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Are Writers Afraid of the Dark–Part II: Salman Rushdie’s contradictory views of censorship

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A brief follow up on my post from earlier today responding to Tim Parks’s notion over at the New York Review of Books that literature is actually characterized by fear and withdrawal from life rather than engagement with us.  Later in the day I read Salman Rushdie’s post at the New Yorker on Censorship, a redaction of his Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture delivered a few days ago.  Rushdie brings out the idea that, indeed, writers can be afraid, but it is a fear born from the fact of their writing rather than their writing being a compensation for it.  Censorship is a direct attack on the notion of the right to think and write and Rushdie brings out the idea that this can be paralyzing to the writers act.

The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom. If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. If he is afraid of the consequences of his choice of subject or of his manner of treatment of it, then his choices will not be determined by his talent, but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free.

via Salman Rushdie’s PEN World Voices Lecture on Censorship : The New Yorker.

Rushdie goes on to chronicle the martyrs of writing, who have had a great deal to be afraid of because of their writing (a point made in responses to Parks’s blog as well).

You will even find people who will give you the argument that censorship is good for artists because it challenges their imagination. This is like arguing that if you cut a man’s arms off you can praise him for learning to write with a pen held between his teeth. Censorship is not good for art, and it is even worse for artists themselves. The work of Ai Weiwei survives; the artist himself has an increasingly difficult life. The poet Ovid was banished to the Black Sea by a displeased Augustus Caesar, and spent the rest of his life in a little hellhole called Tomis, but the poetry of Ovid has outlived the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam died in one of Stalin’s labor camps, but the poetry of Mandelstam has outlived the Soviet Union. The poet Lorca was murdered in Spain, by Generalissimo Franco’s goons, but the poetry of Lorca has outlived the fascistic Falange. So perhaps we can argue that art is stronger than the censor, and perhaps it often is. Artists, however, are vulnerable.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/on-censorship-salman-rushdie.html#ixzz1vMorpS00

This is powerful stuff, though I’ll admit I started feeling like there was an uncomfortable contradiction in Rushdie’s presentation.  Although Rushdie’s ostensible thesis is that “censorship is not good for art,” he goes on after this turn to celebrate the dangerousness of writing.  According to Rushdie, all great art challenges the status quo and unsettles convention:

Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge. Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking, or ugly, or, to use the catch-all term so beloved of the tabloid press, controversial. And if we believe in liberty, if we want the air we breathe to remain plentiful and breathable, this is the art whose right to exist we must not only defend, but celebrate. Art is not entertainment. At its very best, it’s a revolution.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/on-censorship-salman-rushdie.html#ixzz1vMpu97Bt

It remains unclear to me how Rushdie can have it both ways.  If Art is going to be revolutionary, it cannot possibly be safe and it cannot possibly but expect the efforts to censor.  If there is no resistance to art, then there is no need for revolution, everything will be the safe middle ground, and there will be no possibility of great art.

I am not sure of which way Rushdie wants it, and I wonder what my readers think.  Does great art exist apart from resistance and opposition?  If it does not, does it make sense to long for a world in which such opposition does not exist?  Does Rushdie want to be edgy and pushing boundaries, but to do so safely?  Is this a contradictory and impossible desire?

You can also listen to Rushdie’s lecture below:

Barack Obama’s Waste Land; President as First Reader

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GalleyCat reported today that the new biography of Barack Obama gives an extensive picture of Obama’s literary interests, including a long excerpt of a letter in which Obama details his engagement with TS Eliot and his signature poem, The Waste Land. Obama’s analysis:

Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times.

A Portrait of Barack Obama as a Literary Young Man – GalleyCat.

For a 22 year old, you’d have to say this is pretty good. I’m impressed with the nuance of Obamas empathetic imagination, both in his ability to perceive the differences between the three great conservative poets of that age, and in his ability to identify with Eliot against his own political instincts. This is the kind of reading we’d like to inculcate in our students, and I think it lends credence to the notion that a mind trained in this kind of engagement might be better trained for civic engagement than those that are not. But too often even literature profs are primarily readers of the camp, so to speak, lumping those not of their own political or cultural persuasion into the faceless, and largely unread, camp of the enemy, and appreciating without distinction those who further our pet or current causes.

This is too bad, reducing a richer sense of education for civic engagement into the narrower and counterproductive sense of reading as indoctrination. I think the older notion was a vision of education that motivated the founding fathers. Whatever one thinks of his politics, passages like this suggest to me that Obama could sit unembarrassed with Jefferson and Adams discussing in all seriousness the relationship between poetry and public life. It would be a good thing to expect this of our presidents, rather than stumbling upon it by accident.

Don Delillo: Point Omega

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Point OmegaPoint Omega by Don DeLillo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m learning to trust my son’s literary taste in the same way I do his musical acumen. That is, at 16 he is far hipper and knowing than I have the energy to even try to be, knowing I would fail. He’s also several years past insistently recommending the latest animal fable from Brian Jacques. (A guilty father’s admission: I don’t think I could have taken many more years of toiling through the literally untranslatable renditions of ferrets speaking in what appears to be a working class Scottish brogue.) This faith in my son’s judgment was rewarded again a couple of weeks ago as we were flying out together to see my parents in Oklahoma City. He finished Point Omega on the leg from Cincinnati to Dallas, and said I really needed to read it before we got home.

That the book is readable on a plane flight into flyover country says nothing about the substance, though I will say that there are times Delillo is getting away with being Delillo. Not least is the fact that he can disguise a novella as a novel with large print and widely spaced lines and still get away with charging novel prices. More importantly, I thought the first third to a half of this very short book required a lot of patience, with the reader saying, “I know this must be good; it’s Don Delillo.” The first third is filled with the exceedingly detached and ruminant monologue of a documentary film maker and his subject, an academician who has lent his talents to the government to justify a war. The book as a whole is on one level a meditation on the mystifications that led us to prosecuting the war in Iraq.

“I’ll tell you this much. War creates a closed world and not only for those in combat but for th eplotters, the strategists. Except their war is acronyms, projections, contingencies, methodologies.”

He chanted the words, he intoned liturgically.

“They become paralyzed by the systems at their disposal. Their war is abstract. they think they’re sending an army into a place on a map.”

He was not one of the strategists, he said unnecessarily. I knew what he was, or what he was supposed to be, a defense intellectual, without the usual credentials, and when I used the term it made him tense his jaw with a proud longing for the early weeks and months, before he began to understand that he was occupying an empty seat.

“There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create.”

“What reality?”

“This is something we do with every eyeblink. Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation. Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can’t be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resmble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional. The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn’t.”

This is vintage Delillo in a lot of ways, but I’m not sure this dry detachment would have born up for another fifty pages. We get it pretty quickly, the immorality of the abstracted intellectual. What makes the story go, finally, is his having to come face to face with flesh and blood loss, forced in to a recognition that he had become so abstracted from his life that he had only experienced it and those who he should have been caring about as an absence.

Ultimately in novels we care first about relationships and not ideas. Or, rather, we only care about ideas to the degree that they bear the weight of relationships or corrupt relationships or get fleshed out in relationships. And so Raskolnikov, the man of ideas in Crime and Punishment, fascinates not so much because of his ideas but because he makes them flesh and blood and bone. With an axe. What makes Dickens live is not the sociological abstraction of oppressive class circumstance, but the orphaning of Little Nell. Delillo follows in that line in that what makes the novel work is not ultimately the grand ideas of the abstracted intellectual but the ways in which those grand ideas fracture man and wife, father and daughter, man from himself.

That is not in itself profoundly new; if that were as far as Delillo’s book went we’d have to say it was an interesting enough take on the villany of intellectuals. We’ve had that since Faust. But as the book concludes, we recognize that the violence of abstraction is not so much a property of intellectuals as of all living in this twilight of the western world, all those of us who watch the unfolding of images on the screen of our lives, substituting the slow motion replay of dropping bombs and exploding lives for the event, experiencing that violence as an aesthetic object worthy of our repeated fascination, image abstracted from meaning, until the death of others becomes indistinguishable from other means of entertainment in an entertaining world.

Delillo ultimately is a moral visionary. The darkness of his vision is not simply that he sees a world gone bad–though he indeed sees that. Rather it is that one root of that badness lies in the violence we visit on the world through our ways of looking at it. It is in the looking that we can’t escape our own complicity.

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Rego on Roosevelt

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I had the pleasure a couple of weeks ago to read my colleague Paul Rego’s new book on Teddy Roosevelt.  Although I’m a little more critical of Roosevelt than Paul is, his book seems very timely, and does a good job of pointing our Roosevelt’s continuing relevance.  Even this week John McCain morphed into a Roosevelt Republican taking on the Titans of Wall Street.  Whether McCain was convincing in doing so is another matter, but it was in line with Paul’s insight that Roosevelt remains a touchstone figure for many contemporary presidents and presidential aspirants.

I thought I was supposed to do a full-blow review/critical response to Paul’s book at a reception in his honor, but I had the honor of introducing him instead.  What follows are my meandering scribbles on Paul’s book, titled, by the way “American Ideal:  Theodore Roosevelt’s Search for American Individualism.” These don’t quite amount to a review since they’re mostly notes for a talk, but I thought I’d post them here anyway.

In some respects, Paul’s book focuses on the irony of his subtitle: Roosevelt’s search for an American individualism. Though an intellectual biography, Paul seems to suggest that Roosevelt doesn’t arrive at settled substantive positions so much as he grapples mightily with antinomies of American thought, practice and culture—the most important of these being the split between the pluribus and the unum in the American psyche. Born out of the Enlightenment, American politics and culture has never rested easily with the earlier notion of an individual as being one member of a group. Instead, the individual and the society are necessarily in tension with one another, if not actively opposed to one another. On this view, the individual is society’s other, not matter how much we may say that society’s could not be conceived of without individuals and vice-versa. On this reading, a search for an American individualism is a quixotic quest—my reading, not Paul’s—since to be an American is to be a part of a collective, but one which only defines itself through the exaltation of the individual. Nevertheless, however impossible the project, the struggle to reconcile these opposing forces gives Roosevelts work much of its energy and contemporary relevance, no matter that he didn’t completely succeed in his quest.

I especially like Paul’s tracing of the opposition between progressivism and individualism. For one thing, those people in American literature who pay any attention to Roosevelt tend to emphasize his individualism, and so Paul’s attention to Roosevelt’s progressivism was enlightening. Moreover, I learned a lot in Paul’s argument that at the turn of the twentieth century, progressivism was imagining largely in collectivist terms and was in some respects seen as anti-individualism. The complexities involved suggest, as Paul explicitly attempts to do, that politics of the early 21st century continues to bear the marks of the discourses of a century ago. Liberals still rocket uneasily between individual empowerment and government regulation and intervention, while conservative ideals of the self-made man and the destructive energies of capitalism collide, sometimes violently with the conservative values of community, family, and tradition. If Roosevelt has not solved the problem of the pluribus and the unum, neither, really, have we.

Paul doesn’t really take up the gendered elements of Roosevelts thought, and I think they are important on various levels. Roosevelts view of individualism is, in my view, deeply masculine, verging on masculinist, and one reason for the popularity of his books lay in his idealization of masculine activities—war, hunting, camping, and the like—as a remedy for the feminizing forces of culture. Ironically, of course, many conservatives perceived the government as just such a ‘feminizing” force, wherein a man had to give up his manly individualism in favor of the will of the collective. The identification of progressivism with the feminization of American culture is everywhere in American literature at least, and finds it’s way even in to contemporary politics. Think, for instance, of the fairly popular conservative dismissal of the liberal “nanny state,” and the preference that men pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Paul argues that Roosevelt was willing to use the powers of the state in order to enable the possibility of individual achievement. Whether this is genius or hopeless contradictory may depend upon your politics, but I’m struck by the way in which this structure is represented in one of Roosevelt’s signature achievements—the establishment of the National Park system. One reason, though not the only one, that it was brought in to existence was so a place where men could test their mettle against the forces of nature could be preserved in a rapidly urbanizing society.

Paul recognizes Roosevelt’s racism and makes the argument that he must be understood as a man of his time, and I think Paul also successfully shows that Roosevelt’s understanding of individualism did not exclude African Americans, making room for those of the race who in some sense transcended the handicaps associated with racial oppression. To some degree, this is a common argument made about someone like Lincoln—who Roosevelt took as an ideal. By modern standards would clearly be understood as a racist, but his thinking was supple enough to imagine the possibility of transcending the racial categories of his days.

Nevertheless, I wonder if some of the issues surrounding race as well as gender don’t go closer to the root of the problem Roosevelt faced, which would be in how the individual is imagined as an individual. That is, the political conception of the individual in American history is always imagined in raceless terms; however, in our conceptualization of race until very recently, only white people can be raceless. To be black is to be raced; in other words to be inherently marked as identified with a collectivity. By contrast, whiteness is more usually understood as the sign of individualism, of being unbounded by tribe, history, tradition and society. In short, to be free. The great literary essay on this idea remains Achebe’s meditation of Heart of Darkness, where he rightly points out that the travails of Conrad’s white characters depend upon the facelessness and inarticulate jabbering of the black mass that makes them stand out as individuals. In other words, however much room we may make in our conceptualization of individualization for specific black people, this is very easily transmuted in to the understanding that others can become individuals by becoming just like me—in which case they are no longer clearly other in terms of race.

This having been said, I tend to agree with Paul that the structure of this thinking can’t be blamed on Roosevelt, since it is part of the structure of American thinking per se. He did not invent it, nor is it completely clear how he could have escaped it. Instead I think it points to the notion that perhaps the reason these issues cannot be reconciled is that they begin with a deeply flawed notion of what it means to be an individual, however attractive that ideal may continue to be.

Obama, Prissy Prince Charming; Or, why it is possible to be an Obamabot and have a sense of humour

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I’m not much convinced that The New Yorker cover works as satire (more on that below), but I think the guys over at JibJab have another hit with this take on the political campaign.

More later on why I think this works and the New Yorker cover fails, but first I have to say I’m so glad that the world is abuzz with cultural theory! Ok, not so much. But the New Yorker’s ill-fated attempt at satire has the chattering classes hard at work trying to parse questions of genre, reader response, aesthetic taste and various other kinds of folderol. If it was satire, would people get it? If people didn’t get it, could it really be considered satire. Does the message of the image depend upon it’s intended audience as David Remnick

Satire or New Yorker inbreeding? You Decide

Satire or New Yorker inbreeding? You Decide

seems to suggest it does when he asserts that it’s intended, after all for “Readers-of-the-New-Yorker,” that snooty bunch. But is the meaning of the visual text here determined by the intention of the artists and the reading capabilities of an intended-and-oh-so-sophisticated-audience? In this day an age? When ANY text has no chance of being targeted exclusively at an intended audience because it will immediately be spewed endlessly into the blogosphere. What is an intended audience in such a world?

I’m impressed by the degree to which the discourse has revolved around criticisms of readings and possible readings. Maureen Dowd–I liked her much more when she was being smug and condescending about Hillary Clinton–smirks that obama is prissy and humourless and should just realize that COME ON, everyone in New York knows its just a joke. This seems just like the kind of answer a New Yorker would give, believing as they do, and apparently Maureen does, that the world is their oyster.

Philip Kennicott has a more interesting take on this same general idea over at the Washington Post. Agreeing with Dowd that Obama may be a bit too prissy in his response to the cover, he goes further and links it to the particular aura of printed material in comparison to our video-oriented imagination. Satire lives, but only in the bawdy possibilities of the moving image.

On “Saturday Night Live,” a sketch in which Michelle Obama tossed the flag in the fireplace and Barack Obama took off the pinstripes to reveal a flowing white robe would be seen as outrageous — and funny. Print cartoonists, unfortunately, find themselves working in an oxygen-free environment that is increasingly akin to the atmosphere of academia, or PBS. Cable television makes print seem like something ancient and sacred, a rule-bound sanctum fraught with the ever-present risk of sacrilege. Print is becoming a strange land where the solitary reader might easily go astray.

“People say, well, I get it, but I’m afraid that so-and-so is not going to get it,” said a mildly exasperated Remnick.

Which is to say that even as we pride ourselves on our media sophistication, as debunkers and decoders of the visual, we fret about the power of the printed image to circulate beyond the comforting control of television’s continuous interpretation and contextualization. In the age of YouTube — where for the most part we can still laugh at each other and ourselves — we are increasingly becoming print-humor iconoclasts, terrified that someone might be worshiping images in the wrong way.

I can really only go part way with him on this. Do we really think print is sacred. Just the other day in my reflections on Hard Times I was suggesting that we are so super saturated with “print”–broadly considered–that print has lost it’s aura. I think the same applies to the image.

Tom Toles, The Washington Post, July 16 2008

Tom Toles, The Washington Post, July 16 2008

[Side note: I can see the point that everyone can be a little condescending to readers in fly-over country, still, I think this take from Tom Toles on the controversy is a lot smarter than the original and a lot better satire too. Score one for the post, and tom Toles.]

It may, of course, be that a good number of lefties have been holding Obama sacred, and The New Yorker cover doesn’t work for the same reason that jokes about Jesus mother don’t play in the Vatican.

But really, I don’t think the real issue is that all the Obamabots are humorless. I thought the JibJab video was hysterical–and not just because it’s skewers are equal opportunity. It’s because the satire reveals and revels in something that is kind of really true about Obama, who is the subject of the piece. By contrast, the real subject of the satire on the New Yorker cover is nowhere to be seen–and, to be honest, nowhere in consciousness. We could, of course, satirize the reader of the The New Yorker because the reader is at the scene of reading and so, in viewing the image, would view something grotesquely true about themselves. Instead, the New Yorker cover tries to laugh at someone else without referencing that someone else anywhere in the image. Thus the image seems to be “about” Obama even when we pause and have to say “No, it really can’t be.”

This is not a lack of irony on the part of readers, as Remnick and others have lamented. Rather, the image is not ironic at all, playing off a doubleness contained within the image or within the readers’ experience of themselves viewing the image. Instead, it is a kind of postmodern archness which is anything but ironic. Indeed, I think it’s kind of smug.

On the other hand, the JibJab video really does reveal something that’s kind of true about Obama, as much as I love him. If stretched and distorted and made into a grotesque–which is what satire does, witness Swift–then you really feel the truth of the criticism that Obama is just a little too good to be true, and that too good to be trueness depends heavily on a lack of specificity that lets us project our fairy tales on to him. He will inevitable disappoint (witness Dowd’s grouchiness). In this sense, the video becomes not only about something that seems vaguely real about the Obama candidacy, it becomes about us as the viewers of the video (and more specifically as viewers of Obama). We see the truth about ourselves and our fantasies in ways that make us uncomfortable but also make us want to laugh.

None of this necessarily makes me happy, about the New Yorker, I mean. I used to think that The New Yorker was the repository of all that was smart and superior and intelligent in the world. But the guys over at JibJab are way smarter. Score another one for video. Where the smart people are.

April 4, 1968

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Today is the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The video is a montage surrounding the Civil Rights Movement and the life of MLK with the speech by Robert F. Kennedy playing in the background.

I was in many ways too young to completely understand what was happening in 1968. But even now these words and these images move me.
Martin Luther King Jr. speakingThe words speak for themselves. Related to the general interests of this blog, they make me think of one thing very simply: Words Matter. Whether in the life and preaching of Dr. King, or the eloquence of RFK, summoned from the heart at the instant of crisis.

I think I am no sentimentalist to say that I find myself longing for a leader who could quote Aeschylus by heart, who did not hold words in contempt, who knew enough to see that eloquence isn’t empty. Through words we imagine a life we can’t yet see.

John McCain–Happy Hemingway or Hillary Redux

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This in from the NYTimes evaluating last night’s victories by John McCain and Barack Obama:

On the Republican side, Senator John McCain of Arizona won a commanding victory over Mike Huckabee in the Wisconsin contest and led by a wide margin in Washington State. All but assured of his party’s nomination, Mr. McCain immediately went after Mr. Obama during a rally in Ohio, deriding “eloquent but empty” calls for change.

Umm…I’m wondering. Why does McCain think he can make this line work any better than Hillary has made it work for the past three months? Still, McCain comes at it from a slightly different angle. If, as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, Hillary is trying to protect the legions of naive American innocents from from the seductive Black Lothario, it seems to me that McCain is invoking more directly the masculine resistance to beautiful words that has dominated white male experience in the United States for the past 150 years or so.

No accident that McCain’s favorite novel is Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. This from Vanity Fair:

The enduring question about John McCain is what, finally, he is willing to do to win. His favorite novel is For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s story of an idealistic American, Robert Jordan, who goes to fight for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Jordan is willing to risk his life but never his honor, and his dying meditation, that “the world is a fine place and worth the fighting for,” gave McCain’s second memoir its title.

Indeed, McCain has more than his share of doomed to dutyFor Whom the Bell Tolls poster integrity that characterized Hemingway’s public persona. The title of Hemingway’s book, of course, refers to an ultimate destiny in death and the unflinching effort of the real man to face that inevitable destiny with something like grace. A characteristic effort of Heminway’s heroes, even when they mostly fail the chance. There’s a way, of course, in which McCain clearly does live out the Hemingway mythology. The prisoner of war refusing to bend the knee to his enemies, the maverick political independent, the loyalty to Bush on principle regarding the war, even when in his heart of hearts I think McCain finds Bush despicable. Even McCain’s political story this primary seasons unfolds like that of a Hemingway hero, the man willing to do what he believes in without resources. The belief that a man should stand up and do the right thing even in the face of overwhelming odds and the inevitable odds of death. As the Times suggested a couple of days ago, he doesn’t even pander well, which is precisely what makes him attractive to so many. Even I like McCain, and I disagree with him about almost everything. Proof again that policy statements and knowing the ropes may be important things for a Senator, but it’s not so clear that this kind of political minutiae is what will get people to follow you.

[Ironic side bar: The title of Hemingway’s novel is drawn from John Donne’s MeditationFor Whom the Bell Tolls First Edition number XVII, republished as the following poem:

‘No Man is an Island’ MEDITATION XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

I say “ironic” because Donne’s meditation is primarily about the unity of mankind, “No man is an island.” We are all part and parcel of one another, involved in all mankind. Sounds positively Obamian. We are the hope we’ve been waiting for. We are the world. We are the children.

In Hemingway’s hands the solitary confrontation with death is a chance for the man to test one’s mettle against the worst that nature offers, like the bullfighter in the ring. Finally we do this alone. I can’t quite see McCain with Donne. Maybe if he stood up and said, “any man’s death diminishes me…except that of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and various and other choice enemies who would be better gotten rid of.”]

Nevertheless, even if McCain runs on this Hemingwayesque idealism, he’ll give Obama a better run for his money that Clinton is right now. On the other hand, if he tries to tell the American people that they are naive for hoping that the world can be different than thepolitical world the baby boomers created …well…politicians don’t get so far telling people they are stupid. The irony of McCain is that he was, in some respects, the Obama of the last political season. If he goes against the instincts that made him a winner in the past, he’ll just be another old guy that Obama will blow out of the water.

Side bar number two: Obama might well be saying, it’s morning in America. Hillary could learn more than one lesson from Ronald Reagan.

Side bar number three: I’m not so sure Obama isn’t more ruthless and politically savvy than Clinton gives him credit for. He appeared on television in the middle of Clinton’s speech last night, and every station in the country dropped Hillary to hear what he had to say. Why does Clinton think Obama is so unable to handle tough as nails and ruthless Republicans? He’s shown every ability to handle tough as nails and ruthless Democrats like, umm, Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Barack Obama is a Woman! Who knew???

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Scandal mongerers alert! Barack Obama’s heretofore unacknowledged sex-change operation threatens to derail his quest for the White House.

(Side Note: I have discovered that including many words like “sex-change,” “porn,” and “diarrhea” really pumps up your blog stats. Count on them from here on out).

Anyway, this in from Scripps-Howard

“If Clinton loses the nomination, do women lose? Rights? Power? Visibility? Clout? Are they not taken as seriously by the political establishment? A month ago I would have told you yes. Now I believe the answer is no. Why? Because metrosexual, pro-choice, pro-health care, anti-poverty Obama is, in every political sense at least, more of a woman than Clinton.

====

“Clinton’s female supporters who are watching Obama’s movement coalesce, solidify and take over should console themselves there will be a woman Democrat in the White House either way if the Democrats win the general election. The nominee will either be a woman with double-X chromosomes, or one with XY chromosomes who votes more like a woman than most with XX.”

Perhaps Bonnie Erbe has come up with the true and deeply troubled reason that Barack Obama draws tens of thousands of screaming female fans at whistle stop campaigns throughout the country.

He’s a gender-bender.

And just what does this say about the tens of thousands of screaming young and middle aged men who rush the stage. Deeply repressed problems with gender identity no doubt. Something we have always suspected of limp-wristed liberals and moderates anyway, yes?

Seriously, though, the gender weirdness of this campaign continues to demonstrate that Americans have a keenly developed, if not completely sick, sense of the politics of sexuality and gender. Obama is suspicious because he is too much of a woman, and Clinton is unappealing because she is too much of a man.

It is interesting to me, though, that Obama combines and focuses a great deal of discursive energy when it comes to the politics of not only race but gender. Several years ago in a class I was discussing the tradition of Black Christs within African American religion. My students, mostly young female Christians, largely agreed when one said that as she tried to imagine Christ as an AFrican American, she imagined he was more definitively male than the white Christ she had grown up with.

Well, this is the classic stereotype that we’ve lived with since the 20s. (I realize I’ve already posted on this, but I just can’t get over it) Black men are somehow supposed to be outrageously and uncontrollably masculine–all brawny testosterone, no brains, no tenderness. White men are somehow soft and feminine–at least if they are religious or educated. Jesus holding Mary’s little lamb. Obama’s “metrosexuality”–his softness, his charm (think, what kind of men do we describe as charming?)–humanizes the threatening masculinity his blackness might otherwise entail for white audiences. Clinton’s ill-fated effort to paint Obama as a seducer, as well as the effort to link Obama’s appeal to Jesse Jackson was not only dismissive, it was also an effort to link him to an older form and stereotype of threatening black male sexuality.

But now that we know he’s actually a woman. We don’t have to worry about any of that, do we?

Is it any wonder that the rest of the world wonders when we will grow up?

Listening as Reading

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Some more about audiobooks today.

I still remember my shock and dismay a couple of years ago when I clicked on to the New York Times book page and found an advertisement of much a younger, more handsome and vaguely Mediterranean-looking young man who oozed sex appeal as he looked out at me from the screen with headphones on his ears.

“Why Read?” asked the caption.

Surely this was the demise of Western Civilization as we knew it, to say nothing of being a poor marketing strategy for a newspaper industry increasingly casting about in vain for new readers.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that audiobooks have developed a generally sexy and sophisticated cache for literary types that other shorthand ways to literature typically lack. As an English professor, I’ve been intrigued lately that a number of colleagues around and about have told me they listen to audiobooks to “keep up on their reading.” To some degree I’ve always imagined this as a slightly more sophisticated version of “I never read the book, but I watched the movie,” which has itself been about on a par with reading Sparknotes.

However, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, another colleague recently took issue with my general despairing sense that the reading of literature, at least, is on the decline, no matter the degree to which students may be now reading interactively on the web. “Yes,” she said, “but what about audiobooks?” She went on to cite the growth in sales over the past few years as evidence that interest in literature may not be waning after all.

My immediate response is a little bit like that of Scott Esposito over at Conversational reading. In a post a couple of years ago Scott responded to an advocate of audiobooks with the following:

Sorry Jim, but when you listen to a book on your iPod, you are no more reading that book than you are reading a baseball game when you listened to Vin Scully do play-by-play for the Dodgers.

It gets worse:

[Quoting Jim] But audio books, once seen as a kind of oral CliffsNotes for reading lightweights, have seduced members of a literate but busy crowd by allowing them to read while doing something else.

Well, if you’re doing something else then you’re not really reading, now are you? Listen Jim, and all other audiobookphiles out there: If I can barely wrap my little mind around Vollmann while I’m holding the book right before my face and re-reading each sentence 5 times each, how in the hell am I going to understand it if some nitwit is reading it to me while I’m brewing a cappuchino on my at-home Krups unit?

It’s not reading. It’s pretending that you give a damn about books when you really care so little about them that you’ll try to process them at the same time you’re scraping Pookie’s dog craps up off the sidewalk.

I have to grin because Scott is usually so much more polite. Nevertheless, I cite Scott at length because viscerally, in the deepest reaches of my id, I am completely with him and he said it better than I could anyway.

However, it’s worth pausing over the question of audiobooks a little further. I don’t agree with one of Scott’s respondents over at if:book, who describes listening to audiobooks as a kind of reading. But it is an experience related to reading, and so it’s probably worth parsing what kind of experience audiobooks actually provide and how that experience fits in with our understanding of what reading really is.

As I’ve said a couple of times, I think we lose sight of distinctions by having only one word, “reading,” that covers a host of activities. I don’t buy the notion that listening can be understood as the same activity as reading, though the if:book blog rightly points out the significance of audiobooks to the visually impaired. Indeed, one of my own colleagues has a visual disability and relies on audiobooks and other audio versions of printed texts to do his work. Even beyond these understandable exceptions, however, Scott’s definition of reading above privileges a particular model of deep reading that, in actual fact, is relatively recent in book history.

Indeed, going back to the beginnings of writing and reading, what we find is that very few people read books at all. Most people listened to books/scrolls/papyri being read. TheChrist reading in the synagogue temple reader and the town crier are the original of audiobooks and podcasts. In ancient Palestine, for instance, it’s estimated that in even so bibliocentric a culture as that of the Jewish people only 5 to 15% of the population could read at all, and the reading that went on often did not occur in deep intensive reading like that which Scott and I imagine when we think about what reading really is. Instead, much of the experience of reading was through ritual occasions in which scriptures would be read aloud as a part of worship. This is why biblical writers persistently call on people to “Hear the Word.” This model of reading persists in Jewish and Christian worship today, even when large numbers of the religious population are thoroughly literate. See Issachar Ryback’s “In Shul” for an interesting image from the history of Judaism.

Indeed, in the history of writing and reading, listening to reading is more the norm than not if we merely count passing centuries. It wasn’t until the aftermath of the Reformation that the model for receiving texts became predominantly focused on the individuals intense and silent engagement with the written word of the book. In this sense, we might say that the Hebrews of antiquity weren’t bibliocentric so much as logocentric—word-centered but not necessarily book-centered.

Along these lines, the model of intense engagement—what scholars of book history call “intensive reading”—is only one historical model of how reading should occur. Many scholars in the early modern period used “book wheels” in order to have several books open in front book wheelof them at the same time. This is not exactly the same thing as multi-tasking that Scott abhors in his post, and it’s not exactly internet hypertexting, but it is clearly not the singular absorption in a text that we’ve come to associate with the word “reading.” “Reading” is not just the all-encompassing absorption that I’ve come to treasure and long for in great novels and poems, or even in great and well-written arguments. Indeed, I judge books by whether they can provide this kind of experience. Nevertheless, “Reading” is many things.

But to recognize this is not exactly the same thing as saying “so what” to the slow ascendancy of audiobooks, and the sense that books, if they are to be read at all, will be read as part of a great multi-tasking universe that we now must live in. Instead, I think we need to ask what good things have been gained by the forms of intensive reading that Scott and I and others in the cult of book lovers have come to affirm as the highest form of reading. What is lost or missing if a person or a culture becomes incapable of participating in this kind of reading.

By the same token, we should ask what kinds of things are gained by audiobooks as a form of experience, even if I don’t want to call it a form of reading. I’ve spent some time recently browsing around Librivox.org, which I’ll probably blog about more extensively in a future post. It’s fair to say that a lot of it turns absolutely wonderful literature into mush, the equivalent of listening to your eight-year-old niece play Beethoven on the violin. On the other hand, it’s fair to say that some few of the readers on that service bring poetry alive for me in a way quite different than absorption in silence with the printed page. As I suggested the other day, I found Justin Brett’s renditions of Jabberwocky and Dover Beach, poems I mostly skim over when finding them in a book or on the web, absolutely thrilling, and I wanted to listen to everything I could possibly find that he had read.

This raises a host of interesting questions for a later day. What is “literature.” Is it somehow the thing on the page, or is it more like music, something that exists independently of its graphic representation with pen and ink (or pixel and screen). What is critical thinking and reading? I found myself thrilled by Brett’s reading, but frustrated that I couldn’t easily and in a single glance see how lines and stanzas fit together. I was, in some very real sense, at the mercy of the reader, no matter how much I loved his reading.

This raises necessary questions about the relationship between reader and listener. Could we tolerate a culture in which, like the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, reading is for the elite few while the rest of us listen or try to listen. At the mercy and good will of the literate elite—to say nothing of their abilities and deficiencies as oral interpreters of the works at hand.

More later

Garrison Keillor and Toni Morrison Tag Team Angelou and Grisham

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Garrison Keillor, a personal favorite, has broken for Obama. As I suspected a while back, Obama seems to be doing well with the literary crowd—gathering in Michael Chabon, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and now Garrison Keillor. There may be others, but I can’t find them in the five minutes I can afford looking around on the web. Still, it’s not a total lock. Maya Angelou and John Grisham have put in for Clinton, with Angelou putting forth with about as much sagacious pomposity as Morrison mustered for Obama. According to Angelou, embedded below, we should be attracted to Clinton because “she gives herself authority to be in her own skin… to be who she is.” We further discover that Hillary has the honesty to stand up and say “Yes, I am a woman.” And further that she is her mother and grandmother and an great grandmother and great greats. And all women. And she is even Maya Angelou.

Going to be a crowded Lincoln bedroom. And here we thought we were only going to get a two-fer with Hillary and Bill.

Seriously though, I have some trouble with the notion that women ought to vote for Hillary because she’s a woman, any more than a man ought to vote for Obama because he’s a man or because he’s black, or McCain because he’s a man or because he’s white. This being said, I know it happens, consciously and unconsciously. So I don’t have an absolute problem with Angelou being straightforward about it. What strikes me, however, is that Clinton supporters have been quite frank and straightforward in arguing that people ought to vote for Clinton because she’s a woman. I don’t see quite the same straightforward statement by any prominent black supporters of Obama. And of course it would be absolutely politically impossible for someone to get up and say they were voting for Obama or McCain or Huckabee because they were men. So the rhetorical strategies are still interesting. What’s allowed and what’s not allowed. My general sense, still, is that Obama is the wiser in playing down a unique appeal to a “natural” constituency. Can Clinton speak for and to everyone. She doesn’t really try to make that case, and I imagine it will cost her in a general election.

Back to Keillor. Much more understated as befits a Minnesotan. Though, it must be said that Keillor’s understatement is no less strategic or conventional the Angelou’s and Morrison’s self-inflation.

“I’m happy to support your candidacy, which is so full of promise for our country,” the best-selling author and humorist wrote in a letter declaring his support. “Seven years of a failed presidency is a depressing thing, and the country is pressing for a change and looking for someone with clear vision who is determined to break through the rhetorical logjam and find sensible ways to move our country forward. That’s you, friend.”

“And of course it will be exciting to have a president who can speak with grace and power to the American people,” Keillor wrote.

A war that’s left 10s of thousand dead or maimed, and has saddled our grandchildren with crippling debts has left Keillor depressed. Well, perhaps this is self-inflation of a very understated sort. From what I gather though, many things leave the good Lutheran depressed, and for the melancholy another thirty or forty thousand dead is par for the course in the scheme of things.

Keillor’s compliments to Obama’s rhetoric stand out. Obama couldn’t muster a great deal of grace and power in his response, however.

“I’ve been entertained and inspired by Garrison Keillor’s work through the years,” Obama said in a statement. “As president, I will wake up every day thinking about how I can help make life better in places like Lake Wobegon all across the country.”

Umm. Ok. This is EXACTLY why I thought Obama was running. To help all those good folks with white picket fences in the land that time forgot. It’s an interesting contrast, of course, since Keillor, despite his liberalism, has made his literary career on the examination of a white ethnic community as “typically American” in an era when it’s typicality has faded by the hour. Indeed, there is no measure of how atypical Lake Woebegon really is than the candidacy of Barack Obama.

Have they even seen black people in Lake Woebegon. I have my doubts. As much as I love the show. I can’t remember a single one.