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The annual book round-ups are being released by the media, and despite the death of the novel, there are still some interesting things to talk about. We start with the “Season’s readings” from The Guardian, compiled by Ginny Hooker. Several notable notables have chimed in to contribute their recommendations:
- Gordon Brown recommends FDR: The First 100 Days — booooooooring. Cliche, once so prominent in politics, is on its way to the door. Obama thrived on the novelty, in the US, of Marxist imagery and London has Boris friggin Johnson (that’s a compliment) as its mayor (Johnson, by the way, recommend’s Boswell’s biography of Samuel Johnson). Brown would do well to start reading some Ayu Utami (my favorite Indonesian author) or Dewi Lestari. The liberal media would eat it up.
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recommends a book told from the perspective of a gecko called The Book of Chameleons. In a previous post, I suggested that, while the reports of the death of the novel had been greatly exaggerated, it was certainly losing its foothold at the top of the literary mountain. As such, expect more unconventional narratives like this to become the convention.
- Tariq Ali mentions Napoleon’s Accursed War, saying “One of the great epics of the 19th century, properly recovered for the first time by Fraser in all its ambiguities and tragedies, along with its popular heroism, it’s continuously moving, without a trace of sentimentality.” Might be worth picking up.
- William Boyd suggests that Nicolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is worth revisiting this year because a new translator, Donald Rayfield, alongside refurbished Chagall illustrations. The Garnett Press, run out of Queen Mary University of London, Rayfield’s HQ, asserts that “it will be as impossible to separate Chagall from Gogol as, say, Tenniel, from Lewis Carroll.” Doubtful. Recently, the Harn in Gainesville featured a Maggie Taylor reinterpretation of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland alongside reproductions of Tenniel’s illustrations. The exhibit drew everyone, including me, in for close study.
- Carmen Callil recommends So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. This is going on my list.
- Margaret Drabble offers up Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma, which also appears on the NYT list. Drabble writes that the book “is almost unremittingly tragic, and made me feel quite ill, but was well worth the effort – bravely published, bravely translated, a grim and important novel about a crisis in world history.” You could write that about any of a billion books (or even movies, if paraphrased) that have come out of China and frankly, I can’t take it anymore. I was so depressed after Li Yaotang / Ba Jin’s Cold Nights that I wanted to shoot someone. Still, Richard Holmes later recommends Xinran’s China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation which seems like it may be pretty good. Oral history isn’t just good, it is great, as a form of narrative wildly different from mere prose. And this is about one of the world’s most terrible tragedies, speaking in terms of opportunity cost — monetarily, to be sure, but even moreso otherwise.
- Mick Imlah’s The Lost Leader, recommended by Alan Hollinghurst, is apparently a tour de force 61 poem compilation covering Scotland, its people, its history — everything. As reviewer Kate Kellaway writes, “In a sense, The Lost Leader is the wrong title for a book in which Imlah sees to it – brilliantly – that none of his subjects gets away.” So add this one to the list.
- Hanif Kureishi recommends Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise. Ross writes a blog of the same name that had quite a few good posts before and during the book’s release, but has since become sadly dormant. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but nothing compares to dollar signs.
- David Lodge, who write a most recommended book about the sometimes funny adventures of deafness, offers up Captivated: JM Barrie, the Du Mauriers and the Dark Side of Neverland. According to him, the book “is a somewhat speculative but mostly persuasive study that reveals new complexities in the web with which the sinister Barrie entrapped the tragic Du Maurier family.” Whoa.
More 2008 in Books next post from The New York Times.
This is an open letter to the hordes of persons coming to the blog, looking at a post written… just a small little post… about Masaccio: who are you? How are you finding this blog? Is there some link…? Help!
In the last post, “The Angels Within,” I discussed the relationship of fiction (and literature) with the human condition. Kermode and Vargas Llosa argued that fiction filled a gap between who we are and who we want to be. Considering that economics is the study of human behavior and our choices in a world filled with scarcity, it ought to shed some light on our humanity to figure out how fiction serves these needs and if it continues to do so today.
Many authors believe it does not.
According to the Wikipedia article on the “Death of the Novel,” certainly the definitive source on the subject, authors have hypothesized the impending death of the novel for years. Critics as renowned as Barthes and authors as notorious as Vidal have weighed in on the subject. Actually, the article has some interesting notes that I wish to tie together. The article mentions various persons’ theories for the death of the novel, including “the rise of nihilism in European culture,” there being no significant people to write about, and “the mortality of the post-war generation of American novelists.”
All of these explanations are right. They each shed different light on the fundamental cause of the death of the novel, which, while perhaps exaggerated in scope, has indeed come to pass.
First, the nihilists. The rise of nihilism in European culture has not been limited to Europe; it has extended through to the entire West, and have no doubt, it will metastasize to the rest of the world as “progress” continues apace. The nihilism of European culture is not really consistent philosophical nihilism as such, rather it is an overweening meandering over the discursive landscape full of meaningless regurgitations, aphorisms, and moanings of half-formed ideas as though they are deep insights. Poppycock. It is no coincidence that this pervades the left-loving intelligentsia at the same time that the cost to the formation and transmission of information shoots through the floor. The staggering promulgation of media smashed the entrenched fragmented ethical hierarchies, thereby sweeping away the anchors of meaning and culture. The vapid utterings of so-called European nihilists remains.
Second, are there really no more important people to write about? Granted, it would be hard to come up with another Douglas MacArthur, of whom biographer Geoffrey Perret once wrote that he lived the most interesting American life. But the popularity of biography has not waned. Could this point be related to the nihilist point…? Perhaps there are merely no significant people to write about in the wake of determinism and the inevitability of history a la Marx. Since the argument is ludicrous on its face, we can dispense with it, but let us remember it for the sake of discussion later on.
Third, the mortality of post-war American novelists. I think that it might be a bit presumptuous to assume that the novel is dying because post-war American novelists are dying. New markets for literature are opening up all around the world as the cost to creating and publishing literature continues to decline. Some of my most interesting times in Indonesia were spent translating novels (although some of my worst times in Indonesia were doing the same… thinking of the translations of various Japanese novels far better read in their native language or English…). Putting that aside, the author’s mocking point was that “when a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him,” meaning that when the post-war generation died, the novels the like of which they penned die with them. The author may have unwittingly been right, but for the wrong reasons.
Entrepreneurs loaded the gun. Politicians like Reagan and Thatcher negligently waved the gun around shooting wildly. And so: Capitalism killed the novel. Some might not long mourn its departure, believing that nothing intrinsic about the novel was particularly valuable. This would be a mistake. Just as haiku, typically 17 syllables, matches the average length of a human utterance of 16-18 syllables, implying that the form of haiku conformed to an organic essence of humanity, so too did the novel conform to an essence of humanity. Just what that essence is must be the subject of another post.
Simply, there are two related problems for novels. One, other media (journalism, non-fiction, television, etc.) now tell the tales once told by novels more succinctly, which appeals to the West, a world in which the opportunity cost of time has quickly risen just as surely as information costs have precipitously dropped. The value of a tale as long and convoluted as War and Peace no longer seems as great as the value of reading three books on completely different subjects or more relevant NYT bestsellers or learning three foreign languages (which is probably what I could have done in the time it took me to deal with Tolstoy). And are we really that interested in realist fiction? No. What does it do for me that these new media don’t do better? Nothing. Two, the subject matter of novels that may best belong to novels — long tales of love, heroism, adventure, tragedy, romance, and even science fiction — can only be done so many times in so many ways before the demand in the market decreases. Now, of course the novel is not going anywhere and it is not really dead. This is what I meant by the exaggeration of the claim in terms of scope. However, as a percentage of the total fiction being created, the percentage must have waned over the past few years. There is nothing to suggest it will stop. Why would I read about a fake general whose life includes epic campaigns for freedom on three different continents over fifty years whose extraordinary rise was just as brilliant as his meteoric fall when I could just read about Douglas MacArthur? Take this example from Old Soldiers Never Die:
The general was the quintessential twentieth-century incarnation of the tragic hero as immortalized by great playwrights down the ages. MacArthur’s complex nature and dramatic life made him the living breathing brother of Coriolanus, Hamlet or Macbeth. Like the tragic heroes of the theater, he would finally be brought down not by his enemies but by an immutable fault line that ran through the bedrock of his character. When the SCAP got airborne from this remote coral island, MacArthur was set on a direct course to the ultimate destination of all tragic heroes: the spectacular, irreversible fall.
Ho! I’ll take another non-fiction biography, please. There are other benefits to reading these books over fictionalized versions. I learn history that I can talk about with other people that goes beyond dreamy (or dreary) discussions on character, the inevitable lessons that such fiction might have to offer. Now I can discuss real consequences as well as the imagined. That’s not a trivial benefit that factors into people’s economic cost-benefit analysis when deciding between fiction and “non-fiction.” So this is not at all to say that there has been a death of fiction, for as Milosz says, even completely factual biography is all fiction. But it is to say that the relative benefits of novels, whose ideas have been cast and recast in many ways, now pales compared to the relative benefits of non-fiction (a type of fiction in our terms) because its stories are always unique as well as useful in ways novels never could be.
This suggests many things. I think amongst them is that as novelists attempt to distinguish themselves from other novelists and their conventions for profit (profit need not be financial, it could be artistic satisfaction), they will adopt increasingly unconventional styles and themes. Unconventional styles could include narrative structure, the prose, or even settings. I am reminded again of Indonesia. While there, I had one particularly rewarding experience was translating Saman by Ayu Utami, an experience I don’t think I am likely to soon forget. It provided me with many colorful phrases that I would cannibalize for my own use of Bahasa. The words that conclude the book are frankly unfit to print, in any language (which makes me wonder about the seemingly demure young man and woman who recommended it to me), but it reminds me a lot of Night by Bilge Karasu, a Turkish writer. Both novels have met with wild acclaim and both jar the reader (see the NYT review’s take on this) with substantial leaps across time and frame of reference. At the end of both novels I was exhausted, but in an oddly satisfied way. Both novels continued to haunt me for years, and, in fact, haunt me to this day. We should expect more of it.
We may also expect the continued swelling of importance for journalism, be it by blog, radio wave, or television. Tom Wolfe, a tremendous novelist, lazily warns of the very real demise of the novel in a five part series on Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge series hosted on National Review. Wolfe described the problem as follows:
Right here, as we speak, the novel is dying a horrible death. It really is. It’s had it. And soon it’ll be in the same position as epic poetry was in the early 19th century. That had always been the great genre. But non-fiction will continue. And the memoir and autobiography will never die, never has died. And they’re interesting because they’re like Wikipedia, some of it may be true.
Robinson asks an excellent question related to my aims in this post, “When did it happen that in this country that the formative novelist, the great novelist is Mark Twain, when did it happen that American letters became possessed of precious, little stories instead of big, boisterous stories that fit the temper of the country itself?”
It happened soon after the Second World War. There was a key essay by Lionel Trilling, who was a [Professor at Columbia] who also had a huge following among, let us call, the “charming aristrocracy” and he said the day of the realistic novel is over. Its been done, its been done to death, and besides, we live in a fractured society now and you cannot do a slice of life and pretend that this slice of life is giving you all the life int he country. The future of the novel is in the novel of ideas.
Wolfe goes on to give some early novels of the late Norman Mailer as examples of this, including Barbary Coast. Robinson points out that Updike and Mailer criticize Wolfe’s work as journalism, not literature. Wolfe responds:
Something like journalism, which is written precisely so that the great masses can understand, would be looked down upon by the charming aristocracy. In fact, in American literature, an essentially journalistic approach has been behind– [PR interjection] TWAIN for goodness sake, Hemingway– every success. Hemingway went about writing novels that way, but even more to the point, Sinclair Lewis, our first Nobel prize winner in Literature, to do a novel about his hometown in Minnesota. He didn’t just draw on his memories, he went back! Taking notes on every area of life. John Steinbeck, in case of Grapes of the Wrath, went to the San Francisco News and volunteered to go out and write a series on migrant workers who were pouring in from the Dust Bowl in the mid-to-late 1930s. He didn’t know anything about them.
Were you to believe Wolfe and some of the claims made in this post, you might fear for the survival of the novel. But this is where the essence of humanity comes back in. No doubt the novel will survive so long as it continues to fill some sort of niche in human needs, but they may not be the consistently traditional forms we are used to (and largely bored by these days), nor will they probably resemble the tales told so often before. And for many story-telling purposes, they will be replaced by other fictions, be they blog posts, biographies, or scientific treatises.
As for the perpetuity of angels, they may truly be nearer death than the novel. The challenges presented by so many combating forces for the increasingly partitioned territory of identity (states, tribes, religions, tv shows, sports, games all now make claims!) tugs people in many directions at once, and they absorb more information from more sources than ever before. News, jargon, and blog posts such as this one replace the fictions of complementarity once known as angels. Their survival depends on the ability of angels to represent something that can never be described by consistent arguments and discrete lexicons. They depend on the inexplicable and our willingness to admit the existence of the inexplicable in the full mysteries of the universe.
Recently, the author of Illicit Cultural Property (ICP) has taken aim at two critics of the “cultural property” regime now ascendant in legal systems throughout the world. I enjoy his blog and respect his generally well-thought points of view. For the first critic, the author shows that the response to the publication of James Cuno’s Who Owns Antiquity? seems predictably vitriolic, if Lee Rosenbaum is any indication. No doubt, part of Cuno’s thesis, that the notion of cultural property has been perverted and that laws protecting it stem more from public choice explanations than the preservation of culture per se, would be expected to upset those who favor the status quo and get excited about any extension of regulation into this field. But the real question is: who is right?
You know where I stand on this: I believe Cuno, and those who agree with him, are certainly on the right track. The author of ICP respects Cuno, but is probably not one to join his bandwagon. But one of those who apparently respects and agrees with Cuno is The New York Times’ Critic-at-large and former chief music critic, Edward Rothstein. His column in the NYT, “Antiquities, the World is your Homeland“, received a critique from ICP. Though the shots seem designed to torpedo Rothstein’s column, they each widely miss the mark. His main criticisms are (1) Rothstein confuses cultural property with cultural heritage, (2) Rothstein is unaware of the benefits of NAGPRA, (3) if cultural heritage becomes the exclusive paradigm, then there will be no justification for locating many antiquities in “encyclopedic” museums, and (4) Rothstein does not understand the word “illicit” in the context of this legal discourse.
So let’s start from the top.
1. Rothstein confuses cultural property with cultural heritage
The author of ICP writes:
…he makes a major blunder by confusing cultural property with cultural heritage. He mistakenly argues that nations of origin view antiquities as cultural property. Not so, in fact most would use the term heritage, or an approximation of that in their native language. I think cultural property is a narrower subset of a larger body of what can be called cultural heritage.
First, let us look at the author’s assertion in the light most favorable to it by assuming that the author is right. Let us say that he does make the mistake of confusing cultural property with cultural heritage. Why is it a major blunder? No explanation. What does it mean? Apparently, the main sin is that cultural property is just a “subset” of cultural heritage. Therefore, the author implies that what Rothstein was really describing is cultural heritage, not cultural property. Unfortunately, we are left to wonder why this even remotely matters. It seems that it is a blunder insofar as it was mislabeled. So what? The difference between cultural heritage and cultural property is, at best, esoteric, which is not to say the difference is unimportant. Far from it. But it is to say that the author’s argument does not depend on the difference. Therefore, even seen in its best light, this is not by any means a major blunder.
Now let us assume that the author is wrong. Maybe Rothstein isn’t confusing the two. Rothstein uses the term “cultural property” 18 times by my count. In an early use of the term, Rothstein explains one of the seminal definitions of the term:
In its statement Unesco asserted that such “cultural property” was part of the “cultural heritage of all mankind” and deserved special protection.
This explicitly shows that Rothstein is aware of the distinction between cultural property and cultural heritage, at least in global terms. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t commit the “major blunder” of confusing them, only that he is aware of the difference. Of course, if he is aware and still commits the sin, the sin’s commission might be all the more loathsome. As we shall see, this is probably not the case. The first time the word is used, Rothstein compares cultural property to material property in that it has changed hands a lot. True, so that use of the word checks out. The second use was the excerpt I mentioned. That checks out. We can go through all 18 of them, as I have, and they all check out as perfectly acceptable uses of the term “cultural property.”
By contrast, it seems that the author of ICP has misunderstood the words being used. He believes that Rothstein is confusing the two, when in fact, he explicitly mentions that cultural property was originally conceived as a subset of cultural heritage, just as the author of ICP argues. The tricky part is interpreting Rothstein’s argument. Consider this excerpt:
Italy, for example, affirms as its cultural property “virtually every kind of object produced in or imported to the land we now call Italy over 1,200 years of recorded human history.”
One might consider Rothstein’s argument to be exactly what the author of ICP’s is: that cultural property is being confused with cultural heritage! Rothstein argues that the alleged protectors of cultural property, such as Italy’s policymakers, are making the term so expansive in scope that cultural heritage itself is protected. This, of course, would be an absurd extension of government power and one that should be subjected to extreme scrutiny, which is one of Cuno’s points.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Soon, I will return to more philosophical posts, but here I wish to remain a while in my mode of arguing that the market best allocates resources for art — as opposed to the government provision of the same. In this post from More Intelligent Life, Stephen Hugh-Jones writes of the National Gardens Scheme in the United Kingdom. According to the author:
They are among 3,500 gardens in England and Wales (the Scots, of course, have their own scheme) open to visitors for a day or two each year under the aegis of the 80-year-old National Gardens Scheme. To find what is open where and when, search the website by county or postcode. Habitual garden-strollers use the NGS’s annual directory. Selling 70,000 copies a year at £7.99 ($16) in even the most urban bookshops, it is by now so well-known that is called simply “The Yellow Book“. [...]
The gardens may be huge or tiny, of modern design or traditional. Your hosts may be the Earl and Countess of Portsmouth or, much more likely, plain Mr and Mrs John Smith. The tea and cake that many of them serve will come from the house kitchen, and may well be dispensed by the lady of the house herself, while her husband does the hard work of talking to visitors about his plants. Your fellow-visitors, you’ll find, are mostly pensioners; gardens don’t offer the youthful thrills of sports cars, seduction or sand-castles. Alas, it’s not pure loss: old people don’t scream and scramble or (on the whole) seduce all over other people’s herbaceous borders, but they do like company.
Charity is a powerful market force. For many years, people have thought that economics only contains the domain of finances. Not so. Economics is the study of all of human behavior, or “human action,” and has for many years shown that charity may do much more good than government intervention — and where it is most desired. For these pensioners, I imagine the NGS is a wonderful getaway. The NGS website gives a small description of its charity element:
Few people realise that through this we raise £2 million each year for nursing, caring and gardening charities. Since 1927 we have raised over £40 million (£22 million in the last 10 years). Our office is small so most of the money goes straight to the charities we support.
I wonder how long the office would remain small if it became a government office. Okay, done wondering.
Do you feel like wasting a few hours exploring the comforting design and, dare I say, the future? Go on to MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind. I don’t know about you, but I am one of those comforted by the sterility of the future. Blame it on the interior designers of the starship Enterprise.
Style.com reports on a new substance that may give rise to some seriously dark coloring:
Researchers at New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered what’s being called the “darkest substance ever” (after Dick Cheney’s heart, presumably). The material is made from carbon nanotubes and is supposedly the closest thing yet to ideal black—meaning that it absorbs all light, regardless of its angle or wavelength. Something tells us we’ll be seeing it on the runways this fall.
But the fun with black carbon nanotubes doesn’t end there! Far from it. RPI’s researchers have developed new batteries based on them!
Rensselaer researchers infused this paper with aligned carbon nanotubes, which give the device its black color. The nanotubes act as electrodes and allow the storage devices to conduct electricity. The device, engineered to function as both a lithium-ion battery and a supercapacitor, can provide the long, steady power output comparable to a conventional battery, as well as a supercapacitor’s quick burst of high energy.
The device can be rolled, twisted, folded, or cut into any number of shapes with no loss of mechanical integrity or efficiency. The paper batteries can also be stacked, like a ream of printer paper, to boost the total power output.
Stylish and cool — but not literally. The original BBC article on the subject suggests these pragmatic uses for this new “darkness” that may have some implications for the arts: Nano-particle paint to prevent corrosion and Thermo-chromic glass to regulate light.
I’m guessing that most of you are as ignorant of technology as I feel nowadays. Back in the DOS era, I was on the cutting edge. I could edit an autoexec.bat, config.sys, or command.com file with the best of them. Windows 3.1 kept me in the game, but later Windows operating systems reduced DOS to some kind of little screwdriver, whereas before it had been an all-purpose tool for doing things. To this day, DOS remains in my view far more efficient and fun than Windows (hence DOS-like operating systems flourishing amongst tech gurus I suppose). But that’s a discussion for another day.
One of the biggest developments in the Web 2.0, if you will, has been the massive amounts of information now made available to anyone who wants them. A good way to store information is a Wiki, named after Wikipedia, which runs off MediaWiki files. Nowadays, some hosts have their own Wiki products, like SocialText. You can sign up with SocialText and they will give you an easy to use Wiki right away! Anyone can edit it! That’s pretty cool. Unfortunately, I found it a bit unwieldy for the purposes of the Artist Rights and Reproductions Database. After two months of testing and prodding, I decided to move in a different direction. However, I want to emphasize that Wikis are tremendous tools for improving information flow and work design in the work place. They can save on all kinds of costs, such as printing, paper, and ink. I’d think time and energy as well.
Anyway, I went back to the basics, which turned out to be far from basic: MediaWiki. You’d think it would be easier to install but it depends on all kinds of things (mySQL, PHP settings…). That’s probably why I am still trouble-shooting trying to figure it out, which is a real mental grind for those of us who were long ago left behind by technology. Stay tuned for results.
And if you want to have your VERY OWN WIKI, follow these instructions. They’re pretty good. But if a problem springs up, you’re on your own. My recommendation: install the latest version MediaWiki with a MySQL 5.0 database and PHP 5. Period. I installed an older Wiki (1.6.10) on a MySQL 5.0 with PHP 4.
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
So writes ee cummings. I thought it best to maintain a more official reserve of up-to-date thoughts on the art community and issues relating to the Artist Rights and Reproductions Database (woefully, awkwardly: ARRD). Please forgive me for the nonsense that I write. Feel free to comment, link, or suggest.
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