A Certain Slant of Light

YOU GUYS YOU GUYS I TOUCHED A SHAKESPEARE FIRST FOLIO TODAY! And also a first edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice! And surveys that George Washington drafted in his youth, and one of the twenty-five copies of the Declaration of Independence printed just after it was signed!

I went to IU to visit my friends today, and we stopped by the Lilly Library and asked the librarian to bring up a smorgasbord of the most interesting rare books. The librarian, a bespectacled white-haired man, brought up a laden cart and laid his treasures before us one by one. "Go ahead and touch," he said, because we were craning our heads so we could look without breathing on the books.

And! And! There was a display of illuminated manuscripts in the library's foyer. Most in plexiglass cases, of course, but pages from one out in the open to be touched: less fragile than I expected. All the books were. It was lovely.

Read Bertrand Patenaude's Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, which is about Trotsky's last years and murder in Mexico and wicked suspenseful, which is quite a trick given that I already knew it was going to end with the ice pick.

It's marvelously written and quite sad: here's Trotsky, after all, who has lost nearly everything, watching helpless as Stalin kills off most of his old friends and relatives. But Trotsky, bless him, remains an optimist to the end. He's got like two thousand followers, tops, and he's all "I will lead the Fourth International! The workers of the world will unite behind us and topple Stalin!" Never mind that he managed to induce a schism in this tiny, tiny movement.

He called the two sides of the schism the Majority and the Minority, pace Lenin and the Bolshevik/Menshevik split. Patenaude does not say this, but I bet Trotsky loved the parallel. He's distilled the party down to the true loyalists! Just like his idol!

Like Lenin, after all, Trotsky went out of his way to cause the split. He decided that the Soviet invasion of Finland was a continuation of international revolution and not imperialist at all, oh no. To hell with the evidence! Dialectical materialism says I'm right!

Why, Trotsky, why? It's so frustrating, because he could be brilliant and he clearly understood Stalin, but he was unable to make the leap between "Stalin is an evil bastard who has perverted the Soviet Union" to "Possibly I should stop supporting Soviet foreign policy." If he admitted the second, after all, he'd have to admit that his life's work was an irreparable ruin.

Which is why it's a tragedy. Not only has Trotsky's life's work failed - not only is he incapable of admitting it failed - but it failed because of his tragic flaw: Trotsky wasn't a leader.

He had bucketloads of charisma, but it functioned best in the eye of the hurricane. During the Revolution, he whipped crowds into fury - his speeches probably won the war. But it wasn't the enduring kind of charisma he would have needed to run a country; he couldn't compromise, he couldn't manage people over the long term.

Pretty much the only place Trotsky ever got close was in Stalin's mind (and perhaps his own) - which was the only place that mattered, because Stalin warped reality to suit his imaginings.

Thus, the end: goddamn Ramon Mercader murdering Trotsky with an ice pick. It's so unfair.

Alison Hoover Bartlett's The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is a wasteland of missed opportunities.

It tells the story of John Gilkey, a man who steals books in order to build a magnificent collection. It also purports to tell the story of the man who caught him, but in fact Gilkey gets three times as much page count.

Herein lies the first problem with the book: it's tremendously padded. Here's a topic through which you could explore book-collecting and book-collectors, collections in general, the psychology of thievery, curses written on early manuscript books to keep away thieves, book construction through the ages, the meaning and purpose of literature and indeed art in general, identity and the attempt to construct identity through material objects...

And instead Bartlett reports at great and repetitive length her interviews with Gilkey.

Astonishingly, given the verbiage devoted to him, Bartlett fails to build a vital sense of his character. Whenever she achieves an insight into his soul, she repeats it ad nauseum: Gilkey is just like other book collectors...except he steals! Gilkey's moral reasoning is so elastic as to make anything he wants to do all right! Doesn't that just BLOW YOUR MIND?

No. Nor did it first time you said it.

As if this were not enough, about a quarter of the book is devoted to the author's exploration of her own psyche and experiences. Tragically, her insight into herself is about as shallow as her insight into Gilkey. Often this is just boring: her lackluster attempts to kick-start a book-collecting passion of her own, for instance, are pointless but not irritating.

No, what's irritating is her realization (which she has four or five times) that she's no longer an impartial observer; that her presence is shaping events. She attempts to preserve her facade of journalistic objectivity (she's already lost the actuality of it) until the reader realizes that she values said "objectivity" mainly as excuse for cowardice.

This culminates in the scene where she visits Gilkey's childhood home, where his mother shows Bartlett Gilkey's bookshelves - where the books are shelved with the spines toward the wall. Bartlett stares at them, paralyzed: if she turns them over she could help booksellers retrieve thousands upon thousands of dollars of stolen property.

Now, if she had become friends with Gilkey and didn't want to land him a richly deserved jail sentence, that would be - not laudable - but understandable. Even interesting, written by a more self-aware author. But that doesn't cross her mind. No, she's afraid "what responsibility [she] might bear in knowing the books were there" (239-240).

But she already bears the responsibility, because she already knows the books are there! She mentions that she "curse[s] her lack of courage", but I don't think she realizes that her lack of courage is not merely a flaw, but a moral failing. It sinks her not only as a person, but as a writer: her book is shallow and out-of-focus because her fear clouds her vision.

The frustrating thing about studying fairy tales, or children's lit generally, is that every other scholarly book goes all wide-eyed and horrified about how children's books are written by, ZOMG, ADULTS, who are imposing their hegemonic sexist racist classist views of the world on the poor, oppressed children.

The logical conclusion, generally not stated but implied is that children should write their own books. These books would (apparently) be free of sexism, racism, classism, and every other evil ism, because children are as yet pure and unsullied by their cultures, and would not unthinkingly reflect the values they see in their world in their books.

Therefore, Eragon is the height to which children's literature should aspire.

*beats head against the ground*

Where should I start?

Look. Children are simply not like other oppressed groups. First: they're going to grow out of being children. Second, and conversely: everyone who writes children's books once was a child, which surely offers authors a level of insight that, say, a man writing about women or a white person writing about black people doesn't have.

Thirdly: women and black people, unlike children, are capable of writing their own books (provided the system allows them to do it). Kids of course can also write decent books once they have the education and life experience...by which time they're usually adults.

Yes, there are a few talented kids who write books - I like Amelia Atwater-Rhodes and and loved The Outsiders - but not enough to supply the voracious market of child readers. And I sincerely doubt there are many five-year-old writers who could supply the picture book market. Should the preschool crowd just wuffle along, bookless, rather than risk being hegemonically imposed upon by their elders?

Much better, clearly, if they remain stuck in the bubbles of their immediate surroundings. Keeping them ignorant is obviously better than subjecting them to hegemonic messages. Which of course won't be implicitly present in the world around them.

No, wait. Surely implicit presence in daily life is one of the things that makes a hegemonic idea hegemonic?

And without books (or movies, or music, or anything else that might be tainted by adult hands...), there won't be many countervailing messages for kids to latch on to. Among many, many other functions, art makes it possible to view culture at a certain remove: to see the forest instead of the trees. And at a remove, you can see a broad picture of "the way things are" - and also see that the way things are is wrong.

The critical viewpoint is learned. Kids don't emerge from the womb knowing it. The books they write reflect the hegemony of sexism and racism just as much as those written by unthinking adults.

***

Quite frankly, this strikes me as a very odd outcropping of the Romantic notion that children are - and should be kept - innocent, ignorant, and unsullied. The sullying agent is no longer knowledge of sex, but knowledge of sexism, racism, classism, etc.

But hegemonic attitudes are even more impossible to hide than sex, which is at least a discreet act which can be tucked behind closed doors. Hegemonic attitudes, by definition, infuse every corner of culture: that's why they're hegemonic. You might as well try to keep children innocent of air.

I just finished rereading Charlotte's Web today. It really is better as an adult: half the theme went over my head when I read it when I was eight. I got the friendship part, but the meaning of Charlotte's death went over my head.

Her death is probably one of the best-done death's in children's literature. Usually with kids' books the author wants to teach a Very Important Lesson about how death EXISTS and is RANDOM and COULD HAPPEN TO SOMEONE YOU LOVE (I hate and loathe and DESPISE Bridge to Terabithia) - and it's SO CHEAP, because of course in fiction, unlike life, death is never random. The author chooses to kill a character, occasionally because the death arises naturally from the story but more often because she wants to be "edgy" or "deep" or "realistic" or to win a Newberry medal.

And, having made that choice, generally the rest of the book is consumed in horror and mourning. These books suggest, simultaneously, that death is a common occurrence that affects everyone, and that when someone you know dies it will WRECK YOUR LIFE and make you miserable FOREVER, or at least till the last two pages of the book when a glimmer of hope gets tacked on to make it publishable.

I feel this message is pernicious.

Charlotte's death, on the other hand, is beautifully done. It really is one of those rare literary deaths that grow naturally from the story: it's well foreshadowed and it comes at a natural time, both in her life cycle and in the story itself. Moreover, while her death is terribly sad, life goes on. Wilbur mourns her, but he doesn't collapse in a puddle of endless misery.

And leaving aside DEATH, the book is wonderfully written. I especially love the sense of setting, the very intense sense of being in a barn, of seasons changing, the sights and smells and sounds. White is a deliciously descriptive writer. It's a fun book to sink into, like sitting on the porch eating gingerbread.

One caveat: the ending of Fern's story still MAKES ME FURIOUS. One Ferris wheel ride with a silly boy and she completely ceases to care about Wilbur? TOTALLY BOGUS. I hate that scene almost as much as Bridge to Terabithia.

Read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 this weekend. It's a little shrimp of a book, 115 pages, an hour and a half to read.

It's too long.

The book was apparently cobbled together out of short stories, and it has a short story worth of an idea in it - and no, it's not about censorship; I think people believe the book is all about censorship because book-burning is such a visceral, horrible image.

Rather, Fahrenheit 451 is about how television is creating an instant gratification culture that is CORRUPTING OUR SOULS and destroying our ability to feel and think, which degradation of the human spirit is encapsulated in compulsory book-burning.

It's alarmist - it's inevitably dated (nowadays it's surely the internet that's CORRUPTING OUR SOULS) - and, fatally, it's predictable. The plot is not predictable - I didn't know what events would take place - but I knew what those occurrences would mean, so the exact events weren't interesting. The theme never grew larger or more complicated but remained the same, all the way through the book.

It's dull.

Even the climax is not exciting. It's a ridiculous set-piece where the chief fireman (that is, the chief of the men who light books on fire) quotes from works of great literature for pages on end - quotes that would have no resonance for the protag, and are clearly meant for the reader, and God alone knows why Bradbury didn't admit he was writing a treatise and leave off pretending it was a novel.

Because it's not a good novel. The plot is unpredictable but not interesting. All but one of the characters are dull, and she dies. (Off screen. I'm pretending she went to a better book.) The story is smaller than the sum of its parts, worthwhile only for the Theme.

And it's such a simplified, spoonfed theme, too. I would expect better from a book that bemoaned the downfall of thought.

I want my hour and a half back.

Everyone has a favorite Politburo member. Donald Rayfield’s is Lavrenti Beria.

This, at least, is the impression I get from his book, Stalin and His Hangmen. To be fair, Rayfield is not fond of the Beria of the thirties and forties – who tortured prisoners with his own hands; who deported the Chechens, Ingush, and Kalmyks in dead winter with half an hour’s notice and no warm clothes; who drove around Tblisi and Moscow picking up schoolgirls for sex – but the Beria of the fifties, who had undergone a brain transplant.

Well, not really. But how else to you reconcile Beria the bloodthirsty sadist, who ordered women “as modern politicians order pizzas”, with the Beria who emerged after Stalin’s death? Beria the modernizer, sick of bloodshed, who amnestied a million prisoners, prohibited torture, opened cities to the outside world, and suggested reuniting the two halves of Germany?

This last proved too much for the rest of the Politburo. Panicked by this outbreak of liberalism (and, to be fair, by the fear that Beria would let his freak flag fly again once he had consolidated power), they had him arrested and shot.

Stalin and His Hangmen is less gracefully written than Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and less compulsively readable, but nonetheless an interesting book to read in counterpart. He fills in gaps, particularly in the early years of the secret police, and provides a fuller picture of the international scene than Montefiore, who focuses on domestic issues.

Although Rayfield, unlike Montefiore, never pulls his punches – noting, for instance, that Politburo members decorated death lists with comments like “Bastards,” “They deserve it,” which suggest a giddy, cruel delight in vengeance and death – his book is less harrowing than Montefiore’s. Rayfield's less skillful prose and wrathful asides about the West's failure to notice or care about Stalin's atrocities provide a layer of distance. His book is a picture of Hell, rather than a tour of it.

After having such a nice time reading John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, I decided to try Ernest Hemingway next - because he's inseparably linked in my mind with Steinbeck, even though he ought to be linked to Fitzgerald, and anyway I'd never read anything by him.

This was a mistake.

( There are totally going to be spoilers. I do it to save you the pain of reading Hemingway cold. )

I think Hemingway's goals as a writer and my goals as a reader simply aren't a good fit.

Evolutionarily speaking, birds are dinosaurs, mushrooms are animals, and fish don't exist. (Or cows are a fish. Take your pick.)

In the eyes of the Rofaifo of New Guinea, the giant flightless cassowary bird is a mammal.

And the face of Linnaeus, the creator of the first scientific taxonomic system - a man so egregiously in love with himself that he pronounced his system "a masterpiece that no one can read too often or admire too much" - is sold in Sweden, sculpted in marzipan, for your dining pleasure.

I've been reading Carol Kaesuk Yoon's Naming Nature: The Clash between Instinct and Science, an entertaining, eminently readable overview of the much-neglected art and science of taxonomy. It's full of delicious trivia like this, and gives a swift overview of basically everything about taxonomy ever besides.

She covers the history of scientific taxonomy, the different (but surprisingly similar) folk taxonomies in use all around the world, psychological studies of people who through brain damage have lost their ability to recognize living things, and posits the existence of an innate human ability - like Noam Chomsky's universal grammar, but for taxonomy - to order plants and animals into usable hierarchies, an ability she calls the "umwelt."

( The umwelt )

I picked this up on a lark, but I ended up enjoying the foray into popular science so much that I'm looking for more books in the genre. Does anyone have recommendations?

The first book I remember reading – not the content of what I read, but the experience of reading it – is The Berenstein Bears Count Their Blessings. It was Christmas break, first grade, (I learned to read fairly slowly), vacation at my grandmother’s house; I curled over the book in an armchair in the lanai, the room softly lit, the night black out of the cozy white window frames – the lulling sound of rain, and rumbling thunder…

But – here’s the thing – thunder terrified me; I wouldn’t have sat peacefully and read through a Florida thunderstorm. I think the thunderstorm was only in the book, and I was so absorbed that in my memory it’s grown out of the pages.

Memory plays tricks. And yet, I have such strong memories of the when and where of certain books. I remember, a little older, reading Megan Whelan Turner’s The Queen of Attolia, sitting outside a building daubed with a copy of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon. Kneeling by the shelves in a bookstore, since closed, mainlining the first few pages of The Outsiders before I bought it. Riding a train across the Rockies, torn between the mountains and Crown Duel.

Sometimes I’ve even transported books somewhere memorable to read them, because I know I’m going to love the book and want to be able to remember that first experience. I took Anne Fadiman’s marvelous Ex Libris to the local park to read; I remember the sun on the long grass, the fountain, and Fadiman’s rich, beautifully balanced prose melding into a beautiful May afternoon.

Except it may have been Fadiman’s other essay book, At Large and At Small, that I read that afternoon. It’s the same size – has the same sweet, seamless prose… and memory plays tricks.