Le Guin makes myths.

Mr. Underhill had decided that since his truename was no longer a secret, he might as well drop his disguise. Walking was a lot harder than flying, and besides, it was a long, long time since he had had a real meal.

This paragraph is from a short story called The Rule of Names which is a little known precursor to Le Guin's great trilogy A Wizard of Earthsea. It is a funny little tale of wizards and dragons, naming and secrets.

But the trilogy itself (my preference is for the first three books of a longer series, ergo trilogy) is a grand adventure and coming of age story. Le Guin takes what might have been a trite tale in the hands of a lesser writer and creates subtlety and true characters (a rare thing) and a mythos which is impossible to resist. Every reader will make the obvious comparison to a series of much better known books about a young wizard. Be forewarned: There is just no comparison. As Harold Bloom archly commented, Rowling's readers will go on to be fans of Stephen King. I would hazard that Le Guin's readers will go on to be readers of Beowulf and Le Morte d'Arthur, Shakespeare and Chaucer.

When it rained Ogion would not even say the spell that every weather-worker knows, to send the storm aside. In a land where sorcerers come thick, like Gont or the Enlades, you may see a raincloud blundering slowly from side to side and place to place as one spell shunts it on to the next, till at last it is buffeted out over the sea where it can rain in peace. But Ogion let the rain fall where it would. Ged crouched among the dripping bushes wet and sullen, and wondered what was the use of having power if you were too wise to use it.

So, another for the Catalog. Learning one's self may be the only true knowledge. Mr. Bush might learn the death he creates abroad begins in his own soul.

THE HORLA

'Tis the witching hour and time for a scary story.

But which? James's The Turn of the Screw? Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes? Shelley's Frankenstein? Stoker's Dracula? Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher? Le Fanu's Carmilla? I hope you will go read all of these and much more. The genre is a rich one and great fun on a cold autumn night. But I am going to opt for Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla (The Horla).


Written as journal entries by a man descending into paranoiac frenzy. Is the Horla real or just a figment of a very overwrought, even insane, intellect?

August 20. I shall kill Him. I have seen Him! Yesterday I sat down at my table and pretended to write very assiduously. I knew quite well that He would come prowling round me, quite close to me, so close that I might perhaps be able to touch him, to seize him. And then -- then I should have the strength of desperation; I should have my hands, my knees, my chest, my forehead, my teeth to strangle him, to crush him, to bite him, to tear him to pieces. And I watched for him with all my overexcited nerves.

The representation of alienation and dementia is de Maupassant's genius. We chill at his protagonist's terrors and feel our own throats close and the air sucked from our very lungs as the Horla creeps closer and closer. Who, if any, survives?
De Maupassant himself was diagnosed as insane later in life; was this the premonition of his own spiral into the dark?

I got up so quickly, with my hands extended, that I almost fell. Horror! It was as bright as at midday, but I did not see myself in the glass! It was empty, clear, profound, full of light! But my figure was not reflected in it -- and I, I was opposite to it! I saw the large, clear glass from top to bottom, and I looked at it with unsteady eyes. I did not dare advance; I did not venture to make a movement; feeling certain, nevertheless, that He was there, but that He would escape me again, He whose imperceptible body had absorbed my reflection.

Anyway, an addition to the Catalog to send a thrill into the coalish lump that once was the heart of a man.

THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK

I have nothing to say of any value on this wonderful poem. So, of course, I will say it here.

Lewis Carroll's more famous Alice in Wonderland (and another pox on Disney, if I may) is simply great, but I find I like the Snark much, much better. The multiplicity of interpretations, the exegetics created on the text therein, and the pedantic prattle practiced on Carroll's creation should all vanish in the face of the Boojum. Rid the earth of it all! But sit by yourself and chuckle quietly while reading the adventures of the Bellman and crew in the quest for the Snark.

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.

They shuddered to think that the chase might fail,
And the Beaver, excited at last,
Went bounding along on the tip of its tail,
For the daylight was nearly past.

"There is Thingumbob shouting!" the Bellman said,
"He is shouting like mad, only hark!
He is waving his hands, he is wagging his head,
He has certainly found a Snark!"

They gazed in delight, while the Butcher exclaimed
"He was always a desperate wag!"
They beheld him--their Baker--their hero unnamed--
On the top of a neighboring crag.

Erect and sublime, for one moment of time.
In the next, that wild figure they saw
(As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,
While they waited and listened in awe.

"It's a Snark!" was the sound that first came to their ears,
And seemed almost too good to be true.
Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
Then the ominous words "It's a Boo-"

Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air
A weary and wandering sigh
Then sounded like "-jum!" but the others declare
It was only a breeze that went by.

They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away---
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

I refer to Mr. Chesterton's quotation from an earlier entry to the Catalog:

"Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity."

This nonsense poem is supremely strong. We know it belongs in Mr. Bush's library because an enervated weakness is all that he has shown to this point. Perhaps Mr. Bush could refer to the writings of Lewis Carroll for some hints.

THE ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

The invention of instruments of torture is a dangerous one, and it seems as if they were a test of endurance rather than of truth. Both he who can endure them and he who can not endure them conceal the truth. For why shall pain make me confess what is true rather than force me to say what is not true? And, contrariwise, if he who has not done that of which he is accused has fortitude enough to endure those torments, why shall not he who has been guilty do the same, so precious a meed as life being proposed to him?

This book "written without preconceived plan, without method" as Andre Gide put it, gives us a human soul in every sense of that phrase. Montaigne gives us his entire self and, reciprocally, gives us a self of our own. Reading these essays we feel our own souls grow and our minds alter; it is altogether an unsettling experience.

The Puritan anti-intellectualism and prejudice against education is an abomination. Would not reading the quotation above make the atrocities justified by Mr. Bush and his minions less likely, to say the least? History may teach us nothing; we may have nothing to learn from our past misdeeds, but can we not learn from what we have learned? Where shall wisdom be found? Nowhere if we refuse it. Montaigne would teach us ourselves.

Let me be excused for saying here what I often say, that I rarely repent, and that my conscience is content with itself, not as the conscience of an angel or a horse, but as the conscience of a man; adding this unfailing qualification... that I speak as one who is ignorant and seeking, referring myself for decision purely and simply to common and legitimate opinion. I do not teach, I narrate.

Another for the Catalog and all who look there.

THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS

It occurred to me today that I had added nothing to Mr. Bush's library that might specifically interest a child. I'm not talking about My Little Goat or The Puritan's Guide to Infesting Little Children With Guilt About Their Bodies or some such nonsense. Several very good ideas came to mind, all of which should be in the Catalog, but one stood out. Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (preferably with the Michael Hague illustrations.)

It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting-everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering "Whitewash!" he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.


Toad, Mole, Badger, Ratty and all the others are absolutely perfect in Grahame's tale (and a pox on Disney here.) Adventure and friendship, loss, just retribution, careening good humour and the best Christmas imaginable make this the book for our children. Please! Read it to some child tonight - or read it to yourself quietly in a big, overstuffed chair with a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Here I usually add some snarky comment about Mr. Bush and his fellows, but I am anxious to get to the splendid assault on Toad Hall to rid it of the weasels and stoats, so... farewell.

THE RENAISSANCE

The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary.

Such is the beginning of the famous passage Oscar Wilde chanted before Il Giocondo or, in Brownian terms, the Mona Lisa.

Walter Pater's volume of appreciation, nay idolatry, is arguably the finest non-fiction that arose from the ill-understood and unfairly ridiculed Victorian age. It is overwrought and florid, a chiaroscuric masterpiece of prose.

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants.

My personal preference is for the first essay Two Early French Stories for the beautiful, almost Gothic story La vie des saints martyrs Amis et Amile. Its uncanniness and brutality are told with gentleness that draws us in and somehow makes us sympathetic towards the absurd, pious friends.

For the Bush Presidential Library. Beautiful writing must be saved and if, like the manuscript in Eco's The Name of the Rose, it is hidden amongst the testaments of the doctrinaire, then so be it. Someone will find it.

RUMI

Tomorrow is the 800th anniversary of the birth of Rumi.

Listen, O drop, and give yourself up without regret,
and in exchange gain the Ocean.

The mystical poet of Islam is a 'universal voice' speaking to all travellers.

Come and be Love's willing slave,
for Love's slavery will save you.

There is only one question to ask of extremist Islam: Where is the meeting place of such beautiful and transcendent poetry with the manufacture of walking bombs? But a similar question might be asked of Christianity which produced the mystical visions of St. John of the Cross in The Dark Night of the Soul: How does the ecstasy of Christianity fuel the Crusades or the Inquisition or America in Iraq? How do mystical vision and violent religious fervor come from the same teachings?

Acknowledged by Islam as the greatest of its mystical poets, Rumi (real name: Jalâluddin) drives East and West toward an ecstatic vision of God.

The Prophet said, "God doesn't pay attention to your outer form:
so in your improvising, seek the owner of the Heart."
God says, "I regard you through the owner of the Heart,
not because of prostrations in prayer
or the giving of wealth in charity."
The owner of the Heart becomes a six-faced mirror:
through him God looks out upon all the six directions.

Mathnawi V, 869-870, 874
translated by Kabir Helminski and Camille Helminski

So, the Heart of Islam to Mr. Bush for he and his library and for all who will read it.

Sufism
BBC - Rumi
NPR - Rumi

MOBY DICK OR THE WHALE

Author Ken Kesey used to write letters to the editor of the Eugene (OR) Register-Guard suggesting that a secondary education should consist of sitting in a classroom reading Herman Melville's classic from cover to cover repeatedly. For four years.

Now, I believe there is no reason that everyone shouldn't be made to read this great, great book, but even I balk at Mr. Kesey's draconian curriculum. In fairness, of course, Kesey is grandly yanking our chain. The Chief Prankster was a master at such fun and games - but enough about the late author. We're here to recommend the white whale and its pursuer.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

Not the famous opening sentence, the lines above follow hard upon and give us a dubitable motivation for our Ishmael's run to the sea to follow the whale. The chase, the rounding of Captain Ahab's brutal, obsessive character and the fleshing out of the crew give Melville the chance to draw his grim and nihilistic universe for us to consider. We are Ishmael, untrustworthy as narrators (and maybe as readers) but naive and impressionable. We don't actually chase the whale ourselves as follow the men who do. It is an irony I don't believe was lost on Melville.

As an aside, I may later recommend Ray Bradbury's Green Shadows White Whale which (kind of) recounts his exploits in Ireland writing the screenplay for Houston's original movie. It is a treat.

For now, here is The Whale for Mr. Bush's library. It would be nice to think he would read it and find a little skepticism in his own shrivelled soul. There is something far too unmeditated and rosy about our fearless leader's outlook on life that scares me. I wish for him a grim November and a hunt for the great, white enigma.

Librarian's note: For reasons unknown, this book lends itself to great illustrations and illustrators. One of my favorites is the Modern Library edition with the Rockwell Kent woodcuts. In fact, look at the Doubleday Shakespeare, Chaucer and Boccaccio editions with Kent illustrations, as well. Just wonderful.

SHAKESPEARE

What I claim here is the right of every Shakespeare-lover who has ever lived to paint his own portrait of the man.

Anthony Burgess (he of A Clockwork Orange) has 'painted' his own portrait, he would say, rather than that of the Bard. Shakespeare here is Borges' Everyman and Burgess makes the most of him. It is a sublimely demotic (a word Burgess uses with some regularity in this book) portrait. That phrase may seem contrary, but it is perfectly true. As has been noted by many, Will is somehow the heightened hoi polloi, the truly Great unwashed. Shakespeare isn't the anti-hero so much as the unter-hero.

Burgess' short counterfeit may not be history or biography, but it is eminently readable. Recommended here to Mr. Bush for his post-presidential library.

We need not repine at the lack of a satisfactory Shakespeare portrait. To see his face we need only look in a mirror. He is ourselves, ordinary suffering humanity, fired by moderate ambitions, concerned with money, the victim of desire, all too mortal. To his back, like a hump, was strapped a miraculous but somehow irrelevant talent. It is a talent which, more than any other that the world has seen, reconciles us to being human beings, unsatisfactory hybrids, not good enough for gods and not good enough for animals. We are all Will. Shakespeare is the name of one of our redeemers.

Amen.

LIBRARIAN'S NOTE

The catalog entries by, or related to, Mr. William Shakespeare require an addendum from the Librarian.

Believing the Shakespearean canon to have been written by Kit Marlowe, Bacon, Edward De Vere, Queen Elizabeth or Hughe the stable boy shows not a skeptical mind so much as a profound lack of imagination.

To the quibblers and their lot: get stuffed.

Thanks so much.

The sane man who is sane enough to see that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is sane enough not to worry whether he did or not.

G. K. Chesterton

THE MEANING OF SHAKESPEARE

"But to consider Shakespeare as a whole and at the same time to consider him in detail is... to consider him as a poet - for it is the poet who actually achieves that union of the many and the one about which philosophers have dreamed and metaphysicians argued. This book is written out of a conviction that Shakespeare is primarily a poet."

Harold C. Goddard's book (books, actually, for most readers it is a two-volume set) have ushered many English students into the world of Will. Given its bombastic title by an editor after Goddard's death, The Meaning of Shakespeare is actually a nicely poetic appellative if not taken too seriously (I nearly wrote 'literally'.) Goddard, a Quaker and pacifist, reads a grand criticism of the binary states of lust and violence in Shakespeare, perfectly stated in Lear's "To't luxury, pell mell; I lack soldiers." Of course, Goddard reads much else there as well.

Perhaps his greatest contribution to the critical canon is Goddard's beautiful exposition of the evolution of, and even genetic links between, the plays/poems of Shakespeare. He gives the individual galaxies a context which makes the entirety of the works into a single universe.

Reading Goddard is a pleasure in and of itself.

"Compared with many poets, Shakespeare was a master from the beginning. Compared with what he became, he had his apprenticeship."

The Librarian chooses The Meaning of Shakespeare for Mr. Bush's shelves. I have no fantasies (well, none I wish to share here.) I don't expect a grand exchange of ideas between the two - actually, three - gentlemen, but the books are there if Mr. Bush chooses to avail himself of them.

THE WIT AND WISDOM OF GEORGE W. BUSH

A DICTIONARY OF MODERN ENGLISH USAGE

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H. W. Fowler Second Edition revised by Sir Ernest Gowers, Oxford University Press...

How much more authoritative could a single volume possibly be?

If ever a President needed a style guide it is this one. Mr. Bush's grinding abuse of the language of Shakespeare makes one want to plug her ears and scream to the heavens for relief. While the snarkiest of my readers will no doubt recommend a good dose of Mr. Fowler's advice for me as well, it should be noted that at no time in my life have I ever, without irony, used the word "noo-kyu-lur." Agreed, that is a Texan mispronunciation, not a stylistic injury, it is nevertheless exemplary.

nominativus pendens. A form of ANACOLUTHON in which a sentence is begun with what appears to be the subject, but before the verb is reached something else is substituted in word or in thought, and the supposed subject is left in the air.

Dizzyingly erudite and oddly informal, Henry's entries show personality ('...left in the air') when most dictionaries, guides and usage aids are almost anesthetic in their objectivity. This volume ought to be in every book bag, on every shelf and in the center drawer of every desk, but particularly in that large desk at the top of the oval office.

French words. Use and Pronunciation. Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth - greater indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners.

If it showed any 'superior knowledge' then this entire blog would be an embarrassment, instead it is just bloviation. In the meantime I'll be reading Sir Ernest's revision for the sheer pleasure of the words.

THE LITTLE WORLD OF DON CAMILLO

Giovanni Guareschi's little books of stories about an Italian priest in a tiny village just after the war were wildly popular for years. I frankly have no idea if anyone reads them anywhere any more. Everyone should. Not for lessons on conflict resolution or practical politics, but just because they are wonderful stories. Just wonderful stories and there are not enough of those in this silly world.

When Don Camillo went to the Lord to show Him the basket containing the money and told Him that there was more than enough for the repair of the tower, Christ smiled in astonishment. "I guess your sermon did the trick, Don Camillo." "Naturally," replied Don Camillo. "You see You understand humanity, but I know Italians."

My old paperbacks of Don Camillo tales smell musty as old books should. I gentle them from the shelves for their annual reading and pray that they will last just one more time. Christ is always gracious.

THE ENCHAFÈD FLOOD

There are small volumes of criticism which seem almost to float above their proof text, gently bathing the works with a radiance that elevates both.
I would argue that Harold Bloom's Hamlet: Poem Unlimited is one such book, but more on that another time. For now, W. H. Auden's The Enchafèd Flood or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea is my choice. Extremely bridled, even oblique, Auden's very little (a bare 150 pages in the University press edition) book is from a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia, of all places, in 1949. Wordsworth, Melville, Cervantes, Hopkins, Mallarmé, even Lewis Carroll are all taken into consideration by Auden along with the Classical literature to which the Romantics are responding.
Beautiful in its prose, powerful in its authority and vast in its brevity, Auden's little, little book could teach us to read and write if we would have it.

We are less likely to be tempted by solitude into Promethean pride: we are far more likely to become cowards in the face of the tyrant who would compel us to lie in the service of the False City. It is not madness we need to flee but prostitution. Let us, reading the logs of their fatal but heroic voyages, remember their courage.

My God! but it is near perfection.

THE TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN CULTURE

This is Morris Berman's lightweight introduction to his heftier work Dark Ages America. But if Prof. Berman's insights are correct, then this is more than the vast majority of the population can handle anyway.

The idea of 'twilight' carries quite a lot of imaginative weight in this catalog, but I don't think the man for whom this Library is established will be capable of perceiving the implications of even this dimming metaphor. Still, Prof. Berman's book goes onto the shelves. It is an overview of the erosion of what might have been a great culture but has deteriorated into a self-indulgent, narcissistic, whiny nation of badly behaved adult-shaped toddlers. It is heart breaking.

Read Twilight even if Mr. Bush won't, or can't and become one of Berman's nomads. Please.

The inevitable result... is the inability of the American public to distinguish garbage from quality; in fact, as Paul Fussell points out, they identify garbage as quality.

JESUS AND YAHWEH

The actual, full name of Harold Bloom's book is Jesus and Yahweh The Names Divine. He points out that he intends the last word of the title to be both adjective and verb. That alone may be enough to make America's folk religionists, the Evangelicals, barking mad. But Bloom goes much, much further. His avowedly gnostic bent and understanding of both Judaism and Christianity - historical, literary, theological and mythological - is deep and wide.

As some will have noticed the Librarian's relationship to modern Christianity is both tortured and tortuous. That is as it may be, still the books go into the Catalog and on to the shelves of our mythical library.

Western monotheism, I would argue, has only two persuasive dramatizations of God: Yahweh and Allah. Jesus Christ is a remarkably mixed metaphor, while God the Father and the Holy Spirit are tenuous analogies. The American Jesus is quite another matter, because he is beyond metaphor and has subsumed the national myth of the New People chosen for a future of dreamlike happiness, compounded of emancipated selfishness and an inner solitude that names itself as true freedom... the American Jesus can be described without any recourse to theology.

The steadfast refusal of American Christianity to look beyond its own assuredness is reflected fully in the unmeditated actions of Mr. Bush and his friends. Absolute conviction, perfect self-righteousness, unwavering faith and an earnestness that acts as a brittle shell over it all makes this kind of belief painful and frightening. Oscar Wilde said "All bad poetry is sincere." I would abuse that line: "All bad theology is sincere; all sincere theology is bad."

Please add Mr. Bloom's book to the Catalog in hopes that one person will read it and, maybe just maybe, wonder.

THE AGE OF REASON BEGINS

At nearly any library sale, in many used-book stores of a particular type and in attics and basements across America, individual volumes and entire sets of The Story of Civilization molder. Once, the middle classes longed to be educated, or at least appear so. Will and Ariel Durant's massive overview of history is now neglected.

The Durants rejected what we would call the "cult of the expert" and the specialization of history. Where we no longer believe anyone who can't be cited as a 'professional' in their 'field' they believed an individual really could know more than one thing.

The Age of Reason Begins includes chapters on Shakespeare (not the Durant's best work - but I'm just being difficult), and Galileo, Descartes and Giordano Bruno; these are the individuals who made us who we are. Volume VII of this series also includes a section intriguingly
called "The Islamic Challenge." I'm betting our illustrious leader, for whom this library is to be erected, hasn't read even this much background on our Muslim friends in his entire life.

Anyway, the whole Story is placed in the catalog, but for now I recommend just this volume.

The inadequate and biased transmission of news, and the profitable dissemination of nonsense, barred the general public from any intelligent or concerted participation in politics, and made democracy impossible.

Please place your own snarky comments about the internet here. Thank you.

HOW TO BE A CANADIAN

And wouldn't we all like to be Canadian about now?

Canada is a very large nation, most of which is above water. A "continental cornice stone" located between Greenland and Irkutsk, Canada is where the bombs will land when the U.S. Strategic Defence Initiative takes effect.

Only people in Newfoundland have sex. Everyone else just talks about it. Incessantly.
... Do not talk about love, however. That makes Canadians uncomfortable.

So this is the ultimate guide on how to migrate north of the border (or whatever direction is required to meet your geographic necessities) and join our peace-loving, beer-quaffing friends. Lucinda, who is herself wild to don the maple leaf and say 'eh?' highly recommends both the book and the emigration - at least for all the non-Bushites.

We'll leave this in the Library so they'll know where we went and how to contact us. Last one out turn off the lights, eh?

THE EYRE AFFAIR

According to Mr. Fforde (don't ask me how he pronounces it) his publisher sent out nearly 3,500 galley proofs upon publication to reviewers, journalists &c. (when it would have been more normal to send out 500 or so) with a note: "Just read it!" The reason is that the book is simply unclassifiable. I sincerely doubt that anyone with all their faculties would attempt to provide a précis of the plot.

The Eyre Affair belongs in the catalog for its very Brit humor, clever wordplay and complete lack of respect for the Western canon. Any book that would cause utter consternation in the White House must be very, very good. This is, like many of my additions to the library, an idiosyncratic choice that amuses me. Having said that, I maintain that that is what makes the book essential. (Another that that for those who know.)

I opened the door on the security chain and found a small man in a lumpy corduroy suit. He was holding a dog-eared ID for me to see and politely raised his hat with a nervous smile. The Baconians were quite mad, but for the most part harmless. Their purpose in life was to prove that Francis Bacon and n