2013 reading update

For the last several weeks, I’ve been spending a great deal of time catching up on various things, which hasn’t left a lot of time for blogging. (Hence the paucity of posting.) Directly after Christmas, I caught up a bit on my video gaming, playing through XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which was tremendously fun. This occupied two solid weeks of my leisure time. Then I began catching up on my TV shows, including both live action and anime. I’m almost up to date on Once Upon a Time, and I’m currently following at least seven shows currently simulcasting on Crunchyroll. The other big project for 2013 has been a reading project I’ve dubbed a “primer.” I will be heading back to grad school in the fall as a literary studies major. While I have a background as an English major, my emphasis was on creative writing; this has left quite a few gaps in my literary knowledge (even beyond those previously outlined). To that end, my primer was designed to address specific areas of interest that may develop into specializations once my academic career gets underway. So far, it’s been immensely rewarding. My progress is as follows:

• The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• Language of the Night by Ursula K. LeGuin
• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• The Conquering Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard
• A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony
• My Antonia by Willa Cather
• The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek
• Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber
• Perelandra by C. S. Lewis

Some of these books I actually read back in the tail end of 2012, and Genji is a white whale I’d been working on since 2011, but didn’t finish until this week. I’m currently chewing on Thomas Pynchon’s V., A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool, Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality #1: An Introduction, and John Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.

Coming up I have W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun, Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country, among others. I’d be interested in discussing any of these in the comment thread. ☕

Who still reads the Watchmen?

“Watchmen is a 13 year old boy’s vision of what maturity in art means.” – Freddie deBoer

Alan Jacobs played devil’s advocate toward Watchmen and stirred up a good conversation over the course of two posts. His prompt was the basic assertion that what has come to be known as the greatest graphic novel of all time… “well, it’s not very good.” His reasoning stems from a dissatisfaction with Alan Moore’s propensity to be a bit too one-note in his tone and characterization — and that his one note is of dour cynicism.

The ensuring debate brought to mind two things. The first was to resurrect the memory of the Playtime Watchmen extravaganza we did back when the film came out. I was not a huge fan of the film, but I did not regard it as a total failure. In many ways, both its strengths and weaknesses were heightened (or exacerbated, if you will) from the source material. Not having read the bulk of Moore’s work, I can’t say with authority how much Watchmen conforms to Moore’s overall style or departs from it. I do know that I’ve read V for Vendetta and several volumes of Moore’s run on Swamp Thing, both of which are from the same era, and both of which I personally like better than Watchmen, even though Watchmen is clearly more ambitious and elegant in almost every formal respect. An exchange I had with the estimable Dan Swensen during the roundtable seems particularly relevant to the issues Jacobs raises:

Matt: I don’t think the film (or book) needed to provide false comfort, but again — it seems very reductive and pessimistic of the film to say, “Compromise. That’s the best we can do.  Screw it.”  I can understand why Anthony Lane thought the whole thing was a bit juvenile.  It doesn’t allow for any real goodness in human nature or the universe, obsessed with how things fall apart, get corrupted, or fail spectacularly to enact positive change.  It’s so engaged with darkness and messed up lives and a screwed up world that, for all its recognition of human flaws and foibles, isn’t recognizably human at all.  That was an impression I had when I first read the book, too, but I can see how the book was more a reaction against the times than a forward-looking, holistic vision.  V for Vendetta has the same set of problems that were exacerbated by the film, although I think Vendetta was even a little more compassionate than Watchmen.

Dan Swensen: I think putting it in those terms might be a bit unfair to the story. I think the text clearly condemns Veidt in the form of the Black Freighter story — Veidt tells himself (and others) this yarn about wanting to save the world and shape the future, but I think the Black Freighter is the story as it actually is — that he has become a monster of the worst kind. The group goes along with his plan not because they believe in it, but because exposing it would cause further damage — in other words, they must accept this evil in order to prevent an even greater evil. That, to me, is the core of the compromise, and in a way, the “new kind of heroism” that Veidt smugly talks about in the end; a heroism that goes beyond punching out criminals or saving babies from house fires. I think that saying it “doesn’t allow for goodness in human nature” is putting blinders on.

Which is not to say that the outcome isn’t dark and potentially depressing, because it surely is. But I think it’s unfair to say that it’s devoid of all hope.

Nearly four years have elapsed since that roundtable, and I still basically see things differently from Dan. The way I understand Moore’s perspective as expressed in Watchmen, even the best of all possible choices is still a horrendous moral compromise. In the world of Watchmen, heroes simply cannot be good. At best, they can only be the least despicable kind of bad. This is one of the main points of the work: to deconstruct the received notions of heroism. It is done quite effectively. So effectively that I honestly don’t understand where Dan (or anyone else) can see anything remotely resembling “hope” in the narrative. Wherever it exists, it is stamped out. Or, even if hope continues to exist, what can it do but beat its impotent fists against the edifices of time (which destroys all things, or brings them round again full circle, including the atrocities) and human frailty? I fully grasp that, from the perspective of the surviving protagonists at the end of Watchmen, they are doing what is necessary to prevent further suffering. The cost of that, though, is a false and doomed peace, which is inevitably accompanied by the corruption and venality of human civilization that necessitated such a terrible “new heroism” to begin with.

Something I’ve been struggling with more recently — the last two or three years, I would guess — is a nearly unchecked expansion of my cynical tendencies. I don’t like being cynical. It is the antithesis of everything I desire to be. Yet it worms its way into nearly every aspect of my worldview, wriggling at the edges of my vision like obsidian flagella, growing and writhing until it seizes upon and begins to strangle objects and ideas until they pallor with lost hope. It sucks. You’d think that with such a jaundiced way of looking at things, stories like Watchmen would appeal to me even more. However, the opposite is the case. The more weary I grow of the nature of things, the more I seek out art and entertainment that offer hope unapologetically.

Now, I don’t mean false hope. Treacle rots the gums and the soul. I’m talking about things that make me feel nourished and refreshed. Even a dystopian action flick like Dredd (quite good, by the way), with all its brutality and pessimism, knows enough to end on a note of hope, acknowledging the costs and losses of a battle fought and won, resolutely setting its jaw to face the battles yet to come. The worlds of Dredd and Watchmen (at least, the cinematic versions) are certainly cut from the same cloth, and they both hail from the same spiritual place in terms of their respective source materials. To be honest, I’d be hard pressed to articulate any more precisely why I felt much safer in the quasi-fascistic hands of Dredd than the hopeless nihilism of Watchmen while still maintaining any moral credibility of my own. Yet I find that the “hard truths” of Watchmen don’t strike me as completely true. Most of the great art hints at the possibility of redemption, be it generations removed or perhaps even beyond the veil of death. In Watchmen, though, redemption is a sadistic illusion bought with blood and psychopathology: “heroism,” in other words.

None of my reservations about Watchmen have much to do with its art; they have to do with where I stand in relation to its moral perspective. V for Vendetta (the comic) ends on a similarly pessimistic note, yet it is a note that problematizes everything that’s come before it in an interesting and morally poignant way. The character, V, spent the entire narrative committing acts of terror and murder in the name of total liberty — largely as a personal reaction against the total tyranny of the fascist government. Moore’s script set up a dichotomy between tyranny and freedom, and encouraged sympathy for V’s cause, even though his methods were little less totalitarian than the government’s against which he fought. The film adaptation embraced V and V’s methods, which made it one of the most repugnant superhero films in recent memory. Moore, though, understood what a dangerous line his antihero had drawn and gamboled across. That’s why he ends his narrative with an acknowledgment that even righteous fury, if misdirected, will breed only more of the same. A pessimistic ending, but morally astute. V’s revolution fails, but then, V was never a hero; he was a revolutionary. And the people who carry on his tainted legacy — the fascists of the future — are the ones making the choice to live by the codes they have received. In Watchmen, the heroes are not revolutionaries; they have the power to offer a choice to people. They refuse to do so or are destroyed. Watchmen condemns this choice, but offers no alternative. At the end of V, a former police inspector walks into the darkness, carrying the knowledge of that choice with him into the future, where perhaps it may flower in more fertile soil. In Watchmen, the choice dies with Rorschach, and the countdown to doomsday begins again.

Maybe it is putting blinders on to suggest that Watchmen doesn’t allow for goodness in human nature, but it certainly indicts its capacity to prevail.

_____

The other thing that the Jacobs posts brought to mind was the notion that Watchmen probably deserves its canonical status. The proof isn’t simply in the pudding; it’s in the people who debate the merits of the recipe. The comic finished its run in 1987; about twenty-six years ago. An entire generation has grown up since then that was not around to read the comic in its original form, yet both young and old readers continue to discuss what it means, how it means it, and whether or not it is still relevant. You’ll notice that it is frequently canonical works whose relevance is continually questioned. Non-canonical works are usually simply forgotten. Nobody discusses them at all, even if it’s just to ask if they should be discussed. As always, I was struck by how intelligent and how passionate the commenters talked about Watchmen and comics in general.  This time, though, it particularly resonated that we are far enough removed from its Cold War context (some of us generationally as well as by time’s passage) that this work really must stand on its own. It is apparent to me that the comic continues to resonate, even with all the caveats that include phrases like “for its time.” It was also refreshing to see so much attention refocused on Dave Gibbons, whose art carries the entire thing, and who tends to be denigrated by comic fans for having the temerity to happily profit from his co-creation, and not to be a cranky lunatic who worships a snake-god pseudo-ironically.

In the last couple years, I’ve seen many college syllabi on the Internet that include Watchmen as part of “great books” courses or which are specifically about comics or pop culture. It is also abundantly obvious that the conceit of problematizing superheroes is a fact of our culture. Most superhero stories still lean more toward the mythological or heroic mode when all is said and done, but in terms of influence, it would seem churlish not to study Watchmen as the tip of the watershed moment when comics finally legitimized themselves in the public sphere as a vehicle for stories of artistic ambition and thematic seriousness. Not that great comics or graphic novels didn’t precede Watchmen, but it was with it that superhero comics arrived. Jacobs may not think that Watchmen isn’t very good; he may well be right that it isn’t that good. What is significant is that an English literature scholar should be familiar enough with Watchmen, its context, and its legacy to feel compelled to comment, “apropos of nothing in particular,” on its merits more than twenty-six years after its initial publication. To me, this signifies that readers of English will continue to read the Watchmen — let alone query who watches them — for years to come. ☕

Open for debate: the future of literary posterity

I’ve probably already touched on posterity in several of my posts on lists and listmaking, but — wouldn’t you know it? — another list has popped up. Via Alan Jacobs, Paleofuture has a post discussing an instance of a literary magazine in the 1930s asking its readers to predict which contemporary authors would be canonical by Y2K. These things fascinate me. At what point does a prediction become an act shaping the future? Does the wishful thinking of listmakers actually make those lists into reality? As both Jacobs and Matt Novak note, most of the writers in the magazine’s top ten are still widely read amongst the literary.

I don’t blog about contemporary literature much because, frankly, I’m frightfully out of touch with what’s hip and rad these days. (I can’t wait to read the new Dresden book; that’s all I know!) Both Jacobs and Novak had some great comments on their posts, so I thought I’d open this up for discussion, and hopefully we can get a good comment thread going. Of the English-language authors still living (or having died within, say, the last five years), who do you think will still be read in the year 2100? What considerations make those authors stand out? One of my bigger questions is how important is it for authors or works to be institutionalized (taught in high schools, universities, etc.) in order for them to survive? What kinds of stories survive best in popular culture, outside academia? Are we suffering a relative paucity of talent in our current crop of literary artists, or will future generations look back on this era as an embarrassment of underappreciated riches?

I look forward to your comments. Please have at it.☕

The dialectic of elections

“Today only [stereotyped] thinking is left. People still vote, but only between totalities. The anti-Semitic psychology has largely been replaced by mere acceptance of the whole fascist ticket, which is an inventory of the slogans of belligerent big business. Just as, on the ballot paper of the mass party, voters are presented with the names of people remote from their experience for whom they can only vote en bloc, the central ideological concepts have been codified into a small number of lists. One has to opt for one of them en bloc if one’s own position is not to seem as futile as splinter votes on polling day in face of the statistical mammoths.” – Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, from “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Adorno and Horkheimer were writing in the long shadow of Hitler’s Germany, from which they fled along with almost all of their colleagues in the years leading up to the Second World War. The book from which the above quote is excerpted is a critique of the prevailing philosophy of civilization, one that, in the view of the authors, divides society into individuals (who worship at the altar of individuality), then forces conformity upon them (the better to control them as a collective mass). In the context of the chapter from which that quote is taken, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that anti-Semitism is essentially a symptom of the larger disease, not the cancer itself. Anti-Semitism is an expression of a cultural phenomenon that could be filled by virtually any other attitude that projects fear and self-loathing onto Difference.

What struck me about this particular passage is how uncannily — minus the period-specific references to anti-Semitism and fascism (which was, please remember, considered to be a viable and progressive political philosophy in the early 20th century) — it describes the election politics of the United States in the 21st century. One of the central themes of The Dialectic of Enlightenment is how sameness and conformity preserve the power structure of society by offering the illusion of choice to the average joe. This applies as equally to brands of soup as it does political parties. You don’t have to be a Marxist to appreciate just how much capital (cultural, economic, psychological) has been concentrated in the hands of America’s two biggest parties, and the myriad ways in which that power is wielded by both the parties’ gamesmanship and the sheer inertia of the system against the interests of the individual voters.

By dividing America in twain, the Democrats and Republicans haven’t offered choices to its citizens; they’ve categorized them as being One or the Other. If you are merely One or the Other, then you have little choice but to vote accordingly, which amounts to no choice at all. Whatever the differences between the two parties, consider that they and they alone have — together — monopolized the political establishment of this country for more than 150 years. In their theatrical struggle for power, they have exonerated the use of power itself as a political means. This is why you can hear each party claiming to “Take back America!” as if it had been stolen overnight from its crib.

Despite the changes in cultural values and their respective platforms, both parties have remained. Only those with money can gain entrance to the machine, and only those willing to perpetuate the false (that is, fraudulent) dichotomy as The Real Choice are permitted to stay. Every election is The Most Important Election in Our Lifetime. Only by giving a Mandate to Our Party can Real Change begin. The Others want to Destroy Your Country. Only We are Fighting to Preserve the Real America. Each is defined in opposition to the other, but it’s not a real contest: it’s two bullies dividing the class’s lunch money evenly between them, then flipping for that last quarter. The beauty of it is that they’ve convinced the rest of us that we actually have a stake in whether it lands heads or tails.

I’m not a Adorno/Horkheimer acolyte. But the pessimism exemplified in that quote articulates very well the frustration I feel regarding Decision 2012. It’s not a decision; it’s a coin toss. Worse than that, I know that the machine has won. Instead of seeing elections as an opportunity to direct their own political fate, the American people continue to treat election for political office as a beauty pageant. Good thing, too. We all know that the most valuable quality in an administrator is how often we’d like to have him over for a beer. The personal touch has been mechanized and commodified. In an age when the voice and image of a single person can be disseminated across thousands of miles to thousands of people via wires and electric pulses, it must be reassuring that it’s so easy to believe that, hey, I could easily imagine myself being that guy’s friend! He doesn’t even need to threaten me for my lunch money: I’ll hand it over gladly, because maybe he’ll see me for who I really am. I think he gets me, man. He really cares.

Why else would partisans work the phones on behalf of “Mitt” or “Barack”?

One more riposte from H & A. Substitute “industry” for “the two parties” and “customers and employees” for “voters and campaign volunteers.”

“Industry is interested in human beings only as its customers and employees and has in fact reduced humanity as a whole, like each of its elements, to this exhaustive formula. [...] As employees people are reminded of the rational organization and must fit into it as common sense requires. As customers they are regaled, whether on the screen or in the press, with human interest stories demonstrating freedom of choice and the charm of not belonging to the system. In both cases they remain objects.” – Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” from The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Yep, they care, all right. You’d look just darling up on the shelf with their collectible Furbies.☕

Summer reading list 2012 — The Tragedy of King Lear

Today I finished re-reading King Lear for the first time in a decade, as part of my summer reading.  Still a masterpiece.  I won’t comment extensively since, well, anything written by Shakespeare has already generated entire bookcases full of critical commentary that is a lot more in-depth and learned than mine.  But here are a few things I got out of it:

Summer Reading List 2012 (and 2011)

My wife has posted her planned reading list for this summer.  For years, we’ve frequently made an effort to read things together, and last year’s list was pretty ambitious.  So ambitious, in fact, that I only completed one book that was actually on it: Gravity’s Rainbow.  That’s why my Summer 2012 list is actually half comprised of holdovers from last year’s list.  If Heaven allows, here’s what I’ll read this summer…

__________

The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu (trans. Royall Tyler)

The Once and Future King, T. H. White

The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin

The Arabian Nights (an abridged edition yet to be determined)

The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon (Ellen is reading this in lieu of Gravity’s Rainbow)

King Lear, William Shakespeare

The Prelude, William Wordsworth

Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card

The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne (trans. yet to be determined)

__________

In addition to those, I’ll probably read a good chunk of literary theory as I prepare for the fall.  Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic should arrive on Saturday, as well as a collection of Walter Benjamin’s essays on media.

A disproportionately brief tour of my gaps in literary knowledge and taste

I have good news and better news. The good news is that if you click the following link — yes, this one right here — you’ll be taken to a witty rumination on literary taste and knowledge. The better news is that it’s written by Dan Swensen, who has apparently started a brand spanking new site called Surly Muse that looks like it will be updated with some regularity. And the peasants rejoice! At the end of his post, Dan asks some direct questions that are probably intended to provoke comments and discussion on his own site. (Unfortunately, what he’s going to get from me is a lousy pingback.) He challenges us thusly:

So tell me, reader. What are your genre gaps? Any trashy series that you unabashedly love? Any classics you unreservedly hate? I’d like to know.

Summer 2011 Reading List — Episode I: Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

“A screaming thing comes across the sky. It’s a V-2 rocket carrying twelve thousand pounds of symbolism, and it’s coming down on your poor, deluded, postmodern head.”
- Book-a-Minute Classics (ultra-condensed by Glenn Davis)

There was no update last weekend because I spent a great big chunk of the weekend either spending time with family and friends or reading Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time.  It is the first book on the 2011 Summer Reading list, which my wife has already blogged about several times.  She began the summer with The Once and Future King.  I chose to begin with Thomas Pynchon primarily because I anticipated that his would be the most difficult book of the bunch to read, and I wanted to plow through it while I was at the height of self-motivation.  As Ellen has already noted, we (she, my little sister, and I) each picked two books, with no particular order set in which we would read them as a group.  Our rationale for selecting each one was more or less arbitrary.  The top criterion, of course, was that the book appealed to us.  Another key criterion was that it should be a book that we might find challenging in some way, and that would therefore benefit from group discussion a little more than something more disposable.  For Gravity’s Rainbow in particular, though, I had a few more personal reasons.