Freud and Hamlet

When I read Hamlet, I can't help but think of Sigmund Freud -- probably not for the reasons you're thinking, though.

I don't care much for Oedipal interpretations of the play; there's nothing in it, in my reading, that lends credence to the notion that Hamlet wants to get with Gertrude himself, that that is why he hesitates in his quest for revenge -- nor does it make sense that an admixture of rage (for his father's murder) and jealousy (because he himself wanted to be the one to supplant his father) would give him pause -- rather, all the more reason to kill the dirty bastard who stands in his way. There are plenty of other explanations for Hamlet's pause -- the conflict between the warrior's desire for revenge and the Christian's desire for mercy and God's judgment; the uncertainty over the true nature of the ghost; the fact that Claudius appears to be praying when Hamlet comes upon him, ready to do the deed, and Hamlet's understanding that revenge at such a moment, were Claudius really praying, might send his enemy directly to heaven while his murdered father languishes in purgatory -- all of this in addition to the primary fact that Hamlet is himself a man of thought, not a man of action, and that for him "the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

Rather, Freud serves other purposes in relation to Hamlet. It may seem easy these days to dismiss Freud as a misguided, coke-snorting fantasist from a by-gone era, but to do so would be to overlook the powerful impact that he made on modern consciousness -- and his take on modern consciousness certainly involves that earliest of moderns: Hamlet, who is, as Harold Bloom puts it, Shakespeare's "least archaic" character.

Once you strip away the fancy details of Freud's theories, you're left with two essential ideas. One is that human consciousness is fragmented. More than anyone else, Freud, who trafficked in the language of myths, is responsible for destroying that falsest of myths: that the mind is a single, unified entity. Descartes' mind-body duality is the predecessor for this idea, but also a dead end in its inability to fully understand the relationship between mind and body. Freud's understanding of the fractured mind is the true mark of the modern; Freud may not have invented this notion, but he popularized it. Of the Renaissance writers I know, only Montaigne and Shakespeare seem to articulate a notion on par with the modern view of the fragmented consciousness. With Montaigne, such an understanding quietly underscores the whole of his essays. With Shakespeare, this understanding is the prominent characteristic of his most famous hero. Shakespeare and Freud both understood that it is very much a human quality of mind to hold simultaneously multiple conflicting desires -- to want to do something and not want to do it, to wish for something and know that we shouldn't have it, to weigh both sides of a matter and feel compelling qualities on either -- to feel ourselves ripped to shreds by the centrifugal forces of our own minds. The specifics of id, ego, and superego are less relevant than the fact that there are varied aspects of the mind representing various influences. We take such an understanding for granted now -- the ambiguity of character, the complexity of mind -- but this is the revolutionary quality that Hamlet stood for, a quality that Freud explicated most successfully in prose. Such an understanding of the complexity of character gives the lie to Polonius' stoical maxim that if you are true "to thine own self ... Thou canst not then be false to any man." To which self must one be true? Hamlet is perhaps the first character in all of literature to be so untethered to any solid notion of self. He's a free agent of thought. When stoical maxims fall short, as they do in his famous soliloquy on suicide, Hamlet ranges off into undiscovered territories of thought. He cannot be true to himself, because he has no central core to which he might be true. His only self is limitless thought, and in this context the idea that "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" takes on not only a proto-Romantic aspect but also a vertiginous quality as well, the quality of existential nausea. (I may be riffing off of A. D. Nuttall here; he introduced me to the notion of stoicism in Hamlet in Shakespeare the Thinker.)

When Hamlet does find himself -- or rather creates himself -- it is after his encounter with a Player who teaches him to act out an emotion and another encounter with a rival prince who teaches him how to act out a deed. In the meantime, Hamlet talks, and here we see the precursor of Freud's other significant idea: that it is in talk that we discover ourselves. The Freudian notion is of course famous in caricature for enacting several generations of New Yorker cartoon characters who take to the long leather couch to speak to their shrink. Psychoanalysis has been writ on a larger mass-market scale, though, for more up-to-date audiences. First the talking cure graduated (via the middle school of Phil Donahue) to the Oprah Winfrey Show: instead of taking it to your shrink, you could take it to a television audience of millions. Now, we can take it to our blogs, as well -- no reservations for the production studio required. Hamlet didn't have the Viennese doctor -- nor Oprah, nor the entire membership directory of Facebook -- to hear him; instead, he had us -- that audience whom he addresses so directly in his final speech, but whom he has really been talking to all along in his many famous soliloquys. The art of the soliloquy is the art of self discovery and self-invention, and is that not what Freud wanted his patients to do? To lie down on the couch and soliloquize, to invent their own tragic personas ....

And in the case of Hamlet, the talking cure works. In Act V, he is ready to face his destiny, whatever that may be: "the readiness is all." It may well be that Hamlet didn't have a destiny until he had talked it all out.

I'm sure that many lives have been needlessly complicated by the bombasticism of primitive psychoanalysis. But who could resist the lure of seeing themselves cast as Elektra, as Oedipus ... as Hamlet?

Obama in Berlin

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EED9123DF934A15754C0A96E9C8B63&scp=1&sq=marc%20charney%20obama%20berlin&st=cse

Conspicuously absent from Marc D. Charney's list of "echoes" in Barack Obama's Berlin speech is any reference to John F. Kennedy's 1963 speech delivered there. Obama did, however, allude to Kennedy when at the end of his speech he described the "aspirations shared by all people ... [to] live free from fear and free from want," claiming "It is because of these aspirations that all free people--everywhere--became citizens of Berlin."

Who made them citizens of Berlin? It was Kennedy, who said--as an introduction to his famous closing line--that "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin."

Wisely perhaps, Obama chose to allude to the less-famous intro to the statement "Ich bin ein Berliner" rather than risk seeming presumptuous by quoting Kennedy's use of the German. In doing so, Obama successfully updated Kennedy's notion for our times. The kind of sentiment expressed here is fully consistent with Obama's particular political genius--his inclusiveness--and helps to explain why the junior senator from Illinois was able to draw a crowd of 200,000 in a foreign city.

Keats' Tombstone

Image of Keats' tombstone from http://englishhistory.net/keats/grave.html
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"Here lies one whose name was writ on water."

This was the inscription that John Keats, who died at age 26 of tuberculosis, asked to have written on his tombstone--no name, just a line of verse prophesying what he thought would be his own pending anonymity. There is a historical irony here--that the verse in stone would prove part of the poetic apparatus that ultimately insured his name was not written merely on water.

Though not a line of strict iambic pentameter, there are a lot of consecutive iambs in this inscription--after the initial stressed syllable, four of them in a row. Instead of the initial iamb, we have a single, short, dramatically stressed syllable--"Here"--a declarative and fittingly pronounced beginning. The rhythm proceeds in iambs till the end, when we check a final unstressed note at the end of "water." Thus we have a ten syllable line, a stress followed by four iambs and ending abruptly with a syllable that is so weak that it simply seems to disappear. The effect of the final unstressed syllable is to stretch out the line a little and to provide a different tone at the end by hinting at the unstated, at implications, instead of offering certainty. The verse begins with emphasis and lingers at the end, pondering and thoughtful, trailing off into speculation and denying the sense of dramatic conclusion that we might expect at the end of such an important line as an epitaph. Even the first syllable of "water," where we expect something with significant declamatory power, is not stressed so heavily as we think it should be, certainly not as much as the other stressed syllables in the line, and that is part of the effect as well. To further emphasize the weakness of the ending, consider an alternative statement: "Here lies one whose name was writ in stone." "Stone" has a powerful finality to it that fits with the intended meaning. The way Keats has it, though, the ending invites us to meditate upon the legacy of his work.

He was a poet to the very end.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Tell someone that you just finished reading The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin, and see what kind of reaction you get. You can explain to them that the book is a profile of recent and current members of the Supreme Court and of the events and movements that have shaped their judicial philosophies. Tell them that the author has cracked the facade of that most illustrious of judicial institutions--one that is historically very private--to gain an insider's perspective on the inner workings of the Court. Your partner in conversation will likely be very impressed at your literary accomplishment. You can leave the conversation with a smile at a bit of insider's information of your own, because after having read The Nine you know how imminently readable a book it is. All you have to do is crack open the spine, and from that point on the book pretty much reads itself. No law degree required.

Toobin writes for the New Yorker, and the book is the product of years of covering the Supreme Court for that magazine--and for its literate but popular audience. It is unfortunate that, in ways, the book has been outdated since it hit the shelf--such is the nature of change in today's Court that decisions of the last couple of months might either enhance or defy some of the conclusions Toobin made for his book. But ultimately that is of no matter. The Court that Toobin profiles is one with a significant back-story that goes back decades, and any portrait of the Supreme Court is bound to end in a freeze-frame snapshot of an institution about to change. Indeed, the future of the Court, as the mixed messages of its recent session indicates, is far from settled, but the outcome of the next presidential election will certainly decide whether the Court remains divided almost evenly along ideological lines (with swing voter Anthony Kennedy siding with the Court's conservative faction about 60% of the time). Given the election of John McCain, the Court would be likely to develop a solid right-wing majority the next time a justice is replaced. (Justice John Paul Stevens is eighty-eight. One can imagine abortion opponents hypocritically praying for his death before Bush's term of office comes to a close.)

One thing that you can say about Supreme Court justices as a whole is that they are certainly an idiosyncratic bunch, despite the fact that so many of them at present march in lock-step with each other along ideological lines.

David Souter in many ways stands out. Appointed by George H.W. Bush, Souter was looked at by those on the right as a potential key player in their hope to establish a conservative majority on the Court--one capable of overturning Roe v. Wade--but since his appointment Souter has veered decidedly to the left. Reportedly, Souter does not have a cell phone or an e-mail account, and it is said of him that someone once gave him a television but that he never plugged it in. Toobin also reports that when Souter joined the Court in the late 80s he had never before heard of a popular beverage that some of his colleagues enjoyed--Diet Coke. He seems to have lived in his own professional bubble, aloof to the goings-on around him. There is something fascinating and, in a way, very admirable about Souter's quaint rejection of modern life. While one could argue that a justice should be in touch with the pace of contemporary thinking, one could also say that a justice should be tuned in to the timeless truths of rationality and the law and that the rest is irrelevant.

Clarence Thomas is another stand out, though for very different reasons. I am not the first to speculate that there is a certain degree of self-loathing at the core of Thomas' being. He is, by his own account, a bitterly angry man, and a great deal of his anger is directed at affirmative action, the policy by which he himself was accepted to Yale Law School as well as appointed to the Supreme Court--ironically, as a replacement for Thurgood Marshall. If Thomas displays so much public distaste and bitterness for the policies that made him the man he is today, how must he feel about himself?

I knew this much already about Thomas before reading The Nine. What I did not know, though, was how much Thomas is liked by virtually everyone around him, from his opponents on the Court to cafeteria employees there to the strangers he befriends at NASCAR events and on RV campgrounds. Suddenly, the portrait had become more complex--if anything, more puzzling.

Since the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 2005 and his subsequent replacement by John Roberts, the Court has moved to the far right in a majority of its decisions. This is in a way surprising, since Rehnquist himself was staunchly conservative through most of his career. Despite his continued adherence to conservative ideals, Rehnquist did not pursue them as doggedly once he was appointed Chief Justice. Toobin posits a solid rationale for the softening of Rehnquist's position in recent years, but Rehnquist was not the only one whose stance changed. Others have changed more dramatically--not just David Souter but also John Paul Stevens. In a recent interview for the New York Times Magazine, Stevens, a Ford appointee, said that he still considers himself a Republican and a conservative despite his reliable affiliation with the liberal faction of the court. Perhaps what Stevens does--unlike some of his colleagues--is to isolate his personal political views from his jurisprudence, but it is also possible that his view of "conservatism" was defined in a different era, when it meant something different than what it means now. Only two justices--Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Bryer--of the current nine were appointed by a Democratic president (both by Clinton); Souter and Stevens are the two who, mavericks in their own way, have kept liberal principles at play in the Court.

As you read The Nine, you encounter not only the big personalities but also the big questions at the heart of any analysis of the Supreme Court. First of all, what is the relationship between the judicial branch and the legislative branch, and to what extent does the Court have power to create--rather than merely explicate--the law? (The traditional answer is that the Supreme Court only interprets the law, but in reality that is simply not the case.) Also, what role should political ideology play in the Court? Regardless of what is proper for the supposedly blind procedures of justice, there is a disturbing degree of ideological bias in the current Court, and this bias will be a factor in the goings-on of the Court most likely for decades to come.

Another question involves the role of precedent in Supreme Court decisions. For generations of Supreme Court justices, respect for precedent has been standard operating procedure. At present, however, the increasingly conservative body in the Court threatens to tear apart decades of precedent on issues such as abortion and affirmative action that even Rehnquist was reluctant to dismantle.

A final major question involves the conflict between, on the one hand, judicial originalism and, on the other, the notion of a living constitution. Originalism is the notion that the preceise meaning of the Constitution was established by the framers at the time of its composition and that any interpretation of the Constitution that strays from the original meaning is invalid. As Toobin informs us, this approach to interpreting the Constitution is historically a pretty new one that emerged in the 1980s, and it is represented for those of us who lived through the tail end of the Reagan era by Robert Bork, whose appointment to the Supreme Court was denied by Congress. Appointees who could be described as roughly Borkian in attitude (Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito) sooner or later made their way into the ranks of the nine, and originalism might be said to be the defining force behind the Court's recent overthrow of the Washington, DC, handgun ban. That said, the more one scrutinizes the philosophy of originalism, the more impractical and even foolish it seems.

There is a reason that the Court has not stuck strictly to the framers' intents in a variety of domains: the framers lived in a society that is fundamentally different from our own. At what point does a necessary respect for the foundations of the Constitution become a crippling burden to those of us living in the twenty-first century?

Toobin, who on occasion betrays a mild moderate to liberal bias, hints pretty clearly his belief that the alternative to this notion of originalism, that of a "living Constitution," is really the only sensible way of making the Constitution a document that continues to serve the people. Furthermore, it makes sense in context of the bigger picture. The framers were at the core of a revolutionary generation who acted on the principle that if your government does not work for you, you should replace it. The government has to have some flexibility built into it. It is therefore sensible to think that the framers might intend for the document to change over time to accommodate the needs of a changing society.

It must be said that Toobin keeps his editorializing to a minimum, that he is able to praise both conservative and liberal members of the Court, and that he expands into his own commentary only once the necessary details have been relayed.

Above all, the effect of reading The Nine is to come to a true understanding of the relevance of this judicial body. Although Presidents select members of the Court, the Court in a way has more authority in defining what counts for law than the President does. Although the Supreme Court is a fully fallible institution, Toobin makes his readers understand that the system of checks and balances usually works--that power is thereby distributed to more than just the President and a handful of influential members of Congress. The judicial branch is sometimes referred to as the "Third Branch"--a name that indicates its status as the aspect of government that is easy to forget (in part, perhaps, because we think of it as being so localized; we see the court in action on regional issues and when we get speeding tickets, and we forget that there is more to it than that). What Toobin does with The Nine is to get us to realize that the Supreme Court is a truly powerful body, and that those in the know value the President's right to nominate members as more than just a perk of office.

Justice personified is depicted as being blind, but in truth it is not blind at all and never has been. Toobin gives us a chance to see what the eyes of justice see. The image is sometimes baffling, sometimes illuminating, and always fascinating.

Why You Should Listen to The Pernice Brothers

They don't have any new albums out, just some old ones that have kept growing on me over the years. For what my opinion is worth, I think they're one of the most underappreciated bands around.

All Music Guide, Pitchfork, and just about everyone else have all compared Joe Pernice's voice to that of Colin Blunstone of The Zombies. (Usually the word "smoky" is used.) The comparison is inevitable and apt. The similarity owes less to imitation, I would like to think, than to natural ability. Both singers possess voices that sound more fragile than they really are. Their vocals are whispery but not breathy: these guys are actually singing. It's the kind of sound that won't often work for the heavy stuff--It's worth noting that 2006's Live a Little includes a song about The Clash, but The Pernice Brothers seem unlikely to be able to actually pull off a Clash cover. There's a bit of that that Clash influence there, but for the most part The Pernice Brothers' specialty is intelligent pop music for a literate adult audience--music that is geared for the kind of listener who has been around the block a few times and is perhaps sadder but wiser for it.

Joe Pernice's lyrics prove that he possesses a great ear for the sound of words, and for the most part he avoids cliches and goes instead for more original figures of speech and, quite frequently, clever, sardonic wordplay. Pernice is also also a writer of short stories, and his gift for character sketch translates into his lyrics, as in this example from "Cruelty to Animals":

She won't mind if the place we stand is marked by ash. She believes what
doesn't kill her only takes more time to kill her. Then she smiles as she
paints her lips and does her lashes. Stunning as a taxidermy victim in a
silver cage.

The images and clever turns, startlingly good for pop music, continue: "Stuck in dumn amazement like a dog who's told to levitate." "... spinning glue back into horses."

It's true that musically there is nothing revolutionary or bold about his songs, and in fact some of them in tone and sentiment even border on what we might vilify as "light rock" or "adult contemporary." Don't let that easy tone fool you, though. There is admirable craftsmanship in every track the Pernice Brothers have released, and their work is all the more remarkable considering that it's all indie label material. Thirty years ago, one would think, these guys would have been all over the radio. Video really did kill these would-be radio stars.

So, what the Pernice Brothers offer is exquisitely crafted pop songs: shimmering, incandescent, approaching the sublime sometimes in the way that the best power-pop (The Beatles, Big Star, those Neko Case harmonies on certain New Pornographers tracks) can do. There's a bit of the Zombies, a bit of Elvis Costello, that distant hint of Joe Strummer, even some Squeeze and Joe Jackson, perhaps. The Elvis Costello similarity comes across not in the sound of the vocals but in the phrasing; listen to the way Pernice stretches out words sometimes at the ends of his verses, as in "Somerville," his ode to coming home with your tail tucked between your legs after not making a go of it in the city.

My favorite Pernice Brothers album is 2003's Yours, Mine, and Ours. At a first listen, this album seems a little too slick, perhaps. This is partly due to the opening track, "The Weakest Shade of Blue," which is so well put-together that it seems like something only a machine could produce. You learn to live with its over-perfection, though. For a Pernice Brothers song, "Weakest Shade" has moments that are brimming with optimism. You shouldn't get used to that, because the next track, "Water Ban," and most of the rest of the songs that follow strike more troubled notes. The melancholy tone persists to the end of the album and almost drags it down a little in the end; my only complaint about this set is that it needs another track (in addition to the exquisite "Sometimes I Remember") with a little more drive in it to hold up the last few songs. Nevertheless, the songs are in and of themselves pitch-perfect. This is an imminently listenable collection of songs. "One Foot in the Grave"--despite its ominous title--strikes the perfect balance between up and down; this is what power-pop is supposed to do. "Blinded by the Stars" and "Waiting for the Universe" are other stand-outs. Although this is the most heavily rotated album on my iPod, I am still waiting to get tired of listening to it.

My next favoriate Pernice Brothers album, 2006's Live a Little, does not quite, to my mind, achieve the same level of the sublime, but it's still a great album by any measure. Thematically, the songs focus mostly once again on mature perspectives on adult relationships. It does boast my favorite Pernice Brothers song, "Lightheaded," a song about celebrity, fame, and all that glitter and flash that have eluded Pernice. If this is the result of obscurity, though, he comes off all the better for it.

It's easy to consider Joe Pernice--voice, lyrics, melodies--as the sole architect of this band's sound, but that would be a mistake. As important as he is, all of this would fall a little flat if it weren't for the music that holds that wispy voice aloft. What really makes the Pernice Brothers such a spectacular band is the band. These aren't stripped down acoustic numbers that we're listening to, and as much as the craft of songwriting is in evidence here, I wouldn't want to listen to these songs presented in a bare-bones singer-songwriter fasion. That's not what they're designed for, though it's true that an acoustic guitar track is put to good use at the heart of most Pernice Brothers songs. The arrangements are pretty lush for indie music--especially given the strings on Live a Little--but they're never over-produced. The songs really achieve definition from Peyton Pinkerton's guitar lines, which never quite jangle, exactly, though they do parse out the contours of Pernice's melodies to great effect. On YM+O, the keyboards--at first almost unnoticeable, a mix of organ and spacey-sounding synthesizer--also add flourishes that would be sorely missed were they not present, and LAL features some steady piano work. I've started to appreciate the drums, too, lately--not just the precision of a well-kept beat but also the fills on "One Foot in the Grave," for instance, or at the end of "Automaton," which serve as a reminder that, despite the subtlety of the music, this is a rock band we're hearing.

What happens to a band like The Pernice Brothers? They have a sizeable following for a band that releases on its own label, but mainstream commercial success in today's music industry climate seems well-nigh impossible. At this point, I imagine, every record sale counts, so my recommendation is to get out there and buy a Pernice Brothers record first chance you get.

The Assistant

Unassuming and tacked down to a hard and unromantic urban setting, Bernard Malamud's The Assistant is surprising for the force and power of its lyricism. Perhaps, accustomed as we are to an either/or that so typically presents the hyper-examined lives of the well-taught and well-to-do or the naturalistic squalor of the deprived, we don't expect such yearning, such depth of feeling, in characters so restrained by poverty, by disadvantage, by a want of education that is so consciously felt by the primary characters themselves: when you are grappling with how to pay the bills, who has the clarity of mind to think and feel with any depth? (Viz. Raskolnikov here--an extreme version of this syndrome: a man of great sensitivity whose judgment is so clouded by his poverty that he commits murder.) Malamud never grants a single sentimnetal word in his descriptions of his characters, but throughout the novel, with Dostoyevsky-like precision, he pries into their minds, setting out in plain terms every least doubt and each glimmering of hope. The result is that these people are real as daylight, sympathetic despite their sometimes coldness, and eminently there, on the page and in the reader's mind.

The Assistant begins with Morris Bober, a down-on-his-luck emigrant Jewish grocer who has set up shop in a hapless Brooklyn neighborhood with a primarily gentile population. We soon meet his wife, Ida, whose nagging and browbeating don't seem like stereotype until you back away from the novel to put things in perspective; in the novel, she comes across as a realized character, and the constant verbal put-downs she directs at her sad-sack husband seem like a logical response to the meanness of their livelihood and the decades of barely scraping by they have faced. Morris and Ida have a daughter, Helen, who is bookish and aspiring and whose beauty and quiet melancholy suffuse the book with an elegiac quality; Helen is only in her early twenties, but her life already seems like a look back on opportunity that never quite developed. Lurking somewhere in the background is a dead son, Ephraim, who passed long ago and is by this point little more than an occasional memory, another reminder of a past that, rather than providing a romanticized counterpoint to the present, only makes the present seem part of the same hollowness. To this family dynamic enters Frank Alpino, a drifter who wants to make something of himself and, through a chain of unlikely events that Malamud somehow makes seem realistic, becomes Morris' assistant at the grocery. Frank, orphaned at age five, might be there to serve as Morris' surrogate son, but if he somehow fulfills this embedded psychic need, Morris himself, numbed as he is to the world around him, seems not to be consciously aware of it.

Though dirty and unshaven at first, Frank is not without a certain charisma, and much of the appeal of his character (to Morris and to the reader--and eventually to Helen) is his earnest desire for self-improvement, which he is more than ready to put into action as opportunity arises. Frank's admiration for St. Francis of Assissi (presumably his namesake) establishes a blatant but still effective symbolic nod to the life of the saint, who represents a kind of discipline and asceticism that Frank wishes to achieve himself. This kind of discipline is something Frank needs, because just about every move he makes is a misstep; every time he tries to do right, it seems, he ends up doing wrong, and the result is that the more bad he does, paradoxically, the more the reader sympathizes with him. Frank is a liar despite his forthrightness. He is a thief and a peeping-tom, and eventually he does worse, but what defines him as a character is his constant wish to do good. We never doubt that he wants to do right.

Frank pursues Helen, furtively at first, and eventually, through sheer stick-to-it-iveness, establishes something of a relationship with her--initially one-sided, but more and more mutual as she opens up to the notion of his potential. Helen then takes it upon herself to educate Frank on some of the finer works of the Western literary canon. Among these works are Anna Karenina, whose title character provides something of a model for Helen's character, and Crime and Punishment. Malamud's novel benefits nicely from the name dropping, especially regarding Crime and Punishment: both novels are about poverty and suffering, and both take on as their protagonist a criminal who at times challenges our sympathies but never strays far from them. Both novels also resonate with religious meaning, though for Malamud this means not a discovery of Christian themes (St. Francis notwithstanding) but rather an exploration of the cultural and spiritual significance of Judaism, which in The Assistant signifies a way to live despite suffering, a way to endure. Both novels also struggle with Big Ideas of universal import, though Malamud's novel does so in a notably less self-conscious manner than does Dostoyevsky's. In the grand American tradition, Malamud chooses to ground all of his ideas in the hard-scrabble everyday.

In contrast to this groundedness, the lyricism of this novel has much to do with birds. There is only a handful of real birds in the book: notably, when Frank is in the park feeding pigeons and they flock to him, just as they did in the story about St. Francis preaching to the birds, only Frank has bread for them, not spritual convictions. Representations of the avian factor in elsewhere. When Frank crawls up an air shaft to peak through a bathroom window to spy on Helen as she undresses to take a shower, her breasts appear to him "like small birds in flight." Later, dejected and at odds not only with Helen but with himself, in the midst of a confused and confusing love, Frank on a whim carves out of an old pine plank the form of a bird. The symbolism is clear: no one takes flight in the novel, but everyone wants to. Snow and moonlight and flowers also present symbols of nature, and it's not hard to see what these elements mean in a setting that is unlovely and unkind. Ironically, perhaps, it is the nearby park that provides the scene of the novel's most violent and depraved event, reminding us how our attempts to restore a semblance of the natural in the midst of human contrivance often take on a sinister tone.

The Assistant is not an absolutely perfect novel, but it's about as close to one as we could ever hope for. At times, it seems as though the prose dashes along a little haphazardly and the sentences serve just to shove us forward to the next event, but if so perhaps it is only because Malamud and the reader both are anxious to move toward the next phase of the narrative. The conclusion of the novel is a little suspect also; I found myself not entirely believing it, but I appreciated it nonetheless for what it said about the characters, about where they were going, about the continuous potential, never quite realized on the page, of their asserting the meaning of their own lives.

From the window of the delivery room, I could see a construction crew at work on the roof over the entryway to emergency, two floors below. The roof was a curving metal wave, very modern, and it was, in a way, before the contractions got to be too big, kind of comforting to think of the world operating in its usual fashion outside of our little room. Amy was being induced, which is part of the story, as we'll see, and early on things were easy. She was holding my hand and listening to The Flaming Lips on the iPod, rocking out just like it was 1993, before we'd met and before anything like the birth of a child had occurred as any kind of definable reality for either one of us. It seemed easy so far, but this being our second child, we knew better. We knew that this was a peaceful little interlude before things got really heavy.

My wife was being induced because Dr. Awesome--so called by Amy because of her relentlessly sunny disposition--said the sooner, the better. All around, at the Ob-Gyn--the Baby Factory, as we call it, in and out like clockwork--we've gotten better than usual service. Amy's dad is a doctor at the nearby hospital, and there was a precise advantage here to her keeping her maiden name. More than that, though, she has a blood clotting disorder of the kind that will probably never cause her any trouble in her life but which, if care is not taken to avoid conditions favorable to clotting, could result in a serious lawsuit. Nobody wants that. Care was indeed being taken from every angle.

And that was part of the reason for the early induction, a week and a half before the due date. No one wanted to take any risks. Also, the Little Brother, as we'd taken to calling him, was not gaining weight at the rate predicted, which could be a sign of clotting in the placenta. Better safe than sorry.

When the contractions got to be too much, Amy got up and walked around the room--staggered is more like it, tethered by all sorts of cables to a monitor and IV stand that I had to push along behind her--and sat in a chair for a while. When she got back in the bed, the nurses had trouble with the monitoring equipment. The contractions were getting too strong too quickly. Amy was shaky, quivering. The nurses gave her oxygen. The baby's heartbeat had dropped from the 130s to the 80s. For a while, it disappeared altogether. More nurses came in--four, then five, then six--followed finally by Dr. Awesome, who said something about "another option." One of the nurses handed Amy a form on a clipboard signifying consent to undertake a c-section, and she scribbled something on it that bore a vague resemblance to her signature. Before I knew it, the whole crew was headed down the hall to the operating room. One nurse stayed behind as I started putting on the scrubs she handed me. I ripped the pants while pulling them on.

To get to the operating room, we had to go through construction. The air was clogged with dust from sanded drywall compound, and a big plastic tarp was blue-taped to the end of the corridor. The others had already gone through, and one of the workers was already taping the plastic sheet back to the wall. He took it down again, and I went in following the nurse. I had to wait out in the hall for a few minutes, between the construction area and the operating room. I wasn't sure why I had to wait. I sat down in a plastic chair. A worker came up to re-tape the tarp hanging over the doorway. He saw me sitting there, and he asked me how it was going. He might have thought I was a doctor, or maybe he didn't. I don't know what kind of look I might have had on my face. I don't remember what I said back to him.

In a few minutes, one of the nurses came out and called me into the operating room. There was more talk of another option. I heard pieces of conversation, but I didn't understand most of it. I remember hearing a fragment of a sentence from a nurse I didn't recognize: "All the stuff they've put in her," a fragment that had, in context, the weight of a declaration. I assumed she was referring to Pitocin, the agent that induces contractions. She wasn't referring to any kind of pain medication because Amy hadn't had any. I stood next to the bed holding Amy's hand while Dr. Awesome reached in and manually effaced her cervix the final two centimeters.

"We've got baby's heartbeat again and he's looking just fine, but just in case we're going to stay right here. The anesthesiologist is standing by in case we need to go for another option."

The anesthesiologist came into the room, all matter of fact, but perturbed about something. He spoke to Dr. Awesome for a moment, then came over to Amy, whose contractions were getting stronger. He hovered over her, waiting, while Dr. Awesome waited at the other end of the table. She told Amy to put her right foot up on her shoulder, and I helped hold up the leg and put it into position. Nurses held up the other leg.

The anesthesiologist started asking questions, matter of fact, his tone no different than if he were sitting down in the office and running over a few of the routine preliminaries. He said he knew that she was not in the best frame of mind to be answering questions, but that admissions had failed to go through the required paperwork on the matter (a hint of annoyance there interrupting the facade). He was interrupted by Dr. Awesome before his interrogation had really begun:

"OK, Amy, on your next contraction I need you to bear down."

Instructions were given for breathing and counting. I was to do the counting. The contraction came. The doctor said that Amy was doing a great job: awesome. The nurses gave their praise. The anesthesiologist went back to his questions. Had she ever been given anesthetic before? Amy said that she had, when she'd had her wisdom teeth out. Any problems? Everything was fine. He asked her about allergies, history of illnesses. Bronchitis last fall. OK. Another contraction. The breathing, counting, pushing. The anesthesiologist backed off.

Two more rounds of contractions and the boy was out. He was fine. He sucked in the air and whimpered like a cat. He turned from purple to pink just like that, just like he was supposed to.

Numbers, Anglo-Saxons, the Supreme Court, Ulysses S. Grant, and More Not Small Talk

The Figure 5 in Gold, by Charles Demuth
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On Monday, June 2, I have been scheduled -- with the kind of procedural regularity that has become a touchstone of our modern medical culture -- to become a father once again.

The likely result is that I will not be submitting any blog entries in the near future for you, my loyal reader, to consume conspicuously at your leisure. ("My loyal reader" -- you are not so hypothetical; I think I know all three of you.)

But there are so many Not Small Talk items out there to be addressed. Let me summarize a few of them, briefly -- some ideas that have been scattershot through my mind lately. I leave you to draw your own conclusions on these and many other topics.

* Numbers: Do they exist? I mean, do they exist in any sort of transcendental or platonic fashion? Does the number five, for instance, exist somewhere in the universe independently of things that are five in number? Put another way, does the notion of fiveness exist independently of consciousness?

About once a year, I have this discussion with the calculus teacher at school, and he always responds instantly by saying that he doesn't think it could be any other way. If it is the case that numbers exist transcendentally, is number identity comparable to the law of gravity or some other physical reality--a fundamental force of the universe? In what dimension do numbers exist? If they exist, it seems to me, then mathematics would have to be a branch of physics because it relates to the study of physical properties of the universe. Something to think about--and for my former student Shiv Subramaniam, majoring in comparative lit and mathematics, to tackle before he graduates from the University of Chicago. (You have three years, Shiv.)

* "The saddest thing about any man is that he is ignorant, and the most exciting thing is that he knows." -- Alfred the Great

Of course, it would be a mistake to romanticize the Anglo-Saxons too much, but they are one of my favorite historical groups of people ever, and I agree wholeheartedly with Tolkien's assertion that the Norman invasion was the greatest disaster in English history. Combined with Henry VIII's closing of the monasteries (and the subsequent destruction of already-aged Anglo-Saxon manuscripts), the result is that we are left with precious few insights into their collective life and mind, but what we have shows a people with a powerful culture that was in some ways vibrant and progressive beyond what you could find anywhere else in Europe at the time. Here are some of the highlights of Anglo-Saxon culture and society as I see them:

1. An emphasis on localized self-rule that differed from that of other emerging European kingdoms. This factor is likely due to the preservation of tribal traditions enabled by the geographical isolation of the British Isles. (This theory might owe a little bit to British historian Robert Conquest but also to the kind of geographic determinism favored by Jared Diamond.) Because most greater Anglo-Saxon borders were defined by coastline (Pictish and Celtic adversaries on dry-land borders notwithstanding), the pressure to centralize authority was not the same as it was on the continent. Gaul, for instance, surrounded by emerging kingdoms on most sides, had to centralize authority much earlier than England in order to protect its continued existence as a politically independent entity; a strong monarchy was necessary to keep the neighbors at bay. The Vikings who constantly raided England's shores seemed to have been content with settling in the Danelaw; they didn't until Canute the Great present a critical threat on a national level. This left the Anglo-Saxons free to develop political traditions in a more gradual and deliberate manner. Even after the Norman invasion, some of this tradition remained; it was built into the economy and even the geographical divisions/township structures of England by that time. It resurfaced most notably in the Magna Carta and in the formation of Parliament.

2. King Alfred's progressive attitude toward literacy and education. Granted, he understood that poetry could be great propaganda, but that consideration doesn't diminish the empowering aspect of literacy for those who possess it. The fact that the Vikings, the Normans, and the Protestants essentially demolished the archival remnants of this literary tradition is unfortunate. There is something about Alfred's policies that speaks of a proto-democratic tradition that had repercussions beyond the literary; Alfred was the uncommon king who didn't sell his people short. The English have also been superlative at producing and preserving the documents of bureaucracy: wills; deeds ("indentures"); birth, marriage, and death records, etc. These items speak in their own way of a vibrant tradition of literacy.

3. Dynamic and progressive trade practices that allowed society to flourish. English democracy, even in its infancy, has always relied on prosperity. The English have been a prosperous people. My socialist sympathies notwithstanding, I have to admit that there is a common ground between free trade and political (and therefore personal) freedoms.

* "Bush's appointment of Roberts and Alito may prove to be among the worst of the many disasters of his mistaken administration." --Donald Dworkin

Dworkin writes for the New York Review of Books on the Supreme Court. This line sums up pretty much everything there is to say about the Supreme Court and about what is at stake in that regard in the next Presidential election.

* "The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion." --Article II of the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams in 1797

A useful quotation to have around when discussing the issue of separation of church and state. Jefferson's "Notes Concerning the State of Virginia" is also handy, as are Franklin's "Remarks Concerning the Savages" (containing a scathing satire of the reputed purpose of religion) and excerpts from the latter sections of book two of his Autobiography. While not outrightly condemning religious practice, Franklin approaches it pragmatically, and it is pretty clear that his idea of a divine being is not so different from Aristotle's Prime Mover. That is, Franklin, scientist that he was, believed that something must have set everything in motion, but that whatever it was doesn't much bother with what we're doing day-to-day in the here-and-now. Franklin believed that the purpose of religion was to instill values in people so that they could be productive members of society. He was not, as some evangelical Christians have outrageously claimed, a Christian himself in terms of any beliefs he may have held. The calculating and arch-ironic attitude he displays in his discussion of the virtue of humility in the Autobiography is proof of his lack of genuine spiritual conviction.

* Henry V: Machiavellian bastard or paragon of princely virtue? I can't decide. I can't even decide what Shakespeare wants us to think of him. For years, I've been on the side of judging him a Machiavellian bastard, but I'm planning to reread the entire Henry IV/Henry V cycle and reassess. Perhaps I'll let you know what I think at a later date.

"Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world." Harry does, Harry will. Jack Falstaff is human weakness and vice but also human wit--and perhaps even humanness itself writ large (very large). Does Henry give up his own humanity when he denies Falstaff? Or is he just doing what he must do to accept the mantle of responsibility?

And that whole bit about invading France on weak pretenses. (Not even weapons of mass destruction -- they're just tennis balls.) Reminds me of a certain contemporary political leader of whom 29% of the population still somehow bafflingly approves.

* Ulysses S. Grant: One of my favorite presidents, not so much because of what he did during his presidency but because of what he did before it. As a general, he was a pragmatist who could have been profiled alongside William James and Oliver Wendall Holmes in Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club. An unustly maligned character in part because he rarely spoke up against his detractors. A kind of Washington-like humility emanates from his reticence. His Personal Memoirs sets the record straight, partly; I've only read a few bits and pieces, but when I have time (someday) I'm going to read the whole book--it's as long as Ulysses, which took me a year to read.

* Joan Didion. If I don't get a chance to reread any of her essays in the coming days, I'm at least going to be thinking of her. I need that kind of open-eyed clarity right now. I won't bother trying to convince myself that I know what I'm getting myself into, but I'd at least like to admit to myself what I don't know, which is in the end what her essays always seem to me to be about, and which is a non-negligible kind of self-knowledge.

Wish me luck.

JFK and political authorship

Ted Sorenson (from the New York Times Book Review)

Theodore Sorenson, speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, recently published a memoir (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/books/review/Rosenthal-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin) and in doing so has dredged up a perenially favorite topic for those in the business of writing about such things: who wrote Kennedy's most famous lines?

That Kennedy had a gift for rhetoric is undeniable. A sizeable part of that gift was in the delivery, but regardless he had a flair for a good line. As Louis Menand pointed out a few years ago in an article in the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/08/041108crbo_books?currentPage=all), Kennedy improvised at thirty-two different points during his one and only famous inaugural address. He went over draft after draft with Sorenson, who saw it as his job to help Kennedy articulate his own ideas in the most effective way possible. To this day, at a point when most people who bother to think about it just assume that someone else is writing every word that comes from a politician's mouth, Sorenson insists that Kennedy's words are Kennedy's words and not his own. It would be fair to say that the two were co-authors; Kennedy was not minimally involved.

As for Kennedy's two most memorable lines, one was a paraphrase. Menand also pointed out that Kennedy's Headmaster at Choate was fond of telling students that it's "not what Choate does for you, but what you can do for Choate." Thus a call for alumni giving became a political catchphrase that defined an era. This is fitting: JFK was in many ways the ultimate prep school boy to the end: popular, aloof, smart, cool, ambitious, more than just a bit cynical in his approach to power and leadership, and he brought all of this with him to the White House. I say this not to degrade Kennedy; I understand the reasons why so many bowed down to the alter, but at the same time no one believes anymore that the man was a perfect savior. Sorenson, by the way, still gives Kennedy the credit for the "ask not" line. As for the other line--"Ich bin ein Berliner"--Sorenson takes credit for the blunder. Though seemingly grammatically correct, the use of the article "ein" renders this an idiom declaring, "I am a jelly doughnut." Nevertheless, we know what Kennedy meant, and this is a powerful line that complements the other from the inaugural two years before. One line asks us to give to others through service to our country. The other asks us to look beyond nationalism and see ourselves as global citizens of the free world. In the end, what matters is how the words were used, and Kennedy certainly used them to good effect at a time when American identity was challenged by the threats--internal and external--of Cold War policy.

What Kennedy and Sorenson both understood is that rhetoric matters, that a meaningful political reality can be crafted out of genuine sentiment well expressed. That explains why Sorenson is an Obama supporter (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27wwln-Q4-t.html?scp=7&sq=Deborah+Solomon&st=nyt). It also explains why so many think that Obama has a shot at creating a new kind of political landscape, like the one that Kennedy, for all his faults, started to shape before his assassination.

Will Obama change things? We can hope. The less one pays attention to the current media spectacle--where each candidate is forced situationally into disingenuous and sometimes ludicrous remarks--the better. What we can say about Obama is that he has a flair for rhetoric on par with--perhaps better than--Kennedy's. Let's hope furthermore that Obama, when given the chance, has the audacity to say what he really means. He certainly has the skill to do so. I haven't read The Audacity of Hope and I've only read parts of Dreams from My Father, but what I have read seems to prove that Obama can turn a good sentence, that he is a thoughtful composer of words, that he is--Joe Biden's gaff notwithstanding--indeed very articulate. I am assuming, of course, that Obama and not Ted Sorenson wrote these books.

On The Road

For a while when I was in my early twenties, Cormac McCarthy was pretty much the only writer who mattered to me. There was something about his prose--the visceral and lyrical qualities both at once on the page, the contrasting tautness and then flow of the lines--that took hold of me. His writing displayed the control of language that I admired in Faulkner and Joyce and Hemingway, but in a context that brought new dimensions of meaning. McCarthy possessed what seemed to me a new kind of authenticity, a way of looking at the world without flinching. That was what I wanted to do in my writing.

I squandered a graduate career in creative writing laboring under his shadow. No one has suffered the anxiety of influence greater than I did in those days. At a certain point, I knew that I had to get out.

This was just after the publication of Cities of the Plain, a novel that seemed to exaggerate the worst qualities of McCarthy's prose--the way his lyricism tended to the overwritten and the overwrought. I cut out McCarthy cold turkey, and I never looked back.

Until now.

Used bookstore, April 27, 2008: a copy of The Road sitting on the new arrivals shelf. I pick it up out of curiosity. I read the first line. I'm hooked.

* * *

It's not that McCarthy was ever a bad writer, but he did stagnate more and more as the Border Trilogy wore on. The work that I never lost respect for was Blood Meridian, which portrays human beings--men, really--at their absolute worst: depraved, violent, thoughtless. No book ever rattled me as much as this one.

The Road makes a good counterpoint to Blood Meridian. Both novels are set in waste lands that are partly natural and partly of human design, but ultimately the work of some detached and very distant neoplatonic god that communicates marginally through elemental symbols: blood, stars, desolate and leafless trees, the lay of the landscape and the way the sun sets on it. (Or, in the case of The Road, the way the sun sets behind the clouds that perpetually cover it.) The difference that separates the landscapes of these two novels--one set in the past, the other in the not-so-distant future--is the presence of something in The Road that never shows up in Blood Meridian, and it is something that is evident in the very first line of The Road:

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him."

In the desolation and ash of a post-apocalyptic landscape (where the only things alive seem to be a few ragged, dingy human beings subsisting on what canned goods--or what other human beings--they can find) there persists something that could only be described as a deep and enduring love--though McCarthy himself would never use such a sentimentally laden word for it. Here at the end of the world, though, this is what we have.

The novel that follows is tense, brutal, dismaying at times--and desparate throughout--but it never loses as its focus this core bond between father and son. The protagonist of Blood Meridian, known only as "the kid," never seems to know anything that remotely resembles this kind of bond with anyone. The child present here knows it as the central fact of his life in a place where even insects and fungi seem to be dead.

In general, McCarthy has, by comparison to some of his earlier work, wisely toned down the prose in this novel. Occasionally, a line might make the reader wince as it collapses under its own heavily descriptive syntax, but a few such lines can be tolerated. We get a lot of clipped sentence fragments, most often images of the landscape: "Barren, silent, godless." Or this line, with a Hemingway-esque barrage of nouns and modifiers, lacking a finite verb: "Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind." In a field the travelers see "The corrugate shapes of old harrowtroughs still faintly visible." A stretch of ruined city appears: "Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered." Eventually, the sea washes up: "Cold. Desolate. Birdless." In other instances, the sentences roll on without the hindrance of punctuation.

The overall effect of the description is sometimes stirring: who would have thoughts to describe "hands" of wire, a phrasing that reminds us of a vanished human presence?--and "corrugate" for the fields, which not only enables the reader to see the contours of the fields but also gives off the suggestion of a hard, unyielding quality to a once-fertile landscape? That landscape still bears a trace of human design though the people who once worked the land are well beneath it now. McCarthy's descriptions of landscape depend at once upon specificity (in terms of imagery) and vagueness (never is a particular stretch of road or a ruined city or town ever mentioned by name, though the travelers have with them a tattered roadmap and they themselves know the names of everything). This dynamic between the revealed and the withheld is one that urges on a mythical, legendary quality--this is someplace but it could be any place. The same notion applies with names; just as the kid in Blood Meridian is never identified by name, neither father nor son ever utters the name of the other in these pages.

In all, the style here is typical McCarthy--poetic and sometimes overly poetic, dominated by imagery--and yet the pace of this novel (the plot of which is not much more than typical dystopian/sci-fi fare) is brisk. This book is a quick, compelling, and easy read--what they typically call a "page-turner."

McCarthy resurrects for this novel the motifs that have become typical of his ouvre, and it is a good bet that many of the readers out there who have made this book a bestseller have skipped over the more complicated and esoteric allusions. Religious symbolism figures largely and frequently takes on a gnostic or neoplatonic flair: we get shadows, caves, flickering light, a mysterious God who chooses not to reveal himself in any very direct way. There is a running theatre motif as well that reinforces the notion of an acted-out fiction, a discrepency between appearances and reality. Together these factors develop the epistemological notion that the underlying truths of the world are somewhere inaccessible to anyone who walks this earth. We get a sense of characters who are part of the landscape but can only wonder at their role within it, characters who simultaneously know something and don't know it, "Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must." The second-person address here implicates us as part of this universe, and it is this quality--this making readers aware that they inhabit the same world that McCarthy's characters do--that separates his work from cheap fantasy and makes reading it such a powerful and affecting experience.

Throughout the novel, the word "pilgrim" shows up on a regular basis to remind us that father and son here are not searching merely for material sustenance but for a deeper, more profound meaning as well. The book gives us a glimpse of this kind of meaning, the force that animates the world. Father and son find it in each other: the father "knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke." (It is poignantly worth noting that McCarthy, who seems patently emotionless in the few interviews he has agreed to, dedicated the novel to his young son, John Francis.) The child here bears a crude but ingrained bent for the rhetorical, and by the end of the book we are led to believe that he is, if not the son of God, at least a prophet with a vague resemblance, ready to spread the word.

Ultimately, the future apocalypse of The Road only disguises allegorically the condition of the present: the persistence of evil in the world, the fragility of life, the bond of kin, the mystery of the created world. How McCarthy, who has taken us from the Old West to a future age, will reveal that world to us yet again remains to be seen.

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses Revisited

An N.C. Wyeth illustration of a scene from Last of the Mohicans

Why on earth would anyone in the twenty-first century bother to read The Last of the Mohicans?

This is a question that resounded in my mind as I sat in my study slogging through the book. Why on earth was I reading it? In retrospect, I might say morbid curiosity, but that would be somewhat disingenuous, really. When I picked it up, I had some vaguely inspired notion that it might be fun. Some seventh grade memory of enjoying the book--and of being disturbed by the brutal deaths in it--had lingered with me, but as I read through the clunky narrative, all I could think of was Mark Twain's utterly hilarious critique, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Twain got it right; if for nothing else, you should read this book so that you can appreciate Twain's essay.

There are some entertaining action sequences, but nothing in the book can withstand more than marginal scrutiny. The faster one reads the book, the better it is; you can get a sense of things without getting bogged down in the sometimes nonsensical prose. For a novel that focuses so much on the role of the wilderness landscape, it can be awfully hard to get your bearings straight as you read. When Cooper's characters enter into a cave, watch out--you'll never be able to get the dimensions of the cave right in your mind or be able to figure out how it is that they seem to be able to see in the utter darkness of an unlit space. Somehow they do, though, without so much as stumbling over a single crooked stone.

The primary object of Twain's ridicule is something that plays a key element in the book: the preternaturally keen sensory awareness of the scout Hawkeye and his two Mohican friends, Chingachgook and Uncas. CSI has nothing on these guys. They can detect half of a day-old mocassin print in a dry creek bed and tell you the wearer's weight, height, eye color, and what he had for lunch the day before. From a bent blade of grass they can tell which direction their prey, the wily and unkempt Magua, is going and how fast he is traveling to get there. Hawkeye is always waxing philosophic on the Indian's natural abilities to understand the way of the forest. "Whoever comes into the woods to deal with the natives, must use Indian fashions, if he would wish to prosper in his undertakings," Hawkeye notes, but he is no slouch himself; he knows, too, that moss grows on the north side of a tree. This guy never gets lost. He's what you had before GPS.

To boot, we get a heap of taciturn Indians--some good, some bad--who seem custom made for the cigar store. We get fainting ladies, and it is with one of those damsels--easily more Walter Scott than early American realism--that we nevertheless find one of the more compelling themes, something that not only gives graduate students something to talk about in relation to this book but also makes it very American in a crucial and (if you can get past the patronizing and dimensionally limited tone) surprisingly progressive way. Cora, the older of the two daughters of Colonel Munro, is at least a sixteenth black. It's no secret that noble savage Uncas fancies doomed, sad Cora more than just a little bit, and it's true that he would make a worthy match to her stalwart temper. Had there not been elements of tragedy at the end of the novel we might have seen a for-its-time daring display of racial integration on the frontier of American possibility. We also see a hint of complexity in the principal villain, Magua, aka Le Renard Subtil, whose disgrace is in no small part a result of negative peer pressure from whites: "Was it the fault of Le Renard that his head was not made of rock?" he asks rhetorically--rhetoric being one of his specialties. "Who gave him the fire-water? who made him a villain? 'twas the palefaces, the people of your own color."

In fact, the collisions of race and culture in this novel--and the way Cooper embodies the attitudes of his times toward these topics--do make it worthy of study--to graduate students, at least, and to anyone who wants insight into the mindset of early 19th century Americans, or Europeans, for that matter, since Cooper was a bestseller at home and abroad. Unfortunately, that still doesn't make this book any easier to read.

Charlie and Other Roosters

1.

It was a Sunday morning last fall. We were walking downtown, Mass Street quiet and near empty. Edie in her stroller saw him first: perched on the bed-rail of a beaten Chevy pickup with his jaunty blue wings, russeted body, a dark green fan of tail feathers, red comb.

There was a man dropping off his wife or girlfriend at work at the hotel, or maybe he was meeting her on her morning break. They're locked in embrace beside the truck, but he sees us coming by, hears Edie talking, grins at us. He says, His name's Charlie--I've got him trained like a dog.

We stop so Edie can look at the rooster. The woman goes across the street to the hotel, back to work, and the man gets in his truck. Charlie sits next to him on the passenger seat on the way home.

2.

There's something about a rooster that begs for anthropomorphism of the beast fable/cartoon variety. There's a direct line from Chanticleer to Foghorn Leghorn.

Theprimary factor in this, it seems to me, is one that seems in fact counterintuitive. The rooster's appeal is so strong because of a trait that is not found in humans: that it is the male of the species and not the female that appears to be all gussied up with someplace to go. The male chicken is pretty--proud, regal, cocky to boot, a damned fine looking bird in general. The brashness of the colors at a glance is balanced out by the subtlety of the tones when you look at a particular part of the bird. The fine coloration and the sturdy posture are entirely undermined, though--turned comic, ridiculous--when you take into account the limp flap of a red comb that clashes with the refined beauty of the feathers.

No doubt the rooster's pride is not hurt by anything I could ever say, and indeed I have nothing but affection for the dapper little fellows. Chaunticleer is easily my favorite character in Chaucer's arsenal: he's Foghorn Leghorn before cartoon animation. It's the same thing, in essence: madcap tomfoolery with a moral lesson. When a whole village full of people, various random animals, and a hive of bees all chase Reynard the Fox (with Chanticleer caught in his jaws) through the woods, those of us who grew up with Looney Toons know that we have seen this kind of thing before.

Though Chanticleer has license that we do not--he has seven wives--his follies are human ones amplified. Pretty fellow, he is literally the most hen-pecked of us all.

On Vultures

Audubon's Turkey Vulture, Cathartes aura
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1.

It's spring, and the vultures are back.

Winter skies around here were characterized by bald eagles and red-tailed hawks, eagles by the water and hawks by field and trees, and of course the ubiquitous crow. The eagles high-tailed it out of here all at once when it started to warm up. The ranks of the hawks are diminished. Humble, homely, and massive, the turkey vulture with its gruesome red skull and vast silver-black wings will rule the sky by default between now and the first frost.

The crows seem puny by comparison.

2.

I work on the west side of town, the sprawl of suburban developments punctuated with open fields of yet-to-be-developed space and lined with gallery trees. In the winter, I can look out the window of my classroom to see hawks on the telephone line across the street. This time of year, I see vultures, right now as singularities, but later I'll see them in twos and threes. In the summer, on the highway between here and the outskirts of Kansas City, I will often see upwards of a dozen of them circling over the woods. I sometimes see a batch of them on the roof of a barn near my mom's house in Desoto, Kansas, huddled about in various states of disarray. By appearance, the vulture seems an untidy bird, its feathers always a little out of place, disheveled.

Like hawks, vultures appear to be expanding in number--either that or they are simply succumbing to the promise of greater amenities in the suburbs. Maybe they are just getting over their initial shyness around people--but that doesn't quite seem right because the vulture seems to be an entirely unselfconscious type of creature. A few years ago, I saw them only on the jagged edges of town, near open fields or woods. Twice already this year, I have seen vultures flying over my own neighborhood of Old West Lawrence, right in the middle of town.

On my way home from work, sometimes, I drive through their shadows. I crane my neck to the window following them. I've got to be more careful about this so that I don't end up on the menu anytime soon.

3.

A hawk in flight soars; it glides on currents of wind and climbs them. There is something sharper and tighter about a hawk's maneuvers than even those of an eagle. With its short, stout wings, the hawk works in a more confined space.

A vulture, in contrast to both, kites. It takes up vast amounts of sky. A vulture always looks a little flimsy despite its massiveness, its wings a little papery, blown about by the wind. The hawk seems always to be in control. The vulture seems always to be at the mercy of the skies, even though it is a much larger bird. If you've ever seen a novice skier lose control, careen too quickly down the slope, you've seen a vulture slide along with the wind, seemingly unable to brake.

Despite their reputation, I can't think of them as sinister. Bumbling, clumsy, graceless--but still, there's something about them that I like, something endearingly comic.

4.

The vulture is a mute species; it has no voice box. Unlike other birds, vultures compose no love songs; they communicate by huffing and wheezing. What cool means of seduction one vulture can offer another, I've no notion. Nor can I imagine what crises of self worth they must undergo now, listening to the spring birds with their gentle, intricate trills.

The vulture is generally gregarious, huddling with others of its kind in big bands in the tops of trees, splitting up into singles in mating season. Never altogether sad nor merry, that's how I imagine them most of the time.

Dutiful servants of nature, they've got a job to do, unglamorous but essential, like taking out the trash. Their literary equivalent is Prince Hamlet's gravedigger, and they serve a similar two-fold purpose: comic relief, disposal of the dead. Unlike other raptors, their eyesight is not so keen; they sense carrion by smell. Their talons don't have the vise-like gripping power that hunter birds possess. Vultures circle awkwardly, lazily, on updrafts until they scent something or until the wind batters them some other way. The green and verdant landscape opens up beneath them, for them, but they have no songs to sing in celebration of it.

Their heads are bare so that they can plunge them deep into the carcasses that others dare not devour.

5.

On the expansion theory, maybe the weather conditions have been good for them, or maybe there's less of a certain pollutant since the Farmland plant closed down on the other side of town. Maybe the stars are aligned, or maybe the moon or whatever goddess watches over them just said, go ahead.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Historical Spectacle

Queen Elizabeth I's short but powerful speech to her troops at Tilbury was, in many ways, both the highlight of her reign and one of the best political speeches of her era. The most compelling aspect of it is Elizabeth's understanding of her audience and her attempt to treat with them on common ground. In short, she shows them that she cares, that she appreciates their being there on the anticipated battlefield. How much this is genuine sentiment and how much it is merely geared to buck up soldiers facing a numerically superior force we will never know. Regardless, the speech still stands impressively more than four hundred years after the fact. Boldest of all here is the Queen's direct address of the issue of her gender: "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too." Elizabeth's task, no mean one, was to convince her soldiers that she, a woman, could lead them as well as--or better than--any man. That she ruled so long and so peacefully--comparatively, given the religious strife that had so torn the country during her lifetime--is a testament to her ability to win over the people.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age seeks to capture something of the woman-monarch's matchless charisma and to recreate the tense drama of this moment at Tilbury, when the emerging British empire is nearly at the mercy of the great Spanish Armada and the ten thousand troops it threatens to bring to England's shores. In addition to the opening address ("My loving people"), the film retains only one line of Elizabeth's speech, closely paraphrased: "I am resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live or die amongst you all." Instead of the head-on tackling of gender dynamics and the repeated invocation of God, kingdom, and people--the three domains of the Renaissance world-view--we get references to the sails and guns of the enemy and a Crispin's Day-like promise either of glorious victory or of defeat equally glorious. On paper and in the film, Elizabeth's speech comes off as much more genuine and much less Machiavellian than good King Henry V's, though we must acknowledge that she was certainly not without her Machiavellian qualities. Her speech in the film, however, adds a greater dash of battlefield flavor than the original possessed. It urges the good fight while simultaneously foreshadowing the computer-generated spectacle at sea we are about to witness.

The staging of this speech in the film begins with the right approach--woman warrior in steel cuirass and viking-maiden braids--and then sells out language-wise in favor of boosting the plot dynamics. It's a disappointing moment for Elizabeth I enthusiasts, who might possibly have sat through the preceding hour and a half of film waiting specifically for the delivery of this speech, but obviously we are not the target demographic. Elizabeth really did wear a plate-armor breastplate, but the sails of the Spanish Armada were not likely to have been visible from Tilbury and they certainly did not run aground en masse on the English coast (the fleet was near Ireland when it sustained its heaviest losses). Elizabeth did not look out across the windy surf to see their burning wreckage, as she does in the film. Of course, historical accuracy has been sacrificed here for the sake of narrative momentum, but no matter--dramatists have been rewriting history since the birth of the written line. The problem here is how cheap it all sometimes seems.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is not a bad film, just a disappointing one. We might expect something better than what it has for us. What it does offer is an overview of the major themes of the middle parts of Elizabeth's reign, picking up where the first Cate Blanchett-driven Elizabeth film left off ten years ago, Elizabeth's status as monarch solidly established along with her commitment to the preservation of her own celibacy. Thus we start out firmly embroiled in the personal-political dynamic that informs the age of Elizabeth: in order to maintain power, Elizabeth must rule alone. Whereas male rulers, such as Elizabeth's own father, would literally kill for the opportunity to produce a male heir, Elizabeth seemed to have cared less about all of that. She knew that her legacy would be established solely by her own words and deeds.

The particular revisionist focus of this film involves the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism--or, as writ in this film, the conflict between liberal, enlightened religious tolerance and religious extremism. Clearly, this epic struggle has been played up in the film to resonate with modern viewers. Philip II of Spain represents the dark side of the religious spectrum, declaring essentially a holy war (that very phrase is used) against the English in response to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Little is made of economic or political objectives that may have motivated Spain to wage war against the English. Elizabeth is presented as the prototype of moderation in religion, and it is true that under her the Church of England emphasized adherence to outward shows of ceremony over inward matters of faith. In other words: show up for services on Sundays, but believe what you want to believe. Such a stance was a political expedient in a country in desperate need of reconciliation after decades of faith-based strife, but it also proved to be a key development in the birth of religious toleration. The only Catholics the queen seems to have persecuted were those who were trying to kill her--and fair is fair in that regard. But the tones taken on here in the examination of this conflict seem overly exaggerated without the full political context. That the war between England and Spain was more about religion than it was about empire--this is a hard sell. In The Golden Age, it's the past that gets sold out; the blunt imposition of our modern concerns overrides everything in order to give the viewer a chance to identify with the world of the film.

The primary element, though, at work in this film is personal and dramatic--at times melodramatic--and again it involves a fair degree of historical whitewashing. I am speaking here of the relationship between the queen and Sir Francis Drake. Historically, Drake was a pirate, an explorer, a shameless opportunist; he is frequently identified as an instigator of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Here, Drake (Clive Owen) is a roguishly handsome pirate with a heart of gold and a keen smile, an explorer, a bit of an opportunist in the Han Solo tradition but ultimately loyal to the queen, and there is no mention of the slave trade, only his interest in the native inhabitants of the Americas. The writers have also grafted elements of Sir Walter Raleigh into his story. His only betrayal is an affair of the heart; unable to love the Virgin Queen, though they do in fact fancy each other more than just a little bit, he makes it with her lady-in-waiting, Bess (Abbie Cornish), whom he marries in secret, thus landing himself in prison until the queen goes to him in her hour of need. Of course, he is the only one who can pilot the sixteenth century British version of the Millennium Falcon and lead the underdogs to victory against the evil empire.

All of this is fine, really, and I am mocking things a bit just because it is easy to do so. What makes this grand historical spectacle so hollow at times--what makes it seem cheap--is the wooden dialogue. Drake's lines, in particular, are often groaningly awful. "We mortals have many weaknesses," he wisely advises the queen when she faces a moment of self-doubt; "We feel too much. Hurt too much ... All too soon we die. But we do have the chance of love." Worse still, when Bess comes to visit him aboard his ship:

DRAKE: This is my life, Bess.
BESS: It seems to me a lonely life.
DRAKE: Sometimes. But it's the life I've chosen.

Such lines are chiseled to match the set of the jaw on Clive Owen's face, but they don't well make good script or, for that matter, match the tone of the period. Later, Drake tells Bess when she faces a crisis of loyalties, "We're all humans"--but this kind of understanding of the nature of humanity seems more a product of the golden age of Oprah than of the golden age of Elizabeth. At the very least, it relies on an understanding of what it means to be human that, if Harold Bloom is correct, wasn't invented until Shakespeare started writing in the decade that followed the defeat of the armada.

There are other objections we might raise here. I find it hard to believe that Elizabeth would have so many qualms as she does here about the execution of her cousin Mary (Samantha Morton), especially in an age of so many commonplace executions and the public posting of body parts. The proto-scientific but also Oprah-fied sage advice of Mary's personal wizard, Dr. John Dee (David Threlfall), is a little hard to stomach at times. Only Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), the queen's councillor and spymaster and an early purveyor of a gritty realpolitik, comes out with nary a scratch.

It is a difficult thing to merge history, which demands facticity and realism, with romance, which demands simplicity of perspective, and that is why so many historical novels and films fall flat, especially to contemporary audiences accustomed to a greater degree of realism. The fact of the matter, though, is that any life of Elizabeth I, like any life of the famous and equally inscrutible bard whose works she may have enjoyed later in her life, must by necessity be an imagined one. The lines she herself wrote were too crafted to reveal the inner nature of the woman, and little of real personality escapes the carefully designed (lead-based) facade of white face paint she wore. In this regard, however--in the realm of imagery--Elizabeth: The Golden Age achieves the great triumph that makes it worthwhile for the Elizabeth enthusiast. As Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett in white face is eerie, shocking, sometimes frightening, strangely beautiful but also hideous, like a figure in a wax museum come to life--like something out of a horror film but with all of the terror stripped away, leaving only wonder. The filmmakers do not go out of their way to exploit the parallel between the Virgin Queen and the Virgin Mother (how can they when depicting a Protestant society?), but it is there and ready for the taking. When Elizabeth appears, backlit and glowing amidst the gold figures in her chapel, she demands veneration. Later, holding Drake and Bess' infant child, we understand the appeal of this great ruler of men: "I have no master. Childless, I am mother to my people." We have no choice but to follow.

Diane Arbus and the Nudists

Much has been made of Diana Arbus' photographs of the mentally disabled: accusations of exploitation or at least insensitivity on her part. I might argue that her motives in taking the pictures are largely irrelevant--that the pictures stand on their own regardless of the photographer's intent--but I'm too distracted to join the fray. It's all the naked people who have my attention.

As nudes go, they're not much to look at at first. Accustomed to the plasticized and the airbrushed as we are, we might not know what to make of such real bodies. A few of them might be considered attractive, but that seems besides the point. Take a look through the collection in Revelations. The pitifully scrawny, the average, and the obese all have one thing in common: each of the individuals photographed is utterly, completely comfortable in his or her own skin. That's what makes them fascinating to see. If Adam and Eve really did eat the apple, it's news to them.

The bodies I speak of were photographed primarily at nudist colonies, the whole enterprise of which seems to be a recovery of that mythological time before the Fall. After all, it was Adam and Eve's awareness of their own nakedness that betrayed them: "Who told you that you were naked?" My favorite photograph in this series shows a husband and wife in late middle age, resplendent in their shoes, in their cabin at a nudist camp. The man is the perfect picture of scrawniness, with thick-framed spectacles. The woman is sprightly, a little bit of style and sass in her pose. In short, the two look happy.

Of course, Arbus also photographed strippers and transvestites. She chronicled all sorts of people. In a letter to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1963--the same year she shot photos in nudist camps--Arbus expressed the wish to document the "considerable ceremonies of our present." Of the present, she said, "its innumerable habits lie in wait for their meaning"--a statement that seems to suggest that the establishment of meaning is a retrospective act. There is, I suppose, no other way for a photographer to look at it.

Juno: A Father's Reaction

My dad never seemed to have much interest in what I did during my leisure time while I was in high school. Granted, he didn't need to--I was by any standards of classification a geek and a bookworm and by disposition practically incapable of getting into trouble--but he justified his laissez faire attitude by stating that there was only so much trouble his boys could get into. With the girls, though--that was another story.

Chauvanist as this attitude is, there's a truth to it that any feminist--pick your wave--has to admit. Girls can get into a particular kind of trouble that boys can't get into. Of course, both male and female parties need to be involved for this kind of trouble to occur, but the boy has the option of cut-and-run. The girl doesn't.

Enter Juno, with a unique twist on this theme: it's the girl who wants to cut-and-run (in her own particular coming-to-term way) and the boy who, though he might not know what he wants, doesn't want to cut out. The reason it has taken me so long to get around to seeing this film has to do precisely with the subject matter of the film: I, like the male lead in this film, got a girl pregnant. Unlike Michael Sera's sweet-natured and bumbling Paulie, I am older and married (though still bumbling), and the woman I got pregnant was my wife. In fact, I have gotten her pregnant twice, and the product of the first such undertaking is a two-year-old who makes going to see witty and charming films like Juno virtually impossible.

The younger product (who won't be born until June) went with us to the movie and must have absorbed it with interest, albeit indirectly. Based on post-film discussion, I'd say that the film fired off some powerful responses in my wife and that some of this response must have taken the form of hormonal transmission to the little bird inside her belly. It was, for us, a film that was poignant in ways that it could not be for many other viewers.

What struck me about the film wasn't really the kids, who were perfectly endearing and harmless in their own way, but the adults. In particular, the film has three relationships: Juno (Ellen Page, as if you haven't heard) and Paulie, Vanessa and Mark (the adoptive parents, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), and Juno's dad Mac and his wife Bren (J.K. Simmons and Allison Jannie). Juno and Paulie are convincing enough on screen but outside the world of the film rather improbable. Real teens aren't as witty as Juno and no one at any age (outside of Wes Anderson films) is capable of the blend of ironic-cool and naivete that Paulie embodies. (Paulie's a geek but cooler than he knows: he's totally retro and he plays guitar.) Despite their departure from the wholly realistic, Juno and Paulie are convincingly developed, which is what we expect out of good characterization. Vanessa and Mark, by contrast, are mostly foils for the younger couple: they're stereotypes of the suburban couple carried to an extreme, not entirely unrealistic but not entirely real, either. Nevertheless, the sting of the satire is there: Mark, the adult, who is supposed to be mature by virtue of his age and station, does the cut-and-run at the prospect of becoming a father; Vanessa, who has Pottery Barned to the max their house in the remote burbs, seems caught up in appearances, but her heart is golden. If the film has a message, it's that someone who wants to be a parent should be a parent, and that someone who doesn't shouldn't be.

The other relationship that sticks for me is not so much Mac and Bren as it is Mac and Juno. Mac's marriage to Bren is a second for Mac; Juno's mother cut-and-ran (thematic parallel observed) years ago. Toward the end of the film, Mac tells Juno (rather like the protagonist of a late Shakespearean play, one where the mother is seemingly nonexistent) that the relationship that will last is his fatherly love for her. This is a bit of a change from his initial response, when he tells Juno that he thought she was the kind of girl who knew when to say when. Mac's kinder words got to me because, like those Shakespeare plays, they say so much about what it means to be a parent. Mac faces the reality of a daughter in a predicament. I face the uncertainty of the very, very young/not-yet-born. I don't know what my kids are going to do. I'm hoping for the best, ready for anything.

A couple of months ago, Caitlin Flanagan, who writes thoughtful and challenging pieces for The Atlantic Monthly about issues affecting teenage girls, called Juno a "fairy tale" in an op-ed piece in The New York Times. I can sum up the fairy tale so: girl meets boy, girl gets pregnant, girl decides to give the child away, girl does so, and girl meets boy again and they go on with their happy, carefree teenage lives. Juno is a fairy tale then in depicting an improbable but ideal outcome that defies statistical fact in the lives of teenage girls, but not so in its depiction of the lives of adults. The fact of the matter is, nothing can prepare you for parenthood except the wish to be a parent, and Juno gets that right.