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I wanted to note a few additions to the blogroll over the last number of weeks and comment on one other item in it:
- Directly related to the last post, there’s Three Percent, a new project at the University of Rochester “with the lofty goal of becoming a destination for readers, editors, and translators interested in finding out about modern and contemporary international literature.” In the fall of 2008, the university will also launch a new publishing house, Open Letter, which plans to publish 12 works of international literature every year.
- Wholly unrelated but local is A Sect of Myself, a blog “dedicated to keeping a watchful eye on the Conservative Christians who seek to make America a theocracy.” It entices me because it looks TSD is not only another SF liberal, but one who might actually have the fortitude to question the existence of god. On both accounts, I fully identify with the blog name.
- Also local is South DaCola, the blog of editorial cartoonist Scott Ehrisman. (Note Scott’s post about the editorial cartoon exhibit running July 31-September 4.)
- Going north a bit, I’ve added An Angry Dakota Democrat from Jamestown, N.D., who, in turn, led me to Diatomaceous Earth, also from North Dakota. (For the curious, diatomaceous earth is a type of “earth” or soil composed mainly of the fossilized remains of one-celled ancient marine organisms.)
- Departing the country, the blogroll goes to the isle of Malta to add Andre’s Confessions of an Atheist.
- Finally, Clean Cut Kid remains in the blogroll for the time being. For those who haven’t been paying attention, the CCK himself, Chad Schuldt, has been accused of embezzling $100,000 from his employer, Democratic political consulting firm Hildebrand-Tewes. Although so-called “Hildygate” has much of the SoDak blogosphere all ablaze (much less the established media), I haven’t discussed it because I wouldn’t know Chad or anyone at Hildebrand-Tewes if I passed them on the street. I agree with Denise Ross: “To the people who know “so-and-so,” it’s titillating. To the rest of us, it’s of passing interest at best.” Thus, CCK remains in the blogroll until it becomes fully apparent it is defunct. In that regard, it is no different than one or two other items there.
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
My recent interest in foreign fiction — works originally written in a language other than English — continues to pay dividends. In the last two weeks, it produced two wonderful works, Antonia Arslan’s Skylark Farm and Christian Jungersen’s The Exception. I’ll leave it to those smarter than me to determine if there’s any significance to the fact that both these translated works have genocide as a main theme.
Skylark Farm, translated from Italian, is based on the “obscure memories” of the experiences of the author’s family during the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the beginning of World War I. The first part of the novel, in which we meet each of the characters and actually learn the fate of most of them, starts the weakest. Yet as Arslan details village life and neighbors in run-up to the late May 1915 attacks on the Armenians and the initial massacre of the men in the family, she draws us in.
Skylark Farm is an Arslan family property in Anatolia. Sempad, the village pharmacist, is sprucing up the property in anticipation of a reunion with his brother, Yerwant, who left for Venice 40 years before. Unfortunately, the reunion plans coincide with the outbreak of World War I. The Ottoman Empire sides with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) and the Armenians are seen by the Empire as a threat to national security.
Just as the attacks on the Armenians are to begin, Sempad’s family and friends gather at Skylark Farm. As they assemble for group photos and a picnic, a group of Turkish soldiers arrive. Just prior to describing in full detail events the massacre of the men in the group, Arslan asks some of the questions raised by this or any similar event.
How does a massacre happen? What liquor does blood become and how does it rise to the brain? How is it that one acquires a thirst for blood? Those who taste it are said never to forget it.
The ensuing scenes are ones from which we would like to avert our eyes and ones which give no answers to the questions. The events at the farm are just part of the blood that will be tasted and not only at Skylark Farm. The men of the village are killed and the women and children, including the rest of Sempad’s family and his sisters, must attempt to survive a forced march to Aleppo, Syria.
The recounting of the horrors of that march, efforts made to assist the family and the eventual escape of a few family members to Venice and Yerwant is the focus of the book’s second part. It is the most effective part of the book as a simple, present tense recounting seems to bring a sense of authenticity and immediacy to the brutality and horror — and occasional kindnesses.
The Exception, translated from Danish, does not relate a specific tale of genocide although it asks many of the same questions Arslan raised. Jungersen takes a broader look at the issues of evil and human nature through the eyes of four women who work in the fictional Danish Center for Information on Genocide.
Anonymous e-mail death threats — speculated to have been sent by a Serbian war criminal — is the spark that ignites this exploration. Yet the book is not built around ethnic- or racial-based violence and torture. Instead, the story, often told in overlapping narrations by each woman, grows from the slights, real or perceived, and rivalries that give rise to office politics and conflicts in any modern office. The structure erected around this seemingly mundane framework is exceptional. Jungersen’s Rashomon-like exploration of human motives and the range of evil tends to enthrall. To simply stamp the book with the label “psychological thriller” is to undercut its power and vision.
In the course of educating us about various genocides of the 20th century, several of which seem largely unknown, systematic brutality is the means by which The Exception allows us to examine and consider the workings of the human mind, particularly the psychology of evil. Not only does the book take a macro view — asking what causes seemingly ordinary and normal human beings to butcher their neighbors — it also takes a micro view, contemplating not only whether such a trigger exists in every individual but pondering whether we all engage in evil but merely deny it.
The technique of each woman relating their own version of what is occurring — and the issues of their past and present — provides differing perspectives on those issues. Equally important from a narrative standpoint, it freely enables the reader to both suspect and empathize with each woman throughout the book. Yet at bottom seems to be the philosophical questions of whether we are all capable — or guilty — of brutality and evil and what may lead to it. While I might quibble with some of the steps Jungersen takes near the end of the book, they are easily forgiven in light of how he so easily engages us in contemplating troublesome and seemingly eternal issues of human nature.
Given that only approximately three percent of the books published in the United States are translations, it perhaps should not be surprising that works within that group are a literary equivalent of the best and the brightest. Still, that alone does not account for the potency of both Skylark Farm and The Exception. In fact, The Exception could rank among the best single works of fiction published in the U.S. this year.
A single dead man was once a breathing being, was once alive, and what’s left of him is a corpse that can be honored; a hundred thousand dead are a heap of rotting flesh, a pile of manure, more nothing than nothing, a foul, negative reality of which to rid oneself.
Antonia Arslan, Skylark Farm
It seems blog-based book reviewers and so-called “lit blogs” continue to perceived as threats by print reviewers. The latest example is an essay in today’s Boston Globe Ideas section by Sven Birkerts. Titled “Lost in the Blogosphere,” it makes a couple valid points, such as the fact that reviewing is not the same as criticism (which perhaps should have a capital “c” in this context) or that the web and blogs can lead you on a seemingly never-ending meander through cyberspace. But the essay seems predicated on an elitist approach that seems prevalent among many established print reviewers.
According to Birkerts, a “common ground” is necessary if reviewing or criticism is to “matter.” Who should establish the “shared set of traditions” defining the common ground? Of course, it must be “set out by artists and thinkers, and discussed and debated not just by everyone with an opinion, but also most effectively by the self-constituted group of those who have made it their purpose to do so.” (Emphasis added.). In other words, your idea or opinion is meaningless in the marketplace of ideas unless you know the secret handshake and rites of the self-elected print critics and reviewers who shall dictate opinions, tastes and culture.
Birkerts also rubbed a nerve about an approach I feel is too often taken by those in this “self-constituted group.” Here’s how he sets his argument about the need for reviewing to matter:
My impulse is to argue that if the Web at large is the old Freudian “polymorphous perverse,” that libidinally undifferentiated miasma of yearnings and gratifications, unbounded and free, then culture itself — what we have been calling “culture” at least since the Enlightenment — is the emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering.
Since I am evidently culturally deficient, I feel compelled to quote one of the omnipresent GEICO caveman television ads: “What???” I’m not saying I don’t grasp the distinction he is trying to make between the internet as a whole and “culture” as he defines it. (Or perhaps I read too much into it and Birkerts is simply saying lit bloggers — or all bloggers — are blindly grasping anywhere for sexual gratification?) I simply don’t believe reviewing or criticism needs a self-elected group to define culture, particularly if that group demands every reader worry about Freudian theory, miasmas, libidos and emergent maturity.
Maybe I am just too simpleminded. I think people read book reviews to learn about and help decide whether to read a new book. Granted, neither TLS or the NYRB operates on that theory but they focus on cultural and literary criticism, as opposed to simply reviewing books. I still prefer to let the book engage the reader in thought and consideration, not to use a review of it as a vehicle for me to expound and philosophize. Maybe that’s what makes me an illiterati.
In the past I’ve simply made passing note of similar articles and columns. But I looked at this one in more detail because it struck me as particularly ironic. You’ll find it in the online version of the Globe at Boston.com. If you go to the Books section of that site, you will find Globe book reviews and stories, along with something else — reviews from Blogcritics, including two of mine (here and here) in the last couple weeks. Of course, given the fact I have not elected myself as an arbiter of taste, culture or criticism, perhaps they simply prove Birkerts’s point.
I hope he’s not too embarrassed that his piece appears on a site that also has some of the blogosphere’s polymorphous perversity. Then again, maybe I’ve just been so engaged in such activities that I missed the entire point.
Wordsmiths who serve established power . . . are always devoted to obscurity. They castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.
John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards
My guess is the headache medication hasn’t been dispensed this heavily in NASA’s HR and PR departments since Lisa Nowak’s adventures in February. These two stories — worker sabotages computer destined for International Space Station and employee embezzles $150,000 — are bad enough. This one, though, is horrendous. A panel reviewing astronaut health issues as a result of the Nowak incident reported:
Interviews with both flight surgeons and astronauts identified some episodes of heavy use of alcohol by astronauts in the immediate preflight period, which has led to flight safety concerns. Alcohol is freely used in crew quarters. Two specific instances were described where astronauts had been so intoxicated prior to flight that flight surgeons and/or fellow astronauts raised concerns to local on-scene leadership regarding flight safety. However, the individuals were still permitted to fly.
With respect to the two incidents of intoxication prior to flight, NASA’s FAQ on the report says the committee received allegations to this effect that the panel “did not attempt to confirm or verify.” It also did not identify the individuals or flights involved in the incidents. The panel documents are available here.
Now I understand some people (such as those whose last words tend to be, “Hey, watch this!”) might think you can find bravery in a bottle. And I know that during “the Right Stuff” era, the Mercury 7 and their successors were reputedly more than willing to party. But to go into space intoxicated? Aside from reminding me of a bad TV sketch I once saw where an airsick astronaut turned the shuttle into a literal “vomit comet,” it not only makes you ponder the dangers this created but the amount of confidence astronauts actually had in the program.
Of course, as you start to think privatization of the space industry might be the ticket, three people were killed and three critically injured in an explosion at the facility for Burt Rutan’s private manned space program. Still, this incident apparently occurred while testing a propellant system, reinforcing the risks of space flight and the apparent idiocy of the alcohol practices uncovered by the NASA panel.
Sadly, the alcohol report reinforces one interpretation of Peter Schilling’s version of why there is no response to David Bowie’s question, “Can you hear me Major Tom?”
Trying to relax
Up in the capsule
“Send me up a drink”
Jokes Major Tom
“Major Tom (I’m Coming Home),” Peter Schilling
As I am the only one in my household (other than the dog) who has not read HP7 (I think I dropped off after or about book 4), I’ve had time to gather a few odds and ends from the ether.
The most aggravating thing about the younger generation is that I no longer belong to it.
Albert Einstein
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