At long last, I've seen Satyajit Ray's Pather Pachali, the first part of the Apu Trilogy, hailed everywhere as one of the great cinematic works, and I quite liked it. Ray's first film, I prefer to think of it as a work of Indian Neo-Realism; the story of a poor rural family, living on hope and dreams as they make their way through a variety of struggles, it's not all that far in tone from the work of De Sica or Rossellini, although Ray doesn't have quite their taste for sentimentality or for milking heartbreak to the last drop. While Ravi Shankar's restless sitar keys heightened action, it is never pushy, and often notably absent, when things turn doleful. The cinematography of Subrata Mitra, likewise, is perfectly unobtrusive, accent on perfect. Ray doesn't stint on the drama of these lives, but he prefers to look at its sadness in the face with prolonged silent close-ups, as in the film's final scene.
The family lives in a rural area and has fallen on hard times, as they've lost a good part of their land through debt, and no money is coming in. The father, who dreams of being a writer, makes do as a farm laborer; he fades in and out of the story as he cheerily struggles to find work, ever trusting the whims of Providence and good fortune. The mother works as a seamstress and tries to look after the two children, the daughter Durga and the boy Apu, to whom she can afford to feed little more than rice. Also under the family care is the aunt, a decrepit, hunchbacked, toothless and thoroughly weather-beaten old crone.
There is not an exceptional amount of plot to Pather Pachali, a title which for no obvious reason means "Song of the Open Road," although the road doesn't really figure into the story until the last scene. It is a series of slices of life about a family that can rely on nothing but hope; as the family finances dwindle, the father counts on his boss, a farmer and a "good man," to pay him the back wages the family so desperately needs. While the father is out looking for work, the mother works relentlessly to hold the family together. Durga, in a good-hearted effort to help the useless aunt, steals fruit from the neighbor's yard; the neighbors, who are completely unsympathetic, accuse her of stealing more and bring shame on the family. Apu, who is born just as the film opens, serves mostly as an observer of all that happens around him. As the family's domestic crisis worsens, their prospects look up and down at the same time -- the father is promised a job that doesn't pan out, then one that does. In the intervening period when he is away from home, the monsoon rains bring tragedy; when he returns home, flush with small-sccale success, his happiness is short-lived.
The last we see of the family is as they ride off to a new place, hoping for a kinder future. In a prolonged take, the father who has given up his dreams stares thoughtfull ahead; the mother beside him looks directly at us, as if staring into the uncertain future, breaks down and weeps. No music is needed. Their anguish burns right through the screen, and we do not need to be told how to feel.
Monday, September 30, 2002
Sunday, September 29, 2002
Proust Moment, September 29, 2002
Being and Sleepiness
Sleep brings with it a sense of illogic and timelessness, and when we awake our first order of business is to get our bearings straight. Marcel, laying in bed, yearns for a sense of disorder, of freedom from the rational world.
"...for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depth of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilization, and out of a half-visualized succession of oil lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego."
--"Overture," Swann's Way
Being and Sleepiness
Sleep brings with it a sense of illogic and timelessness, and when we awake our first order of business is to get our bearings straight. Marcel, laying in bed, yearns for a sense of disorder, of freedom from the rational world.
"...for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depth of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilization, and out of a half-visualized succession of oil lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego."
--"Overture," Swann's Way
Saturday, September 28, 2002
Proust Moment, September 28, 2002
Maiden voyage
Marcel hears a train, judges its distance; he thinks of the traveller on the train, who is on unfamiliar turf, who is thinking of the events of the evening past and is looking forward to going home. Marcel strikes a match to check his watch: nearly midnight. His thoughts of the man on the train now connect with an invalid in a strange hotel, who sees a light under his door, thinks it is, finally, morning, only to see the light shut out and the dread settling in, of a long endless night ahead. Marcel sleeps fitfully, dreaming of the past, of a great-uncle who pulled his curls when he was a small child. He dreams, too, of women:
"Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake. The rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago: my cheek was still warm with her kiss, my body bent beneath the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had known in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy. And then, gradually, the memory of her would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my dream."
--"Overture," Swann's Way
Maiden voyage
Marcel hears a train, judges its distance; he thinks of the traveller on the train, who is on unfamiliar turf, who is thinking of the events of the evening past and is looking forward to going home. Marcel strikes a match to check his watch: nearly midnight. His thoughts of the man on the train now connect with an invalid in a strange hotel, who sees a light under his door, thinks it is, finally, morning, only to see the light shut out and the dread settling in, of a long endless night ahead. Marcel sleeps fitfully, dreaming of the past, of a great-uncle who pulled his curls when he was a small child. He dreams, too, of women:
"Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake. The rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago: my cheek was still warm with her kiss, my body bent beneath the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had known in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy. And then, gradually, the memory of her would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my dream."
--"Overture," Swann's Way
A bit of a pushy Houellebecq defense from Salman Rushdie in the Guardian, although I did laugh at the "first Rushdie in space" joke. He's right overall, eventhough he falls into grossly overpraising the writer by way of making a sympathetic case. The piece is at its strongest when it comes to attacking the autobiographical criticism that cases such as these bring about:
Houellebecq's novel Platform has also been cited in the case. In the novel, the central character, also called Michel, learns that his father has been murdered by a Muslim man and, through the course of the book, makes a number of harsh and derogatory remarks about Muslims. It has been suggested that in these diatribes the author is getting even for difficulties in his private life. Michel Houellebecq's real name is Michel Thomas. He took his grandmother's surname after his mother married a Muslim and converted to Islam. In our personality-cultist age, in which a writer's biography is firmly believed to hold the key to the meaning of his novels, in which the fictionality of fiction is routinely called into question and novels are thought of as real life in disguise, this detail of Houellebecq's life will prompt, has prompted, many a loud "ah-ha!"
But, and again but. Anyone who cares about literature should, when such ah-has are heard, at once defend the autonomy of the literary text, its right to be considered on its own terms, as if the author were as anonymous as, well, the authors of the sacred texts. And within a literary text, it must be possible to create characters of every sort. If novelists can't depict Nazis or bigots without being accused of being Nazis or bigots, then they can't do their work properly.
And one recalls, a bit dimly over the years, an offending character named Salman in Rushdie's own Satanic Verses.
Houellebecq's novel Platform has also been cited in the case. In the novel, the central character, also called Michel, learns that his father has been murdered by a Muslim man and, through the course of the book, makes a number of harsh and derogatory remarks about Muslims. It has been suggested that in these diatribes the author is getting even for difficulties in his private life. Michel Houellebecq's real name is Michel Thomas. He took his grandmother's surname after his mother married a Muslim and converted to Islam. In our personality-cultist age, in which a writer's biography is firmly believed to hold the key to the meaning of his novels, in which the fictionality of fiction is routinely called into question and novels are thought of as real life in disguise, this detail of Houellebecq's life will prompt, has prompted, many a loud "ah-ha!"
But, and again but. Anyone who cares about literature should, when such ah-has are heard, at once defend the autonomy of the literary text, its right to be considered on its own terms, as if the author were as anonymous as, well, the authors of the sacred texts. And within a literary text, it must be possible to create characters of every sort. If novelists can't depict Nazis or bigots without being accused of being Nazis or bigots, then they can't do their work properly.
And one recalls, a bit dimly over the years, an offending character named Salman in Rushdie's own Satanic Verses.
Friday, September 27, 2002
Proust Moment, September 27, 2002
Dreams of Sleep
Marcel remembers how he used to go to bed early. He would read a little, then put his book away and douse his candle, and would soon be asleep and dreaming ... of putting his book away, dousing the candle, and of what he had just been reading, and of becoming the character in the book. Then, "it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former spirit must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would seperate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed."
--"Overture," Swann's Way
Dreams of Sleep
Marcel remembers how he used to go to bed early. He would read a little, then put his book away and douse his candle, and would soon be asleep and dreaming ... of putting his book away, dousing the candle, and of what he had just been reading, and of becoming the character in the book. Then, "it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former spirit must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would seperate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed."
--"Overture," Swann's Way
Morning with Melville: "The `Gees" and "I and my Chimney" were the selections, neither of which I fell in love with, although the longer latter story was better than the former. Melville needs room to move about in and his shorter short stories don't appeal to me much.
I am preparing for a Tuesday meeting of my book club, which meets bi-monthly at Tree of Life Temple in Columbia. Every meeting we deal with a different story or book, each led by a different member. This time around the discussion is on "Bartleby" and I'm the discussion leader. I tend to look forward to meetings where I have to run the show because it lets you really submerge deeply into a work. In the past I've done The Tempest, A Doll's House, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Lolita, and A Passage to India, and some others I don't recall right off. My usual method is to spend the advance time reading the book over and over and trying to come up to speed as well as possible on the author's life, which is usually neccessary at some level to keep the book in its proper focus. I started reading the Robertson-Lorant bio of Melville, which is superb but I likely won't finish it in time. At least there's Elizabeth Hardwick's little Penguin Lives book as a back-up.
Knowing the work, though, is the main thing, so I spend a lot of time reading and re-reading that and supplementing it with some other stories and poetry -- try to submerge myself not just in the story but in Melville's vast rolling prose.
"Bartleby" is one of those stories that grows and grows the more you read it; it keeps deepening in all its little particulars. It's a story about a bourgeois Wall Street lawyer who hires a dapper but depressing guy named Bartleby as a copyist. Bartleby starts off great guns, but within days refuses to work any longer; "I prefer not to," he announces. The normal response of any employer would be to fire him on the spot, as the lawyer acknowledges; but instead, he is rather confused by Bartleby's sudden change, and isn't quite sure what to do. Bartleby doesn't make things easier for him, as he refuses to do even the simplest task; refuses not with hostility but with a quiet and frustratingly obdurate resolve. "Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance," the lawyer tells us.
Getting rid of him becomes impossible -- Bartleby virtually takes up residence in the office, doing nothing. He isn't lazy; he's what most of us would call "burned out," but the great thing about the story is that it escapes any such easy answer. The sickness of Bartleby, the lawyer discovers, has more to do with his soul -- life no longer seems to have value to him, and the drudgery of copying dull legal documents only underscores the point. Is Bartleby in need of a career change, or career counseling? Again, Melville doesn't let us off the hook, as Bartleby grows in dimension from a man refusing to do his job to a human being turning his face to fate and the universe and saying "No, I won't do it."
I won't, in other words, assume my designated role. My role, my job, will take a different path: that of the man who stands up and says, against all reason, "Nothing doing." It's not a question of finding the right job -- this becomes his job.
The lawyer is befuddled; he himself is a purely superficial sort who has made a comfortable living on the bureaucratic side of his profession, one free of any challenges, anything that upsets his routine: "I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best." Up to the events of the story, the only thing that had upset his plans toward this end had been the termination of the office of Master of Chancery, "inasmuch as I had counted upon a life-lease of the profits, whereas I only received those of a few short years."
Bartleby of course is something else altogether. Bartleby, by sitting in his chair day in, day out, staring into space, confuses him, shakes the lawyer up, as he would most of us: Bartleby rattles his convictions as to what it means to be alive and human, and what the limits of comfort really are. Bartleby is this clinging shadow to his life, the problem that literally won't go away; even after the lawyer finally brings himself to fire Bartleby -- begging him to the end to give him a reason not to -- Bartleby won't leave the office. He sticks to his "job" to the end; the lawyer has to find a new office, leaving Bartleby behind. The new, much less sympathetic occupants of the office send Bartleby to jail, where he dies.
It isn't until later that the lawyer learns that Bartleby, like himself, had seen a job come to an end -- a post as a clerk with the Dead Letter office in Washinton:
Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
This is not a lawyer much given to considering the human condition -- it took a soul-sick employee to do that, to force him to look outside his closed-in, social-climbing, money-grubbing path of least resistance; to ponder, as he never has before, just what life and purpose really mean.
Welcome, as Bob Dylan would put it, to the land of the living dead.
I am preparing for a Tuesday meeting of my book club, which meets bi-monthly at Tree of Life Temple in Columbia. Every meeting we deal with a different story or book, each led by a different member. This time around the discussion is on "Bartleby" and I'm the discussion leader. I tend to look forward to meetings where I have to run the show because it lets you really submerge deeply into a work. In the past I've done The Tempest, A Doll's House, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Lolita, and A Passage to India, and some others I don't recall right off. My usual method is to spend the advance time reading the book over and over and trying to come up to speed as well as possible on the author's life, which is usually neccessary at some level to keep the book in its proper focus. I started reading the Robertson-Lorant bio of Melville, which is superb but I likely won't finish it in time. At least there's Elizabeth Hardwick's little Penguin Lives book as a back-up.
Knowing the work, though, is the main thing, so I spend a lot of time reading and re-reading that and supplementing it with some other stories and poetry -- try to submerge myself not just in the story but in Melville's vast rolling prose.
"Bartleby" is one of those stories that grows and grows the more you read it; it keeps deepening in all its little particulars. It's a story about a bourgeois Wall Street lawyer who hires a dapper but depressing guy named Bartleby as a copyist. Bartleby starts off great guns, but within days refuses to work any longer; "I prefer not to," he announces. The normal response of any employer would be to fire him on the spot, as the lawyer acknowledges; but instead, he is rather confused by Bartleby's sudden change, and isn't quite sure what to do. Bartleby doesn't make things easier for him, as he refuses to do even the simplest task; refuses not with hostility but with a quiet and frustratingly obdurate resolve. "Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance," the lawyer tells us.
Getting rid of him becomes impossible -- Bartleby virtually takes up residence in the office, doing nothing. He isn't lazy; he's what most of us would call "burned out," but the great thing about the story is that it escapes any such easy answer. The sickness of Bartleby, the lawyer discovers, has more to do with his soul -- life no longer seems to have value to him, and the drudgery of copying dull legal documents only underscores the point. Is Bartleby in need of a career change, or career counseling? Again, Melville doesn't let us off the hook, as Bartleby grows in dimension from a man refusing to do his job to a human being turning his face to fate and the universe and saying "No, I won't do it."
I won't, in other words, assume my designated role. My role, my job, will take a different path: that of the man who stands up and says, against all reason, "Nothing doing." It's not a question of finding the right job -- this becomes his job.
The lawyer is befuddled; he himself is a purely superficial sort who has made a comfortable living on the bureaucratic side of his profession, one free of any challenges, anything that upsets his routine: "I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best." Up to the events of the story, the only thing that had upset his plans toward this end had been the termination of the office of Master of Chancery, "inasmuch as I had counted upon a life-lease of the profits, whereas I only received those of a few short years."
Bartleby of course is something else altogether. Bartleby, by sitting in his chair day in, day out, staring into space, confuses him, shakes the lawyer up, as he would most of us: Bartleby rattles his convictions as to what it means to be alive and human, and what the limits of comfort really are. Bartleby is this clinging shadow to his life, the problem that literally won't go away; even after the lawyer finally brings himself to fire Bartleby -- begging him to the end to give him a reason not to -- Bartleby won't leave the office. He sticks to his "job" to the end; the lawyer has to find a new office, leaving Bartleby behind. The new, much less sympathetic occupants of the office send Bartleby to jail, where he dies.
It isn't until later that the lawyer learns that Bartleby, like himself, had seen a job come to an end -- a post as a clerk with the Dead Letter office in Washinton:
Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
This is not a lawyer much given to considering the human condition -- it took a soul-sick employee to do that, to force him to look outside his closed-in, social-climbing, money-grubbing path of least resistance; to ponder, as he never has before, just what life and purpose really mean.
Welcome, as Bob Dylan would put it, to the land of the living dead.
Thursday, September 26, 2002
John Derbyshire in National Review Online takes on the much-maligned Michel Houellebecq, whom I once referred to as a
"frowzy French asshole." Houellebecq, who seems to me to be entirely too schizophrenic to be taken seriously at all, let alone offending one's tender sensibilities, is in trouble in France for calling Islam a stupid religion. France, as everyone from Derbyshire to Michael Graham notes, is a nation of tender sensibilitities -- or so I'm told; hell, I've hardly been out of the South -- but I find it hard to look at this case from across the shore with my usual sympathy for the writer in question or my hatred for the interceding authorities.
It's totally unacceptable, of course; all people should be totally free to call Muslims or Christians or atheists stupid. And yet I'm strangely indifferent where this case is concerned, probably because it all has the odd whiff of unintended but no less gratefully accepted free publicity. I have this innate sense that the courts will come down on his side for cultural reasons, and I can't imagine Houellebecq ever seeing the inside of a jail.
Look at Sartre.
Look at Baudrillard -- whom for years I've always imagined was a hoax -- who said of the 9/11 victims: ''In terms of collective drama, 'we can say that the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them -- the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel.''
Do we really yearn for a future in which French intellectuals can no longer be the laughing-stock of the world? If France starts telling its published intellectuals that they no longer have the freedom to bury their heads in their ass as much as their grandfathers buried theirs in the sand when Hitler arrived in 1936, then the terrorists will have truly won.
"frowzy French asshole." Houellebecq, who seems to me to be entirely too schizophrenic to be taken seriously at all, let alone offending one's tender sensibilities, is in trouble in France for calling Islam a stupid religion. France, as everyone from Derbyshire to Michael Graham notes, is a nation of tender sensibilitities -- or so I'm told; hell, I've hardly been out of the South -- but I find it hard to look at this case from across the shore with my usual sympathy for the writer in question or my hatred for the interceding authorities.
It's totally unacceptable, of course; all people should be totally free to call Muslims or Christians or atheists stupid. And yet I'm strangely indifferent where this case is concerned, probably because it all has the odd whiff of unintended but no less gratefully accepted free publicity. I have this innate sense that the courts will come down on his side for cultural reasons, and I can't imagine Houellebecq ever seeing the inside of a jail.
Look at Sartre.
Look at Baudrillard -- whom for years I've always imagined was a hoax -- who said of the 9/11 victims: ''In terms of collective drama, 'we can say that the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them -- the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel.''
Do we really yearn for a future in which French intellectuals can no longer be the laughing-stock of the world? If France starts telling its published intellectuals that they no longer have the freedom to bury their heads in their ass as much as their grandfathers buried theirs in the sand when Hitler arrived in 1936, then the terrorists will have truly won.
Every David Thomson column for Salon has the same message: "My best days are behind me, but I can still get it up."
Russ Fischer in Blogcritics references this excellent article by John Densmore of the Doors and this stellar response by Tom Waits regarding the use of rock songs in commercials. I can only cheer after a summer in which the only TV show I watch with any regularity -- Big Brother 3 -- was interrupted ad nauseam by a Citrona ad that used The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" to hawk booze to upwardly mobile drones. The Clash, I thought sadly, of all people. Twenty-five years ago they were pure leftists -- horribly naive, sure, but at least they were committed to ideas, principles, a certain standard of political morality, thumbing their nose at the idea of selling out. Money, alas, gets to almost everyone in the end, it seems. Densmore is not the greedhead that most other rock stars are, thankfully, but what if the situation were reversed and he was in the shoes of the members of the Clash, who haven't been heard from in years?
As soon as I saw the Citrona ad, the first thing that came to mind was "Take a good hard look, Rage Against the Machine. That's your future you're staring at."
It's always such a bother, such a letdown when you're listening to the radio and a great song starts up -- only to sell cars or clothes. Waits said it best:
Corporations are hoping to hijack a culture's memories for their product. They want an artist's audience, credibility, good will and all the energy the songs have gathered as well as given over the years. They suck the life and meaning from the songs and impregnate them with promises of a better life with their product.
As soon as I saw the Citrona ad, the first thing that came to mind was "Take a good hard look, Rage Against the Machine. That's your future you're staring at."
It's always such a bother, such a letdown when you're listening to the radio and a great song starts up -- only to sell cars or clothes. Waits said it best:
Corporations are hoping to hijack a culture's memories for their product. They want an artist's audience, credibility, good will and all the energy the songs have gathered as well as given over the years. They suck the life and meaning from the songs and impregnate them with promises of a better life with their product.
Wednesday, September 25, 2002
Michael Lewis' columns on parenting in Slate.com are so drooly and earnest I can barely stand to read them. Warning: Bob Greene used to write this kind of crap and you see what happened to him.
Updike weighs in on Mistry.
Points worth pondering:
*"Mistry harks back to the nineteenth-century novelists, for whom every detail, every urban alley, every character however lowly added a vital piece to the full social picture, and for whom every incident illustrated the eventually crushing weight of the world. Liveliness, precision, weight: these old-fashioned mimetic virtues, and the broad sympathy that calls them into being, cannot be taken for granted during a time when the producers and consumers alike of fiction have had their sensibilities early deadened by an incessant barrage of visual entertainment as insubstantial as it is eye-catching. In a world of hurry and quick artistic killing, Mistry has kept the patience to tease narrative and moral interest out of domestic life, in a subcontinent of more than a billion striving, often desperate souls."
This is, I think, why so many readers of fiction will respond to the novel: this scrupulous nineteenth-century yearning for photographic reality.
* I have not encountered another novel, except the Marquis de Sade's "The 120 Days of Sodom," in which excrement plays so prominent a role.
I was thinking more Joyce than de Sade; you see that a lot in Ulysses, this focus on body odor, gas, shit. Joyce wanted to rub the reader's nose in it and I suppose Mistry does too for a different purpose. He wants to put us in this family, because in almost any family there's likely going to be a more natural ease with the topic of waste and hygiene. Would I be too far off the mark to say that families carry with them a smell recognizeable only to its own members? Mistry wants us to get a good whiff of the Chenoys.
* "The reader is moved, even to tears, by these rites of passage among characters we have lived with long enough to feel as family. Against the suspicion that the tears are too easily earned, it could be argued that family matters penetrate to our deepest level; they are the mill that grinds our flour, the lathe that gives us our shape."
Absolutely.
Points worth pondering:
*"Mistry harks back to the nineteenth-century novelists, for whom every detail, every urban alley, every character however lowly added a vital piece to the full social picture, and for whom every incident illustrated the eventually crushing weight of the world. Liveliness, precision, weight: these old-fashioned mimetic virtues, and the broad sympathy that calls them into being, cannot be taken for granted during a time when the producers and consumers alike of fiction have had their sensibilities early deadened by an incessant barrage of visual entertainment as insubstantial as it is eye-catching. In a world of hurry and quick artistic killing, Mistry has kept the patience to tease narrative and moral interest out of domestic life, in a subcontinent of more than a billion striving, often desperate souls."
This is, I think, why so many readers of fiction will respond to the novel: this scrupulous nineteenth-century yearning for photographic reality.
* I have not encountered another novel, except the Marquis de Sade's "The 120 Days of Sodom," in which excrement plays so prominent a role.
I was thinking more Joyce than de Sade; you see that a lot in Ulysses, this focus on body odor, gas, shit. Joyce wanted to rub the reader's nose in it and I suppose Mistry does too for a different purpose. He wants to put us in this family, because in almost any family there's likely going to be a more natural ease with the topic of waste and hygiene. Would I be too far off the mark to say that families carry with them a smell recognizeable only to its own members? Mistry wants us to get a good whiff of the Chenoys.
* "The reader is moved, even to tears, by these rites of passage among characters we have lived with long enough to feel as family. Against the suspicion that the tears are too easily earned, it could be argued that family matters penetrate to our deepest level; they are the mill that grinds our flour, the lathe that gives us our shape."
Absolutely.
I do not share godofthemachine's diss of J.D. Salinger, if only because I've already read similar opinions too many times. Salinger is a dream of a writer, but because of his subject -- children, both the anti-social and the overly bright variety -- he gets unfortunately tagged as this writer you're supposed to grow out of, that he's someone you "relate" to at a tortured adolescent age and then shuck off after college. Somewhere in the process, his artistry and elegant prose gets dismissed. Franny and Zooey is a wonderful novel (Janet Malcolm's piece in the New York Review of Book last year is a brilliant reminder of why) and people forget about the brilliant social comedy of "Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters" or that immaculate story "To Esme -- With Love and Squalor" or the brilliant "The Laughing Man." (Or maybe they don't; Esme was certainly precocious.) Anyway, the more I read Salinger, the more criticisms against him seem gratingly wrong-headed and irrelevant; or maybe it's just me -- maybe this is a blind spot I don't share. More about this later -- I need to pull the books off the shelves to point to my favorite examples. I'm still in love with that sentence from "The Laughing Man" about the girl tossing the cigarette lighter at the nose of the porpoise -- and if after this world people go to live in a world populated by fictional chacters, then my next wife is Franny Glass.
I can't wait to see the Doisneau show and blog on it. Ranks with Weegee and Diane Arbus as being among my very favorites. And it's so rare for decent art to enter our one-horse state capital.
I'm all for freedom of speech, but when you read lists like this, you wonder why so many people wage battles over books that aren't worth it. Maybe this is the "Frequently Most Intellectually Challenged List."
Mail Box
Dear "Philostrate,"
I finally got around to looking at the Times readers' group discussion of The Correx (more accurately: *some* of the discussion), and I wanted to thank you for your generous comments about the book and its author. Your postings were heartening to find amid the Lithuanian ranting.
No need to reply; this is just a late-night thank you.
Jonathan (Franzen)
[Editor's note: Under my online nom de plume earlier this year, I staunchly defended Franzen's The Corrections -- a nasty battle, at times, though not a particulaly invigorating one, as my principal opponent was so beside himself with whimpering anguish over the author's satiric portrait of Lithuania that he couldn't bring himself to finish the book.]
Dear "Philostrate,"
I finally got around to looking at the Times readers' group discussion of The Correx (more accurately: *some* of the discussion), and I wanted to thank you for your generous comments about the book and its author. Your postings were heartening to find amid the Lithuanian ranting.
No need to reply; this is just a late-night thank you.
Jonathan (Franzen)
[Editor's note: Under my online nom de plume earlier this year, I staunchly defended Franzen's The Corrections -- a nasty battle, at times, though not a particulaly invigorating one, as my principal opponent was so beside himself with whimpering anguish over the author's satiric portrait of Lithuania that he couldn't bring himself to finish the book.]
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
For another view of the book I rave about below, there is Ms. Kakutani's semi-dissent, which I don't buy at all; in fact, I thought Yezad's "sudden metamorphosis" from "Westernized skeptic to spiritual zealot" was "persuasively dramatized by Mr. Mistry," mainly because he set it up so gradually and smoothly; Yezad enters the fire-temple almost on a whim and stays because the ceremony, the world, the dustoorji (Zoroastrian priest) all connect to something real and solid in his life and in his past, and she seems to forget that there's some lapse of time between him being a convert and a fanatic.
Maybe, possibly, she has a point that the "two horrific tragedies -- each involving a pair of violent deaths -- that bookend Nariman's life are clumsily handled," although it didn't strike me quite that way while I was reading it.
Anyway -- you probably haven't read the book and you can't really follow my thoughts, but listen to me, people: Family Matters is a fantastically absorbing novel.
Maybe, possibly, she has a point that the "two horrific tragedies -- each involving a pair of violent deaths -- that bookend Nariman's life are clumsily handled," although it didn't strike me quite that way while I was reading it.
Anyway -- you probably haven't read the book and you can't really follow my thoughts, but listen to me, people: Family Matters is a fantastically absorbing novel.
King Lear in Bombay
Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry. Alfred A. Knopf. 448 pages. $26.00
You can't escape the past, it repeats itself too often -- religions, cultures, families and family novels never fail to make this point. In Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters, set in modern-day Bombay, the past has been a constant bother for some thirty years, ever since Nariman Vakeel knuckled under to family pressure to marry within his own caste. Leaving behind his true love, the Catholic Lucy Braganza, he settled into a passionless and resentful mid-life marriage to the widow Yasmin Contractor -- a fellow Zoroastrian, or Parsi -- and her two children, to which the couple add a third of their own. The marriage proved an uncomfortable fit for all concerned, eventually proving tragic for both Yasmin and Lucy; I'd explain how, but that would be giving away too much.
The novel opens years after these events, when the women are long gone and their dueling ghosts have settled in for good. Nariman is now an old man with Parkinson's Disease, living in the ill-named family home, Chateau Felicity, with his middle-aged stepchildren, the vengeful Coomy and her spineless brother Jal. After taking a spill in the street, Nariman finds himself incapacitated and at his children's mercy; a former English teacher, he thinks of himself as King Lear. While he has none of the defects of ShakespeareÕs tragic hero, he has all the indignities and then some: dementia, incontinence, the painful memory of how he lost not one woman but two, and the everyday reality of the family that came about as a result. Coomy decides that she isn't about to spend her days giving baths to her despised stepfather, let alone wiping his ass and helping him pee. Instead, she pawns him off on her younger stepsister, Roxana, and cooks up a deceitful scheme to make sure he stays with her indefinitely: she and Jal destroy the ceiling in Nariman's bedroom and then claim it leaks. The bedroom is now officially inhabitable until it can be fixed, which she makes sure will take forever.
Roxana, Nariman's devoted, Cordelia-like daughter by Yasmin, lives in a cramped and crumbling flat with her husband, Yezad, and their two school-age boys, Murad and Jehangir. With the family already scraping by on Yezad's income as manager of the Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium, Nariman's arrival makes things tighter in every way. Besides being a financial burden who has reduced their living space, the family as a whole has to deal with all the rituals of bathing, bedpans, feedings, and doctor visits. Marital spats increase, and family values gradually begin to erode.
Roxana and Yezad are lapsed Parsis, but their sense of cultural heritage is strong. They want to raise their boys to be as ethical and tolerant as Gandhi and to avoid the easy way out, but life both inside and outside the house works against them. On the streets is a crumbling and increasingly fractured Bombay culture. Shiv Sena, the staunchly anti-Muslim political faction, poses a constant threat of violence to Yezad's co-workers and eventually his Hindu boss, the likeable but naive Mr. Kapur. There's also the steady lure of becoming English; Yezad nourishes a dream of fleeing to Canada -- Mistry's own transplanted home base -- while Jehangir reads adventure books about English boys and dreams of changing his name to John. Resistance to temptation weakens. Jehangir tries to help out the family finances by taking bribes from other school children when he becomes homework monitor. Yezad winds up blowing what little money the family has on an illegal lottery, winning big on the very night the government decides to shut the game down.
That kind of fateful coincidence will reappear. Partly due to Yezad, Mr. Kapur has a tragic encounter with a pair of Shiv Sena goons. At the same time, back at Chateau Felicity, CoomyÕs plan to repair the ceiling with the help of an incompetent handyman is about to come fatefully crashing down.
As a father figure, Yezad is only outwardly tough; Roxy is the family rock. Yezad has no control of his life, and is largely frustrated in every effort to make his destiny. He is, in other words, like his helpless, bed-ridden father-in-law, whom he has always loved but can now barely stand to be around. It's because of these frustrations that he turns in desperation to the last source of strength, his family's religious faith. Yezad's faith grows into fanaticism, and the family's cycle completes itself: Yezad becomes the very type of unbending family stalwart who started the family off on the wrong foot all those years before. Religion, the force that can bind a family together against an uncertain world, can also rip it asunder.
The narrative glides from one character to the next. First Nariman and then Coomy take center stage before receding into the background, re-emerging later. At the heart of the book is the struggle of Yezad and Jehangir, a well-intentioned father and the son who will go on to tell his story. The city of Bombay is a major character, too, where the family tug-of-war between tradition and modern life is played out on a larger scale every day.
There's nothing fancy about Family Matters, and that's what I loved about it. It opens a window into a world most of us know nothing about, and it presents that world with abstemious clarity and a perfectly inviting intelligence. There's no magical realist folderol. Not that I necessarily hate that kind of thing; it's just that I found myself grateful that no angels, devils or swoops of time and space were in the offing, and that Mistry brought nothing into his shop but the precision of a born storyteller. When Yezad enters the fire-temple for the first time to pray, you have that intoxicating feeling of seeing something that's always been hidden, and you find yourself wanting to know more. This is probably the best novel of Indian family life I've read since Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, and I haven't read a more captivating novel all year.
Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry. Alfred A. Knopf. 448 pages. $26.00
You can't escape the past, it repeats itself too often -- religions, cultures, families and family novels never fail to make this point. In Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters, set in modern-day Bombay, the past has been a constant bother for some thirty years, ever since Nariman Vakeel knuckled under to family pressure to marry within his own caste. Leaving behind his true love, the Catholic Lucy Braganza, he settled into a passionless and resentful mid-life marriage to the widow Yasmin Contractor -- a fellow Zoroastrian, or Parsi -- and her two children, to which the couple add a third of their own. The marriage proved an uncomfortable fit for all concerned, eventually proving tragic for both Yasmin and Lucy; I'd explain how, but that would be giving away too much.
The novel opens years after these events, when the women are long gone and their dueling ghosts have settled in for good. Nariman is now an old man with Parkinson's Disease, living in the ill-named family home, Chateau Felicity, with his middle-aged stepchildren, the vengeful Coomy and her spineless brother Jal. After taking a spill in the street, Nariman finds himself incapacitated and at his children's mercy; a former English teacher, he thinks of himself as King Lear. While he has none of the defects of ShakespeareÕs tragic hero, he has all the indignities and then some: dementia, incontinence, the painful memory of how he lost not one woman but two, and the everyday reality of the family that came about as a result. Coomy decides that she isn't about to spend her days giving baths to her despised stepfather, let alone wiping his ass and helping him pee. Instead, she pawns him off on her younger stepsister, Roxana, and cooks up a deceitful scheme to make sure he stays with her indefinitely: she and Jal destroy the ceiling in Nariman's bedroom and then claim it leaks. The bedroom is now officially inhabitable until it can be fixed, which she makes sure will take forever.
Roxana, Nariman's devoted, Cordelia-like daughter by Yasmin, lives in a cramped and crumbling flat with her husband, Yezad, and their two school-age boys, Murad and Jehangir. With the family already scraping by on Yezad's income as manager of the Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium, Nariman's arrival makes things tighter in every way. Besides being a financial burden who has reduced their living space, the family as a whole has to deal with all the rituals of bathing, bedpans, feedings, and doctor visits. Marital spats increase, and family values gradually begin to erode.
Roxana and Yezad are lapsed Parsis, but their sense of cultural heritage is strong. They want to raise their boys to be as ethical and tolerant as Gandhi and to avoid the easy way out, but life both inside and outside the house works against them. On the streets is a crumbling and increasingly fractured Bombay culture. Shiv Sena, the staunchly anti-Muslim political faction, poses a constant threat of violence to Yezad's co-workers and eventually his Hindu boss, the likeable but naive Mr. Kapur. There's also the steady lure of becoming English; Yezad nourishes a dream of fleeing to Canada -- Mistry's own transplanted home base -- while Jehangir reads adventure books about English boys and dreams of changing his name to John. Resistance to temptation weakens. Jehangir tries to help out the family finances by taking bribes from other school children when he becomes homework monitor. Yezad winds up blowing what little money the family has on an illegal lottery, winning big on the very night the government decides to shut the game down.
That kind of fateful coincidence will reappear. Partly due to Yezad, Mr. Kapur has a tragic encounter with a pair of Shiv Sena goons. At the same time, back at Chateau Felicity, CoomyÕs plan to repair the ceiling with the help of an incompetent handyman is about to come fatefully crashing down.
As a father figure, Yezad is only outwardly tough; Roxy is the family rock. Yezad has no control of his life, and is largely frustrated in every effort to make his destiny. He is, in other words, like his helpless, bed-ridden father-in-law, whom he has always loved but can now barely stand to be around. It's because of these frustrations that he turns in desperation to the last source of strength, his family's religious faith. Yezad's faith grows into fanaticism, and the family's cycle completes itself: Yezad becomes the very type of unbending family stalwart who started the family off on the wrong foot all those years before. Religion, the force that can bind a family together against an uncertain world, can also rip it asunder.
The narrative glides from one character to the next. First Nariman and then Coomy take center stage before receding into the background, re-emerging later. At the heart of the book is the struggle of Yezad and Jehangir, a well-intentioned father and the son who will go on to tell his story. The city of Bombay is a major character, too, where the family tug-of-war between tradition and modern life is played out on a larger scale every day.
There's nothing fancy about Family Matters, and that's what I loved about it. It opens a window into a world most of us know nothing about, and it presents that world with abstemious clarity and a perfectly inviting intelligence. There's no magical realist folderol. Not that I necessarily hate that kind of thing; it's just that I found myself grateful that no angels, devils or swoops of time and space were in the offing, and that Mistry brought nothing into his shop but the precision of a born storyteller. When Yezad enters the fire-temple for the first time to pray, you have that intoxicating feeling of seeing something that's always been hidden, and you find yourself wanting to know more. This is probably the best novel of Indian family life I've read since Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, and I haven't read a more captivating novel all year.
"Silence is Golden" is unquestionably one of my favorite songs, although I'm probably in a minority when I argue that it is also a great one. It was the one hit, or at least the one lasting hit, of those one-hit wonders The Tremeloes, although I think that phrase applies as much to certain hits as they do to the forgotten bands that made them. "Silence is Golden" is itself a kind of decadent wonder, not unlike Phil Spector's best songs -- syrupy, oozing, over-the-top and genuinely heartfelt -- although maybe it owes more to Spector's disciple, Brian Wilson, than to Spector himself. Well, both. Both had this aesthetic that told teenagers that their fleeting loves and infatuations and naive uptown dreams were worthy of the full orchestral treatment, and they were absolutely right.
"Silence is Golden" follows that same principle in its own unique way; it's about a love-besotted young man whose in love with a girl whose in love with a jerk; he doesn't want her to get hurt, but if he tells her the truth about the putz who's using her, she'll understandably figure that he's acting solely out of self-interest. So he shuts up, stands on the sidelines, and watches the tragedy reach it's expected end, his heart breaking for her and for himself.
The song opens with four little notes, quickly buoyed by a bevy of oooh-oooh-ooohs, bringing with it a sense of romantic sadness that keeps building and, in the rise and fall of verse-chorus-verse, breaking open with those great backing kettle drums at every chorus.
"Silence is Golden," "Precious and Few," "Dancing Queen" -- a lot of people who grew up with these songs thought they represented Top 40 senescence at its absolute worst, and it sometimes takes years and distance to see them for the little gems they are.
"Silence is Golden" follows that same principle in its own unique way; it's about a love-besotted young man whose in love with a girl whose in love with a jerk; he doesn't want her to get hurt, but if he tells her the truth about the putz who's using her, she'll understandably figure that he's acting solely out of self-interest. So he shuts up, stands on the sidelines, and watches the tragedy reach it's expected end, his heart breaking for her and for himself.
The song opens with four little notes, quickly buoyed by a bevy of oooh-oooh-ooohs, bringing with it a sense of romantic sadness that keeps building and, in the rise and fall of verse-chorus-verse, breaking open with those great backing kettle drums at every chorus.
"Silence is Golden," "Precious and Few," "Dancing Queen" -- a lot of people who grew up with these songs thought they represented Top 40 senescence at its absolute worst, and it sometimes takes years and distance to see them for the little gems they are.
Sunday, September 22, 2002
This enjoyable profile of Jack Nicholson in Today's Times sure makes one wonder about just what kind of liberties were taken with his new movie, About Schmidt, based on Louis Begley's novel. It is all but unrecognizable from the description.
Here's how I described the book in an old review:
In his sixties, retired from the prestigious Manhattan law firm of Wood & King, recently widowed from his beloved Mary, Albert Schmidt -- ÒSchmidtieÓ to those he allows to get close to him -- is petty, selfish and anti-Semitic. It is this last trait that surfaces when his only daughter, Charlotte, becomes engaged to Jon Riker, a rising young star at SchmidtÕs old firm. Schmidt recommended him for the position, but never dreamed heÕd have to make him -- and his family, both parents psychoanalysts -- part of his life.
The bright star on SchmidtÕs own approaching horizon is Carrie Gorchuck, the beautiful 20-year-old Puerto Rican waitress who serves him everyday at his favorite restaurant, and eventually starts sharing his bed. While money, class and charm are part of SchmidtÕs appeal, there is also genuine love between him and Carrie, and all the consequent feverish desire and jealousy. Standing between Schmidt and his young love is her sexual history, both with Bryan, an occasionally drug-addled old boyfriend, and Mr. Wilson, the high school teacher who got to her first, and with whom Schmidt has several confrontations that ultimately turn catastrophic.
Here's this from the Times description:
The film, a dark comedy directed by Alexander Payne, stars Mr. Nicholson as a widowed Omaha insurance actuary who is forced to retire at 66 and decides to hit the road in a motor home. It's a movie in which Mr. Nicholson's long and memorable career comes full circle.
...As Warren Schmidt, Mr. Nicholson cruises the same flat, empty highways. But he is now gray and paunchy, grimly steering an unwieldy Winnebago on a futile journey to make sense of his past. After visiting his childhood haunts, he travels to the wedding of his daughter, played by Hope Davis, who is marrying a waterbed salesman (Dermot Mulroney) Schmidt thinks is beneath her. Along the way he writes soul-searching letters to an illiterate 6-year-old Tanzanian orphan named Ndugu whom he has "adopted" through a TV charity.
The movie, loosely based on the 1996 novel by Louis Begley, opens nationwide in December.
As you can tell, "loosely" is an extraordinary understatement. Kinda makes you wonder why they didn't just toss the book aside and call the movie something else.
Here's how I described the book in an old review:
In his sixties, retired from the prestigious Manhattan law firm of Wood & King, recently widowed from his beloved Mary, Albert Schmidt -- ÒSchmidtieÓ to those he allows to get close to him -- is petty, selfish and anti-Semitic. It is this last trait that surfaces when his only daughter, Charlotte, becomes engaged to Jon Riker, a rising young star at SchmidtÕs old firm. Schmidt recommended him for the position, but never dreamed heÕd have to make him -- and his family, both parents psychoanalysts -- part of his life.
The bright star on SchmidtÕs own approaching horizon is Carrie Gorchuck, the beautiful 20-year-old Puerto Rican waitress who serves him everyday at his favorite restaurant, and eventually starts sharing his bed. While money, class and charm are part of SchmidtÕs appeal, there is also genuine love between him and Carrie, and all the consequent feverish desire and jealousy. Standing between Schmidt and his young love is her sexual history, both with Bryan, an occasionally drug-addled old boyfriend, and Mr. Wilson, the high school teacher who got to her first, and with whom Schmidt has several confrontations that ultimately turn catastrophic.
Here's this from the Times description:
The film, a dark comedy directed by Alexander Payne, stars Mr. Nicholson as a widowed Omaha insurance actuary who is forced to retire at 66 and decides to hit the road in a motor home. It's a movie in which Mr. Nicholson's long and memorable career comes full circle.
...As Warren Schmidt, Mr. Nicholson cruises the same flat, empty highways. But he is now gray and paunchy, grimly steering an unwieldy Winnebago on a futile journey to make sense of his past. After visiting his childhood haunts, he travels to the wedding of his daughter, played by Hope Davis, who is marrying a waterbed salesman (Dermot Mulroney) Schmidt thinks is beneath her. Along the way he writes soul-searching letters to an illiterate 6-year-old Tanzanian orphan named Ndugu whom he has "adopted" through a TV charity.
The movie, loosely based on the 1996 novel by Louis Begley, opens nationwide in December.
As you can tell, "loosely" is an extraordinary understatement. Kinda makes you wonder why they didn't just toss the book aside and call the movie something else.
There are three famous names who tend to stop me in my tracks: Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley, and Vladimir Nabokov. With the possible exception of the last, I haven't read everything they've written, but I've read a fair amount, and I tend to be a sucker for anything written about them, or any printed incident in which they play a role. They tend to bring out the best in people who write about them, I guess because they are all born performers.
I've just discovered John Gregory Dunne's wonderfully bitchy 1983 assessment of Buckley in the New York Review of Books and it's the perfect read. Buckley's world is one "of surfaces, placid and civilized. The effect is at first glinting and funny, but Mr. Buckley's vision is so hermetically focused on himself that one begins to wonder if under that coat of thin veneer there is anything but another coat of thin veneer."
I've just discovered John Gregory Dunne's wonderfully bitchy 1983 assessment of Buckley in the New York Review of Books and it's the perfect read. Buckley's world is one "of surfaces, placid and civilized. The effect is at first glinting and funny, but Mr. Buckley's vision is so hermetically focused on himself that one begins to wonder if under that coat of thin veneer there is anything but another coat of thin veneer."
Friday, September 20, 2002
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
And then there is this rock and roll short story writer, whom it pains me to learn has only recently been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. (Everyday something reminds me that I need to quit smoking. This will remind me for months to come.)
For over 20 years, his music has been one of the steady anchors in my life.
It's a sad day.
For over 20 years, his music has been one of the steady anchors in my life.
It's a sad day.
Monday, September 16, 2002
Sunday, September 15, 2002
I'm trying to read W.G. Sebald's poem cycle After Nature, which in my case has meant spending lots of time today researching the art of Matthias Grunewald. This is one of those cases where you're not going to really grasp the poem unless you do a little homework; you have to find out the real story of Grunewald, and stare long and hard at his paintings, for Sebald's poem to make any sense whatsoever. Grunewald is also known to history as "Mathis Nithart" -- Sebald imagines (at least I guess that's what he's doing) that Nithart was actually his homosexual lover, and that the torment one sees in Grunewald's great paintings is the torment of a divided inner life.
This is only the first part of the poem so I don't know yet where Sebald is going with all this. But it's giving me an education.
This is only the first part of the poem so I don't know yet where Sebald is going with all this. But it's giving me an education.
Saturday, September 14, 2002
Friday, September 13, 2002
I'm not a huge fan of To Kill a Mockingbird, but this is a great article -- maybe the most extensive written on the author in nearly 40 years.
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
You need Darrel Hammond's dead-on impression of Dan Rather to get the full effect, but this Saturday Night Live sketch remains one ofr the funniest things I've ever seen on TV.
Looks like the old gutter-gaunt gangster is finally getting his due. I've loved this band since I was 14. And the writer's correct about "Telegram Sam" -- it is one of "the most riveting three-minute achievements of the era," and that sucker LEAPS off the turntable every time I play it.
What I'm reading: Tales, Poems, and Other Writings by Herman Melville. I'm preparing for a book club discussion on "Bartleby," which in my case usually mean over-prepare. I prefer absorbing a lot about the subject before having to either talk about it or try to discuss it with others. I find certain of the stories tough sledding, and at least a couple from the last two days -- "The Two Temples" and "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" -- aren't even really stories; more like poetic meditations on contraries.
I've been idly reading the book, off and on, through the summer: so far the only ones that have really stayed with me are the great ones: "Bartleby," "Benito Cereno," and "Billy Budd."
I've been idly reading the book, off and on, through the summer: so far the only ones that have really stayed with me are the great ones: "Bartleby," "Benito Cereno," and "Billy Budd."
Hands down the most poisonous break-up song ever written. But get the classic CD -- that whiplash lead guitar really accentuates the bite.
Forget it, Jeb -- it's Florida, part II. More hilarious post-election coverage from everyone's favorite banana republic. Oh the humanity.
Notes from the Underground
American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center by William Langewiesche. 278 pages. $25.00 To be published in October by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
TodayÕs anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center arrives with the usual round-the-clock TV coverage, special sections of the newspaper, and a plethora of books -- almost all of which are surely destined for the please-buy-me rack at Barnes & Noble by early spring. American Ground, William LangewiescheÕs meticulous account of the dismantling of the wreckage of Ground Zero, may not escape the same fate, but it's going to stay in print and it's going to be read for years to come, if only because it captures a vanishing event that (one hopes anyway) won't be repeated.
Like such writers as Tracy Kidder and John McPhee, Langewiesche is interested in how things work; how huge problems, such as pulling apart 1.5 million tons on wreckage, are solved, and how they change the people who solve them. Besides the enormity of the attack, Langewiesche observes the peculiarly American way it was met on the ground. In other countries, he writes, committees would have been formed to draft plans, which would be executed by the military. Here, the "learned committees were excluded, the soldiers relegated to the unhappy role of guarding the perimeter, and civilians in heavy machines simply rolled in and took on the unknown." The problems they encountered were unique in scale: the possible release of freon gas from the chiller plants, the cracking of a subterranean slurry wall that could cause the hole to flood. The people who undertake these and thousands of other daily problems associated with the wreckage find themselves transformed -- like the New York City fireman Sam Melisi, who would play the painful role of mediator when tensions rose between the firemen, the police force and New York City's Department of Design and Construction (DDC). His sudden moral authority "surprised and plagued him to the end; he did not think of himself as a leader, and in other circumstances he probably would not have been one." There is also Peter Rinaldi, the Port Authority engineer who knew the building firsthand and had narrowly escaped with his life in the 1993 bombing of the towers, and two top DDC officials, Ken Holden and Mike Burton -- the ex-punk establishment bureaucrat and the careerist lieutenant who served him -- whose steely relationship is exacerbated by their daily involvement at Ground Zero. These and others find themselves defined by their work and their role in history.
As both a former pilot and a hard-working reporter -- on the scene almost from the day it happened, he stayed until the last piece of wreckage was hauled away -- Langewiesche got close to all the right people and writes knowingly and interestingly about speed, impact, and after-effect. He describes in detail the attack and implosion, the myriad logistics, not to mention dangers, of sorting through the debris, and the way sudden horrible occurrences can test the ability of rule-oriented bureaucrats to make things up as they go along. He is as overwhelmed by the attack as anyone but, like the firemen and engineers he followed, he slowly, carefully, and patiently seeks to master it; to uncover the disaster piece by molten piece.
"The frustration was that you couldnÕt dislodge the debris by shooting it," Langewiesche writes. "Because of the bodies that lay there, you couldnÕt dynamite it either. Because of New YorkÕs sensitivity to noise and dust, you couldnÕt even use small demolition charges to fill dangerous cavities or bring down the skeletal walls. There was no choice but to cut and pull and unbuild the chaos one piece at a time." As the DDC's Ken Holden put it, life at Ground Zero was one of "Excavation, remains, recovery, removal -- repeat."
Events such as 9/11 breed any number of abstract thoughts and theories regarding the motives of Osama bin Laden and the American response, and I don't discount them. But part of the appeal of Langewiesche's book is that it deals up close with the known, the tangible, the (literally) concrete. In several thousand well-chosen words, it pulls into sharp focus all those pictures we've seen daily. It's a book about energy -- the kind the towers represented and released, as the author notes, but also the extraordinary kind it required. Serialized over the last three months in the Atlantic Monthly (on which this review is based) and slated for publication next month, American Ground is a first-class piece of reportage.
American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center by William Langewiesche. 278 pages. $25.00 To be published in October by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
TodayÕs anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center arrives with the usual round-the-clock TV coverage, special sections of the newspaper, and a plethora of books -- almost all of which are surely destined for the please-buy-me rack at Barnes & Noble by early spring. American Ground, William LangewiescheÕs meticulous account of the dismantling of the wreckage of Ground Zero, may not escape the same fate, but it's going to stay in print and it's going to be read for years to come, if only because it captures a vanishing event that (one hopes anyway) won't be repeated.
Like such writers as Tracy Kidder and John McPhee, Langewiesche is interested in how things work; how huge problems, such as pulling apart 1.5 million tons on wreckage, are solved, and how they change the people who solve them. Besides the enormity of the attack, Langewiesche observes the peculiarly American way it was met on the ground. In other countries, he writes, committees would have been formed to draft plans, which would be executed by the military. Here, the "learned committees were excluded, the soldiers relegated to the unhappy role of guarding the perimeter, and civilians in heavy machines simply rolled in and took on the unknown." The problems they encountered were unique in scale: the possible release of freon gas from the chiller plants, the cracking of a subterranean slurry wall that could cause the hole to flood. The people who undertake these and thousands of other daily problems associated with the wreckage find themselves transformed -- like the New York City fireman Sam Melisi, who would play the painful role of mediator when tensions rose between the firemen, the police force and New York City's Department of Design and Construction (DDC). His sudden moral authority "surprised and plagued him to the end; he did not think of himself as a leader, and in other circumstances he probably would not have been one." There is also Peter Rinaldi, the Port Authority engineer who knew the building firsthand and had narrowly escaped with his life in the 1993 bombing of the towers, and two top DDC officials, Ken Holden and Mike Burton -- the ex-punk establishment bureaucrat and the careerist lieutenant who served him -- whose steely relationship is exacerbated by their daily involvement at Ground Zero. These and others find themselves defined by their work and their role in history.
As both a former pilot and a hard-working reporter -- on the scene almost from the day it happened, he stayed until the last piece of wreckage was hauled away -- Langewiesche got close to all the right people and writes knowingly and interestingly about speed, impact, and after-effect. He describes in detail the attack and implosion, the myriad logistics, not to mention dangers, of sorting through the debris, and the way sudden horrible occurrences can test the ability of rule-oriented bureaucrats to make things up as they go along. He is as overwhelmed by the attack as anyone but, like the firemen and engineers he followed, he slowly, carefully, and patiently seeks to master it; to uncover the disaster piece by molten piece.
"The frustration was that you couldnÕt dislodge the debris by shooting it," Langewiesche writes. "Because of the bodies that lay there, you couldnÕt dynamite it either. Because of New YorkÕs sensitivity to noise and dust, you couldnÕt even use small demolition charges to fill dangerous cavities or bring down the skeletal walls. There was no choice but to cut and pull and unbuild the chaos one piece at a time." As the DDC's Ken Holden put it, life at Ground Zero was one of "Excavation, remains, recovery, removal -- repeat."
Events such as 9/11 breed any number of abstract thoughts and theories regarding the motives of Osama bin Laden and the American response, and I don't discount them. But part of the appeal of Langewiesche's book is that it deals up close with the known, the tangible, the (literally) concrete. In several thousand well-chosen words, it pulls into sharp focus all those pictures we've seen daily. It's a book about energy -- the kind the towers represented and released, as the author notes, but also the extraordinary kind it required. Serialized over the last three months in the Atlantic Monthly (on which this review is based) and slated for publication next month, American Ground is a first-class piece of reportage.
Go for the throat, Andy. (By the way, nice to see he and Salon.com's David Talbot have mended fences.)
Jeb Bush: "There's no excuse for not turning on the machines."
To paraphrase the last line from one of my favorite movies -- Forget it, Jeb -- it's Florida.
No doubt this will bring a certain amount of sweet schadenfreude to my fellow supporters of the Gore campaign, who have had to smile and pretend they were good sports after getting screwed out of the presidency. Another plus -- it's beginning to look like we won't have to worry about the prospect of a Gov. Reno, thank God.
To paraphrase the last line from one of my favorite movies -- Forget it, Jeb -- it's Florida.
No doubt this will bring a certain amount of sweet schadenfreude to my fellow supporters of the Gore campaign, who have had to smile and pretend they were good sports after getting screwed out of the presidency. Another plus -- it's beginning to look like we won't have to worry about the prospect of a Gov. Reno, thank God.
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
It just wouldn't be Sept. 11 without a new reason to despise Susan Sontag. Here she helpfully reminds us that the struggle in Afghanistan has less to do with flesh and blood than semantics. And her casting a wistful eye toward World War II and Gettysburg is gratingly, gallingly insincere. Reflect, hell. Susan Sontag is nothing but a hand-wringing old lady.
This poor silly child writes a column in which she moans about the fact that, despite a degree from Yale, she can't get a job worthy of her intellectual acumen.
Will someone please tell me where I went wrong? she pleads, and boy, have people been lining up to tell her. Shawna Gale of Atlanta, now known netwide as the "Wailin' Yalie," claims to possess "impressive analytical skills" and "well-developed public relations skills" -- neither of which are on display. Verily, verily, I say unto you, a high degree of self-importance invariably means a low degree of self-knowledge. She's a child of the welfare state who believes a degree entitles her to a job.
"I have many valuable skills" -- that word again! -- "honed during my days with Dickens, my nights with Nabokov, those wee hours with Woolf." I've logged most of the past summer with Dickens and years with Nabokov, and chances are excellent I'll never see the kind of money Shawna thinks she deserves and I'm twice her age.
I hate to sound like an old grump, but kids today need to learn to get off their ass.
Will someone please tell me where I went wrong? she pleads, and boy, have people been lining up to tell her. Shawna Gale of Atlanta, now known netwide as the "Wailin' Yalie," claims to possess "impressive analytical skills" and "well-developed public relations skills" -- neither of which are on display. Verily, verily, I say unto you, a high degree of self-importance invariably means a low degree of self-knowledge. She's a child of the welfare state who believes a degree entitles her to a job.
"I have many valuable skills" -- that word again! -- "honed during my days with Dickens, my nights with Nabokov, those wee hours with Woolf." I've logged most of the past summer with Dickens and years with Nabokov, and chances are excellent I'll never see the kind of money Shawna thinks she deserves and I'm twice her age.
I hate to sound like an old grump, but kids today need to learn to get off their ass.
Monday, September 09, 2002
Saturday, September 07, 2002
Problem Drinker helpfully plugs the re-release of Gould's Goldberg Variations -- giving me a new reason to spend money I don't have. I'm a total musical illiterate who can't tell excellence from garbage where classical performances are concerned, but I do love listening to this extraordinarily complex work on a semi-regular basis -- it makes me want to work hard. I have the Vladimir Feltsen version, who in the liner notes makes a few snide comments about Gould, so it'll be interesting to compare the two. Or it would be, if I could spot the differences.
Thursday, September 05, 2002
Hitler's Killing Fields
Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes. Alfred A. Knopf. 335 pages. $27.50
Words fail anyone describing the Holocaust, even Nazis.
"Liquidations, executions, purges," wrote an Nazi officer home in September, 1941, after a day of shooting Jews in the Zhitomir province in the Western Ukraine. "All these words, synonymous with destruction, seem completely banal and devoid of meaning once one has gotten used to them.
"It is a vocabulary which has become general usage, and we use such words just as we talk about swatting disagreeable insects or destroying a dangerous animal.
"These words however are applied to men. But men who happen to be our mortal enemy."
The officer was a member of the SS-Einsatzgruppen (task force), a collection of several thousand German soldiers, policemen, bureaucrats, professionals and criminals who had been selected in July 1941 by two of Hitler's right-hand men -- Heinrich Himmler, who controlled the Schutzstaffel (SS), GermanyÕs internal police force, and his second in command, Lieutenant General Reinhard Òthe Blond BeastÓ Heydrich -- to kill Jews and Slavs across Eastern Europe. Starting in 1939, the Third Reich had employed an earlier version of the Einsatzgruppen as a rearguard mop-up group during the invasion of Poland; now the Einsatzgruppen would follow the German army as it moved into the Soviet Union. The goal was lebensraum (living space) which in practical terms meant destroying one population so another could move in.
"It is a question of existence," Himmler told the troops, "thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply." Divided into four groups, Einsatzgruppen soldiers fanned out across the occupied Soviet Union, simultaneously moving into Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Byelorussia, the Ukraine, Crimea and the Caucasus. They would leave in their wake some of the worst massacres in World War II: the Kovno Ghetto and Ponary in Lithuania, Babi Yar in Kiev, where 34,000 people were killed in two days, and Rumbula in Latvia, where 12 men killed 13,000 people in a single day. This was just the tip of the iceberg; some 1.5 million people would die at their hands.
Their methods varied, as Nazis continually tested new ways of killing the most people in the shortest amount of time. In Kovno, they inflamed the anti-Semitism of the locals, using trumped up charges against Jews, or none at all, to justify hauling helpless men and women into the town square, and beating them to death with clubs. Such "attempts at self-cleansing," Heydrich said in a telegram to Einsatzgruppen commanders, "on the part of anti-Communist or anti-Semitic elements in the areas to be occupied are not to be hindered. On the contrary, they are to be encouraged, but without leaving traces, so that these local `vigilantes' cannot say later that they were given orders or [offered] political concessions."
Over the course of the next few years, victims would be hauled into enclosed areas and grenaded, dynamited, or burned alive, either by fire or through using quicklime and water. Handicapped or mentally retarded children were given lethal injections or barbiturate overdoses.
Generally, the standard, reliable method of liquidation was to shoot kneeling Jews in the back of the head or machine-gun them into mass graves. The routine was to round them up under the ruse of jobs or relocation, take them to a nearby forest, swamp or ravine (such as Babi Yar) and line them along the perimeter of a huge pit, which was usually dug by the first victims. Later, under the direction of the Higher SS officer Friedrich Jeckeln, they were shot laying face down in the pit. New victims were piled on top in the same way, and new victims on them; layer upon layer of bodies to maximize grave space. Sardinenpackung, Jeckeln called it; sardine-packing.
Killing on this scale wasn't just a question of manpower and efficiency, but the corruption of human will. The ideal of Himmler's Einsatzgruppen was Kadavergehorsam, "corpse-like conformity" -- molding willing Nazis into remorseless killing machines, not just of enemy soldiers, but men, women and children (since, after all, they would only grow up to avenge their parent's deaths.) Hitler called it a "war of extermination," and Himmler (who like Hitler had no direct experience with killing) told the troops it was perfectly natural.
"We should observe nature," Himmler reportedly said, "everywhere there was war, not only among human beings, but also in the animal and plant worlds. Whatever did not want to fight was destroyed ... Primitive man said that the horse is good, but the bug is bad, or wheat is good but the thistle is bad. Humans characterize that which is useful to them as good, but that which is harmful as bad. Don't bugs, rats and other vermin have a purpose in life to fulfill? But we humans are correct when we defend ourselves against vermin."
It was mass murder by conventional means of war, and as Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes shows in this unsettling new history, it had a mixed effect on Nazi morale. Some, of course, thrived; the ones who liked humiliation and torture, who impaled Jewish infants on bayonets, who stood on a heap of corpses and played an accordion, who took pictures -- such famous pieces of Nazi porn as this photo and this one -- and sent them home to their families. But these raised a problem, as sadists are a threat to civilized society of any kind, even one ruled by Hitler. Himmler's ideal of a good Nazi was one who stoically discharged the unpleasant task of butchering people who were pleading for their lives. "An execution must always be the hardest thing for our men," he said. "And despite it they must never become weak but must do it with pursed lips." Many did it by cracking up, or becoming alcoholic -- liquor and cigarettes were staple rations in some killing squads -- or by committing suicide. Some thought of their own wives and children.
"The wailing was indescribable," said August Hafner, the Nazi officer charged with carrying out the slaughter of some ninety children in Bila Cerkva, a small town near Kiev. "I shall never forget the scene throughout my life. I find it very hard to bear. I particularly remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later ... Many children were hit four or five times before they died."
Of course, on any moral ledger the Nazi who killed with a twinge of conscience merits no more sympathy than the one who killed with murderous glee. Himmler himself combined both types. In one of the few executions he attended, he nervously ordered a soldier to put a pair of women out of their misery, and at one time seemed to consider saving a young Jewish man's life. But that didn't stop him from furnishing his own home with tables and chairs made of Jewish bones, or a copy of Mein Kampf bound in Jewish flesh.
The moral quandaries and logistics of genocide -- the need to make it as impersonal and faceless as possible -- were met, of course, with Zyklon-B. As the showers in the concentration camps filled with carbon monoxide, fewer Nazis were troubled with nightmares. They didn't have to hear the screams. They just had to haul away the corpses.
It has become something of a convention of Hitler studies in recent years to reconsider how well the Holocaust can, or should, be understood. To "understand" Hitler, as the filmmaker Claude Lanzman has pointed out, is to humanize him, which runs the risk of softening if not legitimizing his evil. Rhodes takes a similar risk with a book that puts a marginally human face on killers who bore the psychological strains of their crimes. But, he writes, "surely any indication that slaughter is challenging and takes its toll on the slaughterers ought to be welcomed, if only as ironic justice. Dismissing perpetrators as inhuman monsters rather than human criminals positions genocidal killing beyond comprehension, beyond prevention or repair."
In trying to get some hold on how these particular minds were shaped, Rhodes draws on the work of criminologist Lonnie Athens, who describes "violent socialization" as a four-step process: brutalization, belligerency, violent performances and virulency. In a nutshell, people are exposed to brutality either in youth or in military training, they advance to the view that brutality is the best means of self-protection, they see the effect of acting on it, and they make it their way of dealing with conflict. Being neither a sociologist nor a historian, I can only say that this theory of violence sounds as plausible as any other; and yet, if the book shows anything, itÕs that the complexity of responses among Nazis toward their crimes defies any sweeping explanation, and this one seemed more speculative as it went along. Himmler himself, the son of a violent schoolmaster, is RhodesÕ prime example, although what really seems to motivate Himmler is his somewhat Freudian desire to please Hitler, for whom the daily killing quota could never be high enough. What does make the Athens model appealing is that it emphasizes the role of choice. Where people cannot choose whether they are brutalized, they do choose how they act on it. The victims of Nazi Germany, of course, were given no choice at all.
This powerful, disturbing, and unfortunately-titled book Ð the word "invention" raises the specter of Holocaust denial, quite the opposite of RhodesÕ intent Ð canÕt be read quickly or pleasurably. As it catalogs the terrible years of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the scenes of terror rarely let up, and when I put the book aside, the pictures it brought to mind wouldnÕt let go. ItÕs the wailing of its victims that we still hear. It remains indescribable.
Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes. Alfred A. Knopf. 335 pages. $27.50
Words fail anyone describing the Holocaust, even Nazis.
"Liquidations, executions, purges," wrote an Nazi officer home in September, 1941, after a day of shooting Jews in the Zhitomir province in the Western Ukraine. "All these words, synonymous with destruction, seem completely banal and devoid of meaning once one has gotten used to them.
"It is a vocabulary which has become general usage, and we use such words just as we talk about swatting disagreeable insects or destroying a dangerous animal.
"These words however are applied to men. But men who happen to be our mortal enemy."
The officer was a member of the SS-Einsatzgruppen (task force), a collection of several thousand German soldiers, policemen, bureaucrats, professionals and criminals who had been selected in July 1941 by two of Hitler's right-hand men -- Heinrich Himmler, who controlled the Schutzstaffel (SS), GermanyÕs internal police force, and his second in command, Lieutenant General Reinhard Òthe Blond BeastÓ Heydrich -- to kill Jews and Slavs across Eastern Europe. Starting in 1939, the Third Reich had employed an earlier version of the Einsatzgruppen as a rearguard mop-up group during the invasion of Poland; now the Einsatzgruppen would follow the German army as it moved into the Soviet Union. The goal was lebensraum (living space) which in practical terms meant destroying one population so another could move in.
"It is a question of existence," Himmler told the troops, "thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply." Divided into four groups, Einsatzgruppen soldiers fanned out across the occupied Soviet Union, simultaneously moving into Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Byelorussia, the Ukraine, Crimea and the Caucasus. They would leave in their wake some of the worst massacres in World War II: the Kovno Ghetto and Ponary in Lithuania, Babi Yar in Kiev, where 34,000 people were killed in two days, and Rumbula in Latvia, where 12 men killed 13,000 people in a single day. This was just the tip of the iceberg; some 1.5 million people would die at their hands.
Their methods varied, as Nazis continually tested new ways of killing the most people in the shortest amount of time. In Kovno, they inflamed the anti-Semitism of the locals, using trumped up charges against Jews, or none at all, to justify hauling helpless men and women into the town square, and beating them to death with clubs. Such "attempts at self-cleansing," Heydrich said in a telegram to Einsatzgruppen commanders, "on the part of anti-Communist or anti-Semitic elements in the areas to be occupied are not to be hindered. On the contrary, they are to be encouraged, but without leaving traces, so that these local `vigilantes' cannot say later that they were given orders or [offered] political concessions."
Over the course of the next few years, victims would be hauled into enclosed areas and grenaded, dynamited, or burned alive, either by fire or through using quicklime and water. Handicapped or mentally retarded children were given lethal injections or barbiturate overdoses.
Generally, the standard, reliable method of liquidation was to shoot kneeling Jews in the back of the head or machine-gun them into mass graves. The routine was to round them up under the ruse of jobs or relocation, take them to a nearby forest, swamp or ravine (such as Babi Yar) and line them along the perimeter of a huge pit, which was usually dug by the first victims. Later, under the direction of the Higher SS officer Friedrich Jeckeln, they were shot laying face down in the pit. New victims were piled on top in the same way, and new victims on them; layer upon layer of bodies to maximize grave space. Sardinenpackung, Jeckeln called it; sardine-packing.
Killing on this scale wasn't just a question of manpower and efficiency, but the corruption of human will. The ideal of Himmler's Einsatzgruppen was Kadavergehorsam, "corpse-like conformity" -- molding willing Nazis into remorseless killing machines, not just of enemy soldiers, but men, women and children (since, after all, they would only grow up to avenge their parent's deaths.) Hitler called it a "war of extermination," and Himmler (who like Hitler had no direct experience with killing) told the troops it was perfectly natural.
"We should observe nature," Himmler reportedly said, "everywhere there was war, not only among human beings, but also in the animal and plant worlds. Whatever did not want to fight was destroyed ... Primitive man said that the horse is good, but the bug is bad, or wheat is good but the thistle is bad. Humans characterize that which is useful to them as good, but that which is harmful as bad. Don't bugs, rats and other vermin have a purpose in life to fulfill? But we humans are correct when we defend ourselves against vermin."
It was mass murder by conventional means of war, and as Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes shows in this unsettling new history, it had a mixed effect on Nazi morale. Some, of course, thrived; the ones who liked humiliation and torture, who impaled Jewish infants on bayonets, who stood on a heap of corpses and played an accordion, who took pictures -- such famous pieces of Nazi porn as this photo and this one -- and sent them home to their families. But these raised a problem, as sadists are a threat to civilized society of any kind, even one ruled by Hitler. Himmler's ideal of a good Nazi was one who stoically discharged the unpleasant task of butchering people who were pleading for their lives. "An execution must always be the hardest thing for our men," he said. "And despite it they must never become weak but must do it with pursed lips." Many did it by cracking up, or becoming alcoholic -- liquor and cigarettes were staple rations in some killing squads -- or by committing suicide. Some thought of their own wives and children.
"The wailing was indescribable," said August Hafner, the Nazi officer charged with carrying out the slaughter of some ninety children in Bila Cerkva, a small town near Kiev. "I shall never forget the scene throughout my life. I find it very hard to bear. I particularly remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later ... Many children were hit four or five times before they died."
Of course, on any moral ledger the Nazi who killed with a twinge of conscience merits no more sympathy than the one who killed with murderous glee. Himmler himself combined both types. In one of the few executions he attended, he nervously ordered a soldier to put a pair of women out of their misery, and at one time seemed to consider saving a young Jewish man's life. But that didn't stop him from furnishing his own home with tables and chairs made of Jewish bones, or a copy of Mein Kampf bound in Jewish flesh.
The moral quandaries and logistics of genocide -- the need to make it as impersonal and faceless as possible -- were met, of course, with Zyklon-B. As the showers in the concentration camps filled with carbon monoxide, fewer Nazis were troubled with nightmares. They didn't have to hear the screams. They just had to haul away the corpses.
It has become something of a convention of Hitler studies in recent years to reconsider how well the Holocaust can, or should, be understood. To "understand" Hitler, as the filmmaker Claude Lanzman has pointed out, is to humanize him, which runs the risk of softening if not legitimizing his evil. Rhodes takes a similar risk with a book that puts a marginally human face on killers who bore the psychological strains of their crimes. But, he writes, "surely any indication that slaughter is challenging and takes its toll on the slaughterers ought to be welcomed, if only as ironic justice. Dismissing perpetrators as inhuman monsters rather than human criminals positions genocidal killing beyond comprehension, beyond prevention or repair."
In trying to get some hold on how these particular minds were shaped, Rhodes draws on the work of criminologist Lonnie Athens, who describes "violent socialization" as a four-step process: brutalization, belligerency, violent performances and virulency. In a nutshell, people are exposed to brutality either in youth or in military training, they advance to the view that brutality is the best means of self-protection, they see the effect of acting on it, and they make it their way of dealing with conflict. Being neither a sociologist nor a historian, I can only say that this theory of violence sounds as plausible as any other; and yet, if the book shows anything, itÕs that the complexity of responses among Nazis toward their crimes defies any sweeping explanation, and this one seemed more speculative as it went along. Himmler himself, the son of a violent schoolmaster, is RhodesÕ prime example, although what really seems to motivate Himmler is his somewhat Freudian desire to please Hitler, for whom the daily killing quota could never be high enough. What does make the Athens model appealing is that it emphasizes the role of choice. Where people cannot choose whether they are brutalized, they do choose how they act on it. The victims of Nazi Germany, of course, were given no choice at all.
This powerful, disturbing, and unfortunately-titled book Ð the word "invention" raises the specter of Holocaust denial, quite the opposite of RhodesÕ intent Ð canÕt be read quickly or pleasurably. As it catalogs the terrible years of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the scenes of terror rarely let up, and when I put the book aside, the pictures it brought to mind wouldnÕt let go. ItÕs the wailing of its victims that we still hear. It remains indescribable.
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