What I Read Instead of Work, 1/5/13

Not-work is a subtle exercise. Sometimes work can creep up on you. This morning I accidentally woke up early and read George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss to put me back to sleep. But I love George Eliot now like I loved Tolkien when I was twelve, and pretty soon I was so happy with words I decided I could do some work. That meant re-reading, for the fourth time, James Baldwin's "Down at the Cross." Which provoked a perusal of Cornel West's 1982 first book, Prophesy Deliverance! The combination resulted in the mini-essay I needed to write on Baldwin for an anthology of literary journalism, the essay that had been defeating me for weeks. I should have kept going--next up was a mini-essay on Mailer's Armies of the Night--but I decided to take a break with Lucas Mann's excellent forthcoming book of literary journalism, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere. I could justify this as part-work, since I'd promised to write a blurb for the book, but the truth is it was a pleasure I didn't want to interrupt with a re-reading of Mailer.

I decided to relocate to my office. I don't have internet at home--to save me from even further distraction--so the first thing I did was look at the New York Times. "Just the headlines," I told myself. But how could I resist "Former CIA Officer is the First to Face Prison for a Classified Leak," especially since it led with a happy photo of said spook putting a sneaker on his laughing 8-year-old daughter, a sure sign that his imprisonment is an injustice. Or that the NYT thinks so.

A passing reference to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in the article caught my interest -- the spy had been invited to teach there, and had even taught Liberty U students surveillance techniques in Washington. It wasn't hard to find a picture of the class, which suggests that these students may not have such stellar careers in front of them. From there I wandered around the spy studies programs of Liberty and even further right Patrick Henry College, both dedicated to applying a "Christian worldview" to intelligence work. Their faculties are full of retired heavies with still-active consulting gigs, and their alumni seem to get placed. I justified my digression by tweeting it. Maybe somebody will do some actual journalism.

Back to Mailer, only to be interrupted by an essay by my pal Nathan Schneider, author of a great forthcoming book called God in Proof.

Back to Mailer. Phone call. Need to get my head back into the work. How? By poking around the internet, of course, and landing on this: "Be Wrong as Fast as You Can," by Hugo Lindgren, on work that never gets written.

The Shack

Notes for a review I never got around to finishing:

Recently an acquaintance of my wife’s, a woman she’d met a few times through work, presented her with a gift for our two-month-old daughter: a tiny, hand-knit, beige sweater, a wrap-around tunic that ties at the side with a button in the shape of a ladybug. “Isn’t it wonderful?” my wife asked. She likes wrap sweaters, herself, and she thought the ladybug was adorable. I’m sure it is. But I could only feign agreement. My stomach was lurching with the adrenalized vertigo peculiar to new parents, torqued between deep fear and cold aggression in the face of a perceived threat to one’s child. There was no threat in the sweater, of course. Rather, just the dangers of free association, between its ladybug button and the toy ladybug left behind as calling cards by the child-killer who sets in motion the plot of The Shack, an evangelical bestseller self-published in 2008 by an Oregon motel clerk named William P. Young. I read The Shack with the intention of reviewing it several months ago, but until that moment with the ladybug, I couldn’t account for why this awkward allegorical novel has won the hearts and minds of Christian America like no other fiction since the 1995 debut of the apocalyptic Left Behind series, which went on to sell some 50 million copies worldwide.

The Shack is as unlike that violently fundamentalist fever dream as possible: almost action-free, clogged with philosophical allusion, soundtracked by a series of chapter epigraphs drawn from Bruce Cockburn songs, and dedicated to a transgendered God who takes the form of a jolly, fat black woman in an apron, seemingly borrowed from a bottle of Aunt Jemima maple syrup, and calls herself Poppa to remind you that even though she’s a a mountain of maternal love she’s also your father. The Father, in fact—The Shack is ultimately committed to the same muscular faith that ripples through Left Behind. It’s not the theological destination that differs, it’s the path. Left Behind, perhaps the definitive evangelical text of the 1990s, attacked secularism and liberalism head on, its story of a small band of evangelicals doing battle with a United Nations bent on eradicationg religion an outright declaration of culture war, at the least. The Shack isn’t like that. The Shack loves everybody, even liberals. They’ll learn, if they’ll just relax for a minute and pull up a seat for pancakes with Poppa. The Shack is fundamentalism a la Alice’s Restaurant.

 

Sima's Undergarments for Women

My friend Ilana Stanger-Ross's 2008 novel Sima's Undergarments for Women is out in paperback. I think I would have written something about it here were it not for the fact that I read it around the time my daughter, Roxy, was born. But here's what I wrote to Ilana:

It's stunning! I expected I'd like it, but I had no idea that it would consume me. I read it all with Roxy in one arm and the book in the other, much of it out loud to her. I'd rock her to sleep and then grab the book. If there's any justice in the world -- and there isn't -- it'll win prizes. Beneath the veneer of "charming," as Kirkus puts it, I found a book of surprising pain, reminiscent of Delmore Schwartz' regrets in "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" and Malamud's restraint in The Assistant. I'm deeply impressed at the courage of creation evident in the character of Sima [the aging, disappointed-in-life owner of a lingerie shop], who never grows cute, never a bubbe or a yenta or any recognizable Jewish literary figure; rather a real woman, and a Jewish one. And I think your decision not to really reveal Timna [her gorgeous young Israeli assistant] to us is brilliant; a lesser novel would have done so. I think the closest I got to Timna was the scene in which she tells Sima that it'd be unfair to envy her; but even then, I stay with Sima, her embarrassment, her resentment. Her resentments are profound.

I was impressed, too, by the honesty with which you depicted work. In fact, I can't think of many novels that pay such close, true attention to work, its costs and its rewards and the large but not total role it can play in a life. That's subtly evident in Lev [Sima's retired husband], too, who seems to have been emptied out not just by life with Sima but by an ordinary career as a teacher; he did his work and now he's tired. There's a line near the end that knocked the wind out of me, Sima speaking to Lev: "It's been too late for so long that I don't think time matters anymore."

Of course, there are many such lines. I mention Malamud because he's such a brilliant storyteller without ever showing off. Schwartz, of course, is pyrotechnic; most younger writers are. This novel never calls attention to you, Ilana, which makes it all the more splendid when a line causes the reader to pause, to consider the fragment of things-as-they-are described just so.

I think, too, that it's an important Jewish book, maybe a pivotal one. In part because you describe a world I haven't really seen in books -- the frummy but not frum majority of Brooklyn Jews -- and in part because the book feels so effortlessly Jewish. So plainly and simply and completely Jewish. (The stuff about Israel is very funny. And that's a sentence that's unusual these days.) No shtetl, no bubbe, no identity angst, no folktales, just a couple of Jews in a basement full of bras.

Lost, X-Men, Narnia, Agee

As a child, I knew I wanted to be a writer: I wanted to write X-Men. A few years on, I still wanted to write X-Men, but I also wanted to write The Chronicles of Narnia. I worried about how I'd get the books I loved -- The Great Brain series, Susan Cooper's eerie folk nightmares, The House With the Clock in its Walls -- once I was too old for them. I imagined standing at the counter of the Open Door, the bookstore in which my mother and I spent hours, as a grown-up, with a stack of children's novels: "For my nephew," I'd lie.

What I liked most about many of these stories -- X-Men, The Dark is Rising, The Chronicles -- is that they didn't seem to end. The X-Men, never. The Dark is Rising, not really. The Chronicles, yes; but it was so dull compared to the rest of the story that one could imagine the last book as nothing more than a giant typo.

I drifted away from writing in high school, and went off to college determined to be an actor or a biologist, maybe a forest ranger. (I would have made a great ent.) Instead, I read James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and I was back to writing. What was remarkable to me wasn't that the book didn't end; it was that it never really began. Or rather, it began over and over, each start a crescendo and a failure, proof of Agee's contention that language was a lie, forever inadequate to the "cruel, radiant symphony of what is."

I still like X-Men -- at least, when Joss Whedon was writing a series -- and I return now and then to Agee. But I no longer need endless stories to make me feel safe -- children fear endings -- nor Agee's angst-filled failures to make me feel honest. Writing is mediation; a negotiation.

But television? Its adolescent stories keep hope and nihilism alive. That is, most series are conceived with no clear end in sight. That's the hope. And most are built around a repetition of crescendoes -- none moreso than Lost, the series that has lost hope (the end is in sight). Each new season, almost every new episode, implied a new beginning, as the story returned us to the events that had set the story in motion, each time flogging us for failing to understand what had been right before our eyes and promising us that this time it would be different, this time we would proceed with the necessary information, this time the story would have meaning. And, of course, that was a playful deception, too, because the story always had meaning; it just kept changing. Every episode was an illustration of Faulkner's chestnut: "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

But maybe, sometimes, it should come to an end -- so that it can avoid ending. So argues Graham Hilliard on KillingTheBuddha.com.

There’s a moment in the third season of Lost, ABC’s soon-to-conclude serial drama of time travel and philosophy, that might have made a perfect ending to the series. Jack, the surgeon-cum-tribal chieftain whose impetuousness drives much of the show’s conflict, has delivered himself into the hands of his enemies, “The Others.” A rescue party of his friends has arrived at a gated camp to find Jack sprinting toward them, eyes ablaze. Before they can react—before they can move toward him or aid his escape—Jack looks over his shoulder, raises his hands, and catches a football. He grins at the captor with whom he’s been playing, and he spikes the ball. Cue credits.

It’s a devastating scene—one of the finest in the show’s history—and a stunning conclusion, had it been allowed to serve as one, to a narrative whose success was built not on revelation but mystery. Though Jack has long been established as the series’ central protagonist, the notion that he has switched sides is just possible. We’ve seen the creeping petulance that has marked his behavior since midway through the first season, and we’ve begun to question our own loyalties. Jack has been alone with the Others for days, furthermore, and their motives and practices are unknown to us. That Jack may have turned is both shocking and quietly plausible. In its mastery of timing, characterization, and narrative momentum—the very ingredients that made the show successful in the first place—the moment is a tour de force. It’s an exclamation point. A bang of an ending rather than a whimper.

Read the whole essay at this blog's big sister site, KillingTheBuddha.com

Spring Books

Some good friends are publishing some great books this spring. As it happens, they're all about bodies, dead, alive, or yet to be born.

I blurbed Peter Manseau's Rag and Bone: “Dry bones dance in Rag and Bone, as Peter Manseau brings death to life through his fascinating exploration of religious relics: the skull fragments, detached digits, and ashes of the holy. This is a book that might have been written in the 15th century just as easily as now, but we're lucky to have here the unique 21st century voice of Manseau--a Yiddish-speaking, Buddha-curious son of a Catholic priest and a nun--and one of the most peculiar and most entertaining travelogues in years.”

I also contributed a jacket blurb for Kathryn Joyce's Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement:"'Prairie muffins,' hayrides, and babies -- lots of babies -- don't sound like the stuff of fanaticism, but in Quiverfull Kathryn Joyce brings us the news from the most militant frontier of fundamentalism -- a 'patriarchy movement’ of right-wing women who embrace a caricature of 19th century womanhood as a strategy for culture war. At turns funny, terrifying, and heartbreaking, Quiverfull is a necessary book, an empathetic and brilliant analysis of how this small group of believers shape mainstream ideas about motherhood, marriage, sex and gender.”

Then there's Ilana Stanger-Ross's Sima's Undergarments for Women. I've heard and read little bits and pieces of it over the years, but I'm eagerly waiting for my copy like everyone else before I can say anything substantive about it. In the meantime, though, I'm happy to report that Entertainment Weekly gives Sima an A-.


Here's Michelle Goldberg's second book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World. I know Michelle through her reporting on Christian fundamentalism, so I was glad for the opportunity to read an advance copy of her new work, which, as the subtitle suggests, is big in scope. Here's the blurb I contributed: The Means of Reproduction is a bold and vital book, a story about life and those who twist that word to front for agendas of sexual control around the world. We're lucky that we have Michelle Goldberg, a brilliant and clear-eyed journalist, to bring us news of how the struggle over reproductive rights has gone global, as the American Right teams up with reactionary forces abroad. Goldberg calls it one of the most important fights of our time; after you read The Means of Reproduction, you will, too. A landmark book."

I notice I used "brings the news," a cliche to begin with, in two different blurbs. Don't hold that against the books.

Last, latest, and, admittedly, least, is Believer, Beware: First Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, selected by the editors of KillingTheBuddha.com -- that is, me, Manseau, Paul Morris, Laurel Snyder, Meera Subramanian, Ashley Makar, and Marissa Dennis. I say least only because this is an anthology as opposed to a new piece of work, although there are several new essays in it. The book began one night when I was avoiding work on my most recent book, The Family. Instead of pushing through to a deadline, I stayed up til dawn reading through the hundreds of essays published on KillingTheBuddha.com since Peter and I founded it with designer Jeremy Brothers back in 2000. I came up with a rough draft of a manuscript, then let it sit for months -- until a new crop of editors -- Meera, Ashley, Marissa, and now Nathan Schneider -- resurrected the webmagazine and grabbed hold of the manuscript's first draft, ready to make it real. To round out the book -- which includes terrific work by established writers such as Bia Lowe, Timothy Tyson, Rebecca Donner, and Steve Prothero, and new stars such as Irina Reyn, Danielle Trussoni, and Laurel Snyder -- we rounded up several new essays -- including Meera's "Banana Slug Psalm," Jeff Wilson's "Barbershop Dharma," Mark Dery's "Jesus is Just Allright," my "The Apocalypse is Always Now," Manseau's "Revelation Road," and, my most favorite of all, Quince Mountain's "Cowboy for Christ," a tale of transgendered Bible camp. Here's a sample:

Just like the cowbois in the more interesting queer porn mags, I wore leather chaps and carried a rope everywhere I went. These should have been clues, but I was oblivious to my slant. Perhaps many otherwise curious adults are too horrified to partake in such pleasures, are not ready to see in themselves what they’ve been told is perverted. I know I was spared for a long time from self-effacement or self-denial largely because of my ignorance of such terms as flogging, caning, BDSM, power play, FemDom, and the like. I didn’t know a schoolboy scene from a shoe fetish, and was thus free to engage in all manner of erotic indulgence.

Until the one of the deacons caught me lavishing Whitney’s bare and salty beltline as she leaned back against a pile of sweaty saddle blankets polishing leather in the tack room, I was quite free, indeed. During the ensuing interrogations, I publicly denied any kind of sexual interest in girls (What?! She’s like a sister to me—my sister in Christ!). I recounted my devotion, my service, their lack of solid evidence. The director, who called me out on the back barn porch and addressed me with his arms crossed, could hardly prove a longstanding sexual relationship. Still, my welcome at Bible camp was clearly limited to the end of the summer at best.

Privately, I had to agree with the director. I held up my desires to the holy light of God’s word and, yes, they were out of line with His will. I may have failed as a camp wrangler, but I could get right with God.

When Whit and I left the camp without plans to return, we didn’t tell our friends we’d been caught getting it on in the barn. We cited frustration with transient staff and milky sermons. We said we wanted community; we craved meat and potatoes. So the following summer—after I finished high school and Whit dropped out of missionary school—we moved to Whit’s hometown, where we joined an even more conservative church. That’s what I needed in order to be the God-fearing woman I was meant to be: more rigidity...

"Junky Fried Eggs"; Ozick's "Entrails"; Ask the Dust; Mike Gold; Rocketship; Middlemarch (again)

I am the weasel that bites into its prey long after it's dead.

So says Mr. Ditty, in response to my "unused syllabus" a few posts below. Mr. Ditty -- Noahjohn -- has been one of my favorite writers since I met him at college 17 years ago. I thought he was hands-down the most interesting writer in a class that included several who've gone on to publish a great deal -- le thi diem thuy, Joshua Beckman, and me among them. I'm a big fan of thuy and Joshua, too, but Noahjohn's stories were the rawest, the funniest. They were accidentally "experimental," almost always sentimental, often exaggerated, and never less than true. Noahjohn did a stint for a small town newspaper after college, but then he returned to Florida to teach; and now he teaches in North Carolina. But he's thinking about writing again. His subjects, he suggests, may be his own life, Mars, and the occult -- a redundant list. To rev himself up, he's posted a couple of his old memoir stories on a blog called, unjustly, "Mediocre Ramblings." Here's my favorite: "Junky Fried Eggs and Lady Fingers."

***

Another friend I haven't seen in a long time has also started a blog: Of América: Roberto Lovato on Dreaming Beyond the Walls of Civilization.

Start with this post, an NPR interview with Roberto about Latino politics after Gonzalez.

***

O, Cynthia Ozick!

Such is my comment on Ozick's latest essay, "Literary Entrails," published in the April Harper's, read by me more recently. Such exclamation points, simultaneously ironic and earnest, a signal of a superior mind's resignation to the bustle of reality, are part of Ozick's rhythm. "A coterie!" she writes, mocking Lionel Trilling. "Spiritual ancestors! Posterity!" The question is, did Ozick discover the utility of exclamation points on her own, or does she borrow the point from Saul Bellow, whom she so reveres that she speculates that while another Bellow may be in the infant stages at this very moment, it's also possible that another 200 years will pass before such a genius bestrides the literary world. Bellow was a great exclamation point user, which is perhaps why his fictional alter egos were always running into trouble with the brutes, the Chicago savages, whom they often adored and feared. The brute bashes the exclamation point because it fails the test of authenticity on three levels: it is ironic, it is earnest, and it is enthusiastic.

O, Ozick!

***

When an editor calls and tells me some story I've been working on for a few months is set to run, I go out and buy myself a new book as a reward. John Fante's 1939 novel Ask the Dust was my reward for publication last spring in Rolling Stone of a story about a fundamentalist youth movement called BattleCry. I bought the book, I'm ashamed to admit, at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble, which is not only a chain store, but a branch of a chain store that once attempted to ban me for life after the manager took offense at a reading Peter Manseau and I gave from our book Killing the Buddha. Even more shamefully, I bought Ask the Dust despite the fact that it boasts an introduction by Charles Bukowski. I'm no fan of Bukowski, but that's not the point; what I resent even more is the Bukowski industry, the stamp of gritty authenticity his name is meant to provide for the legions of semi-punk kids who read nothing but Bukowski because he's "real" -- as if a thousand writers haven't drunk themselves stupid and/or lyrical.

But what does this have to do with Fante? All too much, as it turned out. I bought Ask the Dust because I'd heard Fante was brilliant, and because the first two paragraphs were funny and unadorned:

One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up, or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.

In the morning I awoke, decided that I should do more physical exercise, and began at once. I did several bending exercises. Then I washed my teeth, tasted blood, saw pink on the toothbrush, remembered the advertisements, and decided to go out and get some coffee.

That may be the high point of the book. Or rather, it's even keel -- Fante hits that note perfectly and holds it for a couple hundred pages. I stopped reading thirty pages before the end. There'd been a lot more coffee and self-deprecatory bravado, as well as misogyny polished to a high sheen and the roaring anxieties of the writer/anti-hero's ego crashing against the rocky shore of publishing. Along the way other hard-luck characters ambled through the pages, but Fante can never leave his anti-hero for long enough to fully develop any of the sideshows. Maybe he'd plead the logic of character -- his anti-hero narrator is so self-obsessed, how could he really get anyone else? I'd buy that if I hadn't seen it done, by Frederick Exeley in A Fan's Notes, his memoir/novel about being a deeply neurotic, almost violent, self-obsessed, failing writer.

Exeley came along decades after Ask the Dust. Fante wrote from the 1930s, and I can't help wondering whether his popularity isn't due to desire of depoliticized critics for working class grit lit unburdened by the radicalism of that period. Literary types ever since have insisted that literature can only be political if it's ambiguous, as if ambiguity can't become as didactic as the plainest proclamations of proletarian literature.

***

I much prefer Mike Gold's Jews Without Money (1930) to Fante's narcissism. Gold was the golden boy of proletarian lit, derided ever since as didactic, blunt, and unimaginative. Blunt, yes; but there's nothing didactic about his thick description of not just poverty but the political feelings that sometimes grow from it. And to call Gold unimaginative is to say that the world isn't worth imagining. Much of Jews Without Money is a curiousity cabinet strapped into a car without brakes, a catalogue of sights and sensations and sentiments spun through the mind of a child narrator. It's no Call It Sleep, but that's a good thing -- Roth is overrated, a brilliant stylist so narcissistic that his communism -- his broad social politics -- tied him up in knots for decades, while Gold's freed him to write simpler, less innovative prose that nonetheless will survive longer than Roth. Says me.

***

Here is where books survive:

Or maybe it's where they go to heaven. This is the El Ateneo book store in Buenos Aires. Nothing has made me want to have learned Spanish more than this bookstore.

***

My favorite comic book store is called Rocketship, on Smith Street in Brooklyn. It is to comic book stores what Grocery and Saul are to the Smith Street restaurant scene -- so snobby that it's out of place even on the street of the yuppies. But justifiably snobby -- it's simply better than the rest. So much better, in fact, that I used to feel guilty buying super hero comic books there -- Ed Brubaker's Daredevil, Brian Bendis' New Avengers (both of which I've given up on -- talented writers spread too thin). I felt as if I should be buying the experimental graphic novels and collections of obscure early 20th-century comics stacked up on the recommended table. Then, one day I was furtively buying Buffy the Vampire Slayer (not so furtively -- all geeks know Joss Whedon is a genius) when the owner suggested World War Hulk. World War Hulk? Seriously? Yes, seriously. "I love it!" she said. "He's so angry it scares me!" I bought it. Eh. But now I'm freed to buy super hero comics without shame. Which brings me to Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men #22, or, the death of Scott Summers. That, technically, is a spoiler, though the cover art by John Cassady of Summers floating in space as if crucified on Dali's cross, his Cyclops goggles occupying the foreground of the frame -- drifting away from his corpse -- should not leave anyone confused.

I hope he's really dead. Whedon has already portrayed death as well as I think I've ever seen it done on tv with an episode of Buffy called "The Body." The death of Cyclops, a character who goes back to the 1960s, may be another step in Whedon's exploration of character assassination. Cyclops' death, foretold on the cover, isn't even the main storyline of the comic -- after forty years of pulp, he gets just a few pages in the end. Contrast that with the melodrama of Captain America's murder this past spring, so significant that The New York Times had to take notice. I'm more interested in this death-in-passing. Melodrama is what one expects for the demise of the secularized gods of super hero-dom; but this incidental death seems more in keeping with the logic of super hero stories, in which characters are always alienated from the normal emotions of the world by their powers. They're apart; and they die apart. In Captain America, that means opera; in Joss Whedon's X-Men, it means loneliness.

***

Now I'm reading Middlemarch, which has already displaced Wuthering Heights as my new favorite novel. Wuthering Heights, after all, was like a comic book; Middlemarch is what novels would be in a smarter world. It's Moby-Dick for grown-ups, its plot meandering between observation and philosophy that's half-baked and over-cooked and strangely spiced. I'm only 400 pages into the book, so I won't say more. My wife, meanwhile, says I'm becoming a matron -- over the course of the past summer I went from tough guys like Mike Gold and John Fante to Emily Bronte and George Eliot. I think I'd be content to remain in the world of 19th century novels for awhile. I tried reading Pynchon's Vineland while we were on vacation in just that territory, but I couldn't get past the jokes -- he seemed to want his readers too much. Eliot didn't want readers, I think; she simply knew they would be there. And so I am.

Alexander Cockburn, The Golden Age Is In Us(1996); George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871)

I fell asleep last night drawn down by Tarik O’Regan’s Voices, recent choral works which were sufficiently startling to delay sleep by an hour, and Alexander Cockburn’s The Golden Age Is In Us, which I’ve no intention of ever completing, or ever fully abandoning. I find Cockburn’s diary -- essays in short form, off-hand analysis, quick attacks, clear-eyed reads -- strangely soothing. The entries cover the late 80s and early 90s. I remember some of it, Nancy’s drug campaign, Arafat on the White House lawn; and have since learned about other events chronicled therein (SDI, Satanic panic), and know almost nothing about tiny liberation movements in Hawai'i, or, for that matter, in the broccoli fields of Watsonville, California. This last is of extra interest due to the gravity of narcissism -- Julie and I recently drove past Watsonville, thus endowing the little town with our vast worldly importance.

Cockburn’s point is that Watsonville is plenty stocked with worldly importance already. Here he’s writing about Frank Bardacke, a long-time radical writer residing there. Bardacke’s been on my mind, though the most I’ve read of him are his letters to Cockburn reproduced in Golden Age. But JoAnn W. tells me she is editing his giant manuscript on the UFW and that Bardacke spent ten years on this, and knows it as well as anyone in the world.

Cockburn is writing about Bardacke at the beginning of that project, I'm guessing, flush with the power of perception, detecting in Watsonville’s dusty streets, steeple-less church, seemingly blank broccoli fields all the forces of political economy, empire building, international commerce, money, sex, death, etc. Bardacke is apparently not interested in some Winesburgian distillation – he works in sweep and scope, inverting the cliché “All politics are local”: the local is the political, at the farthest reaches of the latter word’s definition.

Which brings me to the spark for this entry: One page of Middlemarch, read while brushing my teeth. Rosamond is pressing her father, Mayor Vincy, to allow her to marry Dr. Lydgate. Vincy has turned against his earlier generous spirit. “I hope he knows I shan’t give anything – with this disappointment about Fred, and Parliament going to be dissolved, and machine-breaking everywhere, and an election coming on –” “Dear papa! what can that have to do with my marriage?” “A pretty deal to do with it!”

Indeed. It’s no discovery that Eliot’s “pastoral study” is large in scope, but this first mention of “machine-breaking” -- workers' sabotage -- underlines the novel’s interest in the relationship of economies large and small to the usual stuff of money, sex, death, etc. Eliot no more subsumes the concerns of the former than would her characters in ordinary life. And yet neither does she burden them with explanatory speeches, representative positions, and such. One of the lessons of Middlemarch is that positions -- class, political, medical, even -- are like musical tones, only of significance in their relation to other tones and only stable if a phrase were to repeat itself endlessly.

Jim Webb, Lost Soldiers 2001; Marilyn Robinson, Bible study, 2004

Almost two months since my last post on "Call Me Ishmael."
During that time, I finished my book, published a trimmed-down piece of it in Rolling Stone and wrote a review that's part of my thinking for the next book. Also, the name "Ishmael" has been thrown into temporary disrepute by its appearance (as "Ismail") in red ink on Killer Cho's arm.

My reading life has been dominated by Jim Webb, the novelist-turned-senator about whom I'm writing a profile. Which means I've been immersed in national epic, historical fiction, thrillers, and history-as-destiny. The most enduring work is probably the first, Fields of Fire, but the later thrillers, more conventional in form, have their own pleasures. Here's a great pulpy line from Lost Soldiers (2001), from a scene in which Dzung, a former South Vietnamese soldier, is being coerced into committing an assassination for the communist regime: "The reality of what Manh was putting before him crept up Dzung's spine on soft little scorpion's feet, causing him to shiver."

Some might take issue with the shiver -- a cliche? -- but I think it's perfect. The art of the thriller lies in adding nuances to recognizable notes. The image of a scorpion walking up a spine does just that. The scorpion's body looks like vertebrae, a spine upon a spine Develop that picture, and you'll see that this is a subtly clever twist on the old shiver routine. The scorpion -- Dzung's government counterpart -- looks much like Dzung. Worse, from Dzung's moral perspective, the scorpion uses Dzung to control Dzung, ascending his spine like a ladder. Dzung is complicit down to his bones. Are a scorpion's feet soft? Probably not -- but they surely feel that way, given that a scorpion is as light as an insect. There are no heavy blows here: Manh doesn't beat Dzung down, he gives him a gun. That is, he makes him a scorpion.

The subject of this post isn't Lost Soldiers, however, since I'll have plenty of space in Rolling Stone to write about Webb's books. It's another thriller, another collection of familiar notes in which smart readers and writers have been finding unexpected nuances for thousands of years. The Bible, of course. As I was sorting through some old papers tonight, I find a little pocket notebook. Paging through, I realized it contained some notes I'd made in 2004, when I attended a Bible study led by one of my favorite novelists, Marilyn Robinson, author of Housekeeping and Gilead. (Here's an essay about Robinson by Chris Lehmann.)

Peter Manseau and I were in Iowa City on tour for Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible, staying with our friend Laurel Snyder. Laurel told us Robinson taught a Bible study in a church basement, and after several drinks, we decided to venture out into a snow storm to find it. Our method: Peering into windows of churches. It took us about a dozen tries, but we found her. Robinson didn't seem surprised at three snow-covered strangers stomping into the middle of her class. Laurel hung back, but Peter and I pulled up chairs. "Fetch these boys some Bibles," Robinson instructed one of the bearded poets who'd become her disciple. Robinson's students were mostly writers, but she's serious about her Bible, a self-declared Calvinist and, if I recall, an ordained minister.

My notes from the evening are fairly cryptic. I'm going to write them down anyway, and then throw out this little notebook. I don't share Robinson's beliefs, but I'm fascinated by her gods.

Literature, says Robinson, proceeds by pushing toward definition. The messiah is a definition of how God will act in history. Which is to say, a counter-intuitive definition, since the messiah's action is that of literature. "The revolution that goes on continuously," says Robinson, "is a refining of definitions."

Would that it was so simple. But Robinson detects in the story impulses toward universalism and impulses away from universalism -- a literary rubber band.

Or, a "pulse." "We have broken His heart a million times over." And every time we do, God responds. "The whole Bible is God trying to say, 'I take this very seriously.'"

But we just won't listen, and we keep knocking God around. God, says Robinson, can be understood at times as like an abused wife -- an interesting idea about who holds the power in this relationship between humanity and the divine.

Then Robinson says: "What would we do without feeling like we're on the dark side of justice?" I'm not sure what she meant by that, but I wrote below it, "asked in a tone of gratitude." She follows with: "As soon as language of justice emerges, it becomes metaphysical." So perhaps this all means that we're spared the abstraction of one of the things that matters most to us -- justice -- by being on the wrong side of it. There are moments of justice in this world, she says, but not where we expect them (or create them?)

The last coherent note I made was: "Humanity will be betrayed by authority."