I just noticed on Elegant Variation mention of Dzanc Books and their first two titles. I’d never heard of them—which says nothing—but I was excited about what they are publishing. For one, the indie presses are keeping literature alive. They are publishing the stuff that’s too risky for most of the big houses—and by too risky I mean too weird and thus unpalatable to the majority of readers out there. I’m not trying to be a snob, it’s just that most people don’t know what to do with novelty. Because if you can’t turn it into a movie, what have you? I like that Dzanc quotes Gary Lutz and Brian Evenson because when you get endorsements from writers like these, and when you publicize them, you are pretty much saying: We are the real deal. And it’s true, they are.

Apropos the business of the good childhood, here comes the Netherlands. Crooked Timber reports UNICEF’s findings that the Dutch excel when it comes to the well-being of kids. Who doesn’t excel? We don’t, of course. The United Kingdom, too. There follows a paean to the Netherlands that has me wanting to immigrate and then an anti-paean that’s making me feel better about where I am, should I ever manage to have kid of my own.

This is what I like about Crooked Timber—they aren’t so bad at flipping the coin, despite the overall lefty bias of the thing. What I don’t like is how self-referential some of the posts are. Like that bit about Jodi Dean and formal modeling; not only is Dean’s post unintelligible, but so is the discussion that follows, if only because this guy assumes we know something about formal modeling beyond the obvious. I suppose most people who regularly read this blog do know about such matters. Me? I’m done. Can’t say the same of Drezner who, apparently, reads Crooked Timber with regularity.

I wanted to watch his bloggingheads tv thing, but I guess I need some intel-based mac plugin. Worth the trouble? No. Maybe I should just read his new book, which looks hot.

Richard Feynman on 3 Quarks: most satisfying. Likewise the snippets from the Orr/Dennett smackdown. It’s getting personal. By time it’s over, they will have long departed from debate over The God Delusion. Did you read The God Delusion? It’s on my pile, just below Anna Karenina, but above Catch-22. Props to 3 Quarks: I learned more from reading the site this week than I have in months.

Unfortunately, I also learned one great way not to get any work done is to read the aforementioned. I have been so unproductive! It’s a little depressing. And when depressed, instead of taking a walk or reading a book, I’ve gone to the Nerve Scanner. Today’s array? A clip from the startlingly unfunny “The Half-hour News Hour,” evidence that John Mayer looks like Edward Scissorhands, and a posing of the age-old question: is Vladimir Putin looker or loser? In short, what 3 Quarks inspires—brain activity, I guess—the Scanner destroys.

I’m signing off, Michael. It’s been fun corresponding with you. Maybe when we meet in the flesh, we can talk cupcakes.

Cheers,

fiona

Maaz:

I agree with you: one can’t talk about books in polite company anymore without it metamorphosing into talk of movies.

And as if to prove the point, just wanted to say, first off, if you haven’t seen “Pitch ’n’ Putt with Joyce ’n’ Beckett” at YouTube, you should. Feckin’ brilliant, it is.

Back to books: Jane Smiley’s new novel about Hollywood is due to – MERDE! I’m doing it again…

You want to get meta-meta? I just read about us reading about Crooked Timber and reading what Crooked Timber thinks we’re doing. Suddenly I’m very dizzy…

Dunno about you, but I don’t think I’ve ever had what I’m doing mentioned within the same paragraph as the fabled New York Intellectuals. But I suppose there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there? And other clichés. Ever wondered what it means to be “post-ironic”? I think I do: it’s when you think you’re being sarcastic but don’t realize you’re actually telling the truth. That is, talking “in quotes” about things that can be safely said without them.

As of this moment, no news yet from The Elegant Variation about Martin Amis’s teaching stint at Manchester Uni, so check it out at the Guardian. (The Mancs are going to have his balls for breakfast with his scalp as a side salad…) There is mention of Simone de Beauvoir being honored at the 16^th International Book Fair in Argentina. Didn’t the Times run a story a couple years ago that the English translation of Beauvoir’s Second Sex is actually rather shitty, and a generation of novice scholars might therefore have derived erroneous notions from it? Too bad this is the end of the line for discussion – would love to solicit your thoughts on that…

Oh, dammit, woman – you scooped me on Richard Feynman! Another late, lamented scientific mind. He and Carl Sagan. If you haven’t read Tuva or Bust: Richard Feynman’s Last Journey, you should. Would have been fun and interesting man to have hung around with: that stoner dewd who actually had a 180 IQ and excellent taste in music, lit, etc.

I read it first at Nerve’s Scanner: Al Franken is running for Senate, and Rudy Giuliani’s declared for president. Would have thought Giuliani’s cancer scare of a few years ago might have put him off the rigors of campaigning; and think Franken hasn’t a chance of winning, as he’s much too much fun to listen to. Think he’d get bored after awhile anyway. Drezner also weighed in with some drive-by thoughts on Giuliani worth pondering.

Maaz, my mighty heart is breaking. As we are being separated, perhaps never to see or hear one another again, I thought I’d bequeath to you a link of Joy Division performing “Love Will Tear Us Apart” as a sort of musical summing up.

Speaking of which: I knew a bit about Nerve and Elegant Variation beforehand but never really gave it a sustained look – so many wasted nights! Well, not anymore, buster. Crooked Timber, Drezner, and 3 Quarks Daily I hadn’t a clue, and am glad that I was clued in before I died. It’s been a pleasure sniping.

(Of course, Fiona, there is always e-mail, you know…)

Helke

Maaz:

I agree with you: one can’t talk about books in polite company anymore without it metamorphosing into talk of movies.

And as if to prove the point, just wanted to say, first off, if you haven’t seen “Pitch ’n’ Putt with Joyce ’n’ Beckett” at YouTube, you should. Feckin’ brilliant, it is.

Back to books: Jane Smiley’s new novel about Hollywood is due to – MERDE! I’m doing it again…

You want to get meta-meta? I just read about us reading about Crooked Timber and reading what Crooked Timber thinks we’re doing. Suddenly I’m very dizzy…

Dunno about you, but I don’t think I’ve ever had what I’m doing mentioned within the same paragraph as the fabled New York Intellectuals. But I suppose there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there? And other clichés. Ever wondered what it means to be “post-ironic”? I think I do: it’s when you think you’re being sarcastic but don’t realize you’re actually telling the truth. That is, talking “in quotes” about things that can be safely said without them.

As of this moment, no news yet from The Elegant Variation about Martin Amis’s teaching stint at Manchester Uni, so check it out at the Guardian. (The Mancs are going to have his balls for breakfast with his scalp as a side salad…) There is mention of Simone de Beauvoir being honored at the 16^th International Book Fair in Argentina. Didn’t the Times run a story a couple years ago that the English translation of Beauvoir’s Second Sex is actually rather shitty, and a generation of novice scholars might therefore have derived erroneous notions from it? Too bad this is the end of the line for discussion – would love to solicit your thoughts on that…

Oh, dammit, woman – you scooped me on Richard Feynman! Another late, lamented scientific mind. He and Carl Sagan. If you haven’t read Tuva or Bust: Richard Feynman’s Last Journey, you should. Would have been fun and interesting man to have hung around with: that stoner dewd who actually had a 180 IQ and excellent taste in music, lit, etc.

I read it first at Nerve’s Scanner: Al Franken is running for Senate, and Rudy Giuliani’s declared for president. Would have thought Giuliani’s cancer scare of a few years ago might have put him off the rigors of campaigning; and think Franken hasn’t a chance of winning, as he’s much too much fun to listen to. Think he’d get bored after awhile anyway. Drezner also weighed in with some drive-by thoughts on Giuliani worth pondering.

Maaz, my mighty heart is breaking. As we are being separated, perhaps never to see or hear one another again, I thought I’d bequeath to you a link of Joy Division performing “Love Will Tear Us Apart” as a sort of musical summing up.

Speaking of which: I knew a bit about Nerve and Elegant Variation beforehand but never really gave it a sustained look – so many wasted nights! Well, not anymore, buster. Crooked Timber, Drezner, and 3 Quarks Daily I hadn’t a clue, and am glad that I was clued in before I died. It’s been a pleasure sniping.

(Of course, Fiona, there is always e-mail, you know…)

Helke

My turn again. Guess your jams and jellies are just going to have to wait, Maaz.

Word to the wise: all the world’s holy texts have some Get-Out-of-Jail-Free clause, which allows its users to commit the occasional murder. Okay, perhaps not Buddhist texts – though I’m cynic enough to believe that even their works have that clause encoded between the lines somewhere.

A lot of great links at 3 Quarks Daily today. Am wondering exactly what the “sort of Valentine’s card” the Islamic Republic of Iran sends Salman Rushdie every year. Are we talking a heart-shaped card with naked little cherubs brandishing AK-47s poking in every which direction, above an inscription which reads “Still thinking of you, sahib”? Am also wondering which is worse: an Iran headed by literal-minded clerics or clerics with a sense of humor like that; Thant Myint-U contributes an essay to the London Review of Books about a subject very dear to his heart (“What to Do about Burma”). Am just now getting into his book, The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), as it’s been recommended to me left and right; and Tariq Ramadan, the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine profile by Ian Buruma, offers “What the West Can Learn from Islam” for The Chronicle for Higher Education. It’s an embarrassment for this country to have revoked his work visa right before he was set to take up a professorship at the U of Notre Dame. It sends the message that the country is Islamophobic, and that’s a notion we ought not to be encouraging at this point in time.

One final thought: does Richard Dawkins strike you as the kind of guy who would get upset trying to explain to an uncomprehending child why Santa Claus doesn’t exist?

A post at Drezner’s site had me fuming for a few moments. That was “So How’s the Global War on Terror Going?”, which shows that the Center for American Progress, along with Foreign Policy magazine – not exactly a bastion of fiery left-wing propaganda – conducted a poll, asking respondents if they felt the world has become safer or more dangerous for the United States and its people. Survey says: 12% believe it has become safer, while 81% beg to differ. Was it the study that raised my temperature? Hardly. Below the YouTube clip of Caroline Wadhams of the CAP is a comment that seeks to cast aspersions on the whole study by pointing out that the CAP is, in fact, LEFT WING. Holy shit! What were those Foreign Policy idiots thinking even talking to those CAPpies?! That throws the whole enterprise into complete chaos! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!

 

At Crooked Timber, Scott McLemee reminds us, in “Boldly Uphold the Revolutionary Use of Stilted Language from ‘Peking Review’ Circa 1974!”, that English majors really have no place within Maoism. Dearest Fiona, how would you like to have received this message today? “Progressive And Revolutionary People Everywhere, Resolutely Uphold The Militant Bolshevik Spirit And Revolutionary Romanticism Embodied In Comrade Valentine!” Or “Decisively Smash Retrograde And Joyless Ultra-Left Lines Which Disparage Proletarian Love And Desire!!”

Is that the swelling of violins I hear? Well, Happy Valentine’s Day, my dear.

Actually, I remember back in my college days hearing some Communists speaking on campus in that very stilted speech, and not through a megaphone; so there really isn’t much room for parody here. They’ve already done a bang-up job for us.

Though I’ve grown quite fond of you within the oh-so-brief time we’ve been corresponding, Fiona, I must confess I’m also quite jealous of you. As you intimated in your last dispatch, you live in a city where you can run into writers and engage them in conversations about bloodshed. In Chicago, I’d be lucky if I might bump into a writer and get an “Excuse me” out of him/her – let alone a discussion on, say, Darfur. I’m thinking it’s got to be the weather.

Nothing much to say about The Elegant Variation today, except that it is required reading for the lit-minded. That, and if Floyd Landis wants to impress us with his honesty, he should hold off on the book and send us a urine sample. Now.

Finally: would have mentioned it before, but I didn’t want to blow my load in one post: excellent interview with John Waters at Nerve. Resolutely Uphold the Camp Aesthetic against the Incursions of Humorless Mullahs, Commies, Writers in a Hurry and Richard Dawkins Everywhere!!!

Love,

Helke

Ms. Maazel:

Your outlook regarding the fan mail as evidenced by your response to the anonymous hangman: too right.

Re: real threats to one’s health and reputation: doesn’t Daniel Drezner know that Vladimir Putin can have him killed? Drezner shouldn’t be surprised to wake up one day to see the contents of his stomach glowing through his shirt.

Of course, as Matt Yglesias of Crooked Timber points out, there’s something to be said for living a life of spying and espionage. Saw Munich the other night and thought, “At least I’d have an excuse for sleeping on the floor of my closet.” Was reminded of key scenes from Tony Kushner’s script after reading this essay at 3 Quarks Daily. Particularly when Avner has that intense discussion with the Black Septembrist in the squat. If they only had Alon Levy refereeing for them.

On a related note: read the following letter by Beirut-based Waleed Hazbun when you’ve got a free moment and tell me what you think.

Re “The Good Childhood”: if you survived, period, then it’s good.

Was going to catch the discussion on that very subject at the Central Library in Madison, Wisconsin, at 7 PM (Central) when I realized that 1. I don’t live in Madison, and 2. I’d be missing American Idol anyway.

See? You’re not lacking for company in vacuousness…

Re upbringing: solidly middle class. And don’t think I don’t make a fetish of it in the right circumstances.

Don’t you find yourself wishing that Drezner was your dad? At least he’d give you a ride to school, come rain, sleet or snow, in which the Midwest is wrapped like a frosty gyro.

Re Phillip Rieff: he was Susan Sontag’s husband, wasn’t he? Helped give the world David Rieff, among other contributions. Sontag said she felt she had married herself into a modern-day version of Middlemarch when she fell in with him. Shudder.

Joan Acocella’s 2000 New Yorker essay on Sontag appears in Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon). Ever read her? (Acocella, that is. Would be very surprised to hear that Sontag never appeared on your syllabus.)

Agree with you about layout of Elegant Variation: very user-friendly. And reading the Wednesday bullet points, one is surprised to see Orhan Pamuk, who is in fear of his life from Turkish nationalists, having chosen the States to live in exile. I would have thought Sweden, myself. Or Canada (particularly Toronto). Pamuk hasn’t exactly had the best things to say about the States, but so what: hope he enjoys however much time he chooses to spend here. At least I hope he receives better than Salman Rushdie, whom the government seemed only intermittently concerned with protecting during the years of Khomeini’s fatwa.

Speaking of the consequences of extremist activities, another shudder passes through me: Justin Clark’s story at Nerve about Gordon Lee, a comic book store owner in Rome, Georgia, who’s been harassed for the past three years for the “knowing dissemination” of images of "sexually explicit nudity, sexual conduct, and sadomasochistic abuse" to minors. Source of the flap? The Salon by Nick Bertozzi, a graphic novel murder mystery set in turn-of-the-century Paris, where Picasso is portrayed painting in the nude. A copy unwittingly made it into the hands of a minor. Call out the National Guard: three years later, it’s still being fought over. Bertozzi weighs in with this interesting observation:

“The Disneyfication of culture has helped contribute to that lack of understanding… I think people unfortunately see cartoons and they see a nice thick line — a lot of cartoonists including myself are influenced by that nice thick line. It's assumed to be childlike.”

I think there’s more to it than that, but it’s a nice starting point for a discussion about how the peculiar oppressive forms cultural ignorance can adopt. Care to weigh in?

I must say that I enjoy reading Crooked Timber dispatches such as this one concerning reaction to an interview with Danny Postel, where the reader response fairly overwhelms the article to which readers respond and takes on a life all its own. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote about the “marketplace of ideas,” and it’s a lot of fun to envision the occasional intellectual slugfest erupting in the midst of it. That’s what the ‘Net was made for, I believe.

Now let’s see what jams and jellies you’re offering…

Fiona my Nona:

Dear me! Did you get a chance to read that Anonymous response to our first post? Scribe tried to lay down the law as if s/he were Officer Krupke disguised as Moses. (Or Lynne Truss disguised as Katherine White.) I’m assuming that s/he hasn’t read too many blogs.

And I love that last parting shot: “Yo, Helke, this applies to you too.” Does our first offense make us the blogospheric equivalent of gang-bangers? Grammar-bangers, perhaps?

After this cartoonish chiding, I just had to revisit Nerve.com and re-read some of the articles devoted to their latest issue’s theme, comics. Favorites include “Subterranean Homesick Blues: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was my Sex and the City” by Will Doig, and Peter Smith’s interview with Peter Bagge. Bagge’s storytelling makes me howl, though I’m among the die-hards who would have preferred it if he had left Hate as a black-and-white title; and I never would have thought that a pack of sai-sporting terrapin might have anything to do with a clatch of Gucci-sporting urban terrorists. Thank you, Doig, for opening my eyes.

The tenor of my evening thus elevated, I turned to The Elegant Variation – and wondered if the anonymous scribe might have been associated with Jarvas’s enterprise. Nah, concluded I: the Variation’s much wittier. First item to catch my eye: “Why Didn’t We Think of That?”, wherein we learn that Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin will only publish the third volume of his memoirs if good reviews can be guaranteed. See how many sublimely absurd notions you can find within the following sentence: “’Like most creative people, Gerry Adams is surprisingly sensitive,’ said Irish Times literary editor Ulysses Grant. ‘He finds it difficult to finish anything unless he’s absolutely sure that everyone will love it.’”

Just wanted to say that everyone should read Ulysses Grant’s memoirs of the Civil War, as they really put you at the scene of this historical event. Also, that Adams, like all writers, is a sensitive human being. Look at Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The capper, however, has to be that Adams is so sensitive that Grant suggests that he hasn’t even finished the volume yet. He wants those positive reviews etched in stone before he’s going to let the process proceed another millimeter. And you thought he was tough on the Oranges…

On to Crooked Timber. Must remind myself to catch the discussion “The Good Childhood: Does It Exist?” when it posts later today. I just want to know what kind of wheels they put on the word “good.” Could make for a nice philosophical workout.

3 Quarks Daily brought me down, as now I’m mourning the absence of Carl Sagan all over again. Nice to know that the New York Times – the paper of note, don’t you know – felt it proper to open with a disquistion on Sagan’s tendency for dragging out the word “billions.” But you do have to agree with the Times: when Sagan died, he seemed to have taken a lot of erudition and understanding with him. Witness the battle over the teaching of evolution in schools, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and the American government’s refusal to address the realities of climate change seriously.

Thought I saw some light at the end of the tunnel at Daniel Drezner’s site: news that a tentative deal with North Korea on the nuclear issue was at hand. But, of course, we should be wary, for as Drezner points out, we’ve seen this kind of thing before, back in 1994, with the Agreed Framework. Moreover, “There is one big difference between 1994 and 2007… the Democrats now control both houses of Congress. I'm not sure, therefore, whether conservative opposition will be as big of a problem as it was before. Of course, it's possible that the 8% of the Democratic caucus in the Senate now running for president will use the deal as an opportunity for foreign policy posturing.”

Like I said, I like Daniel Drezner and his point of view. But sometime he can be such a mood-killer.

I waded through seven inches of snow to bring you these words, Fiona. What have you got for us?

– Helke

Greetings, Fiona.

Read “I Was a Bad Pornographer,” your Salon essay from 15 March 2000. Seems like all the illustrious writers have dipped their wicks into that ink well at one time or another, and I want in on that action. I remember reading a 1999 essay in Harper’s by your late boss, George Plimpton: an appreciation of Terry Southern, I believe. Plimpton wrote about having written a pornographic novel for Grove Press. Maurice Giordias thought it was too much; his wife at the time freaked out; cried a WASPy river.

Between you, me, and the deep blue sea: you never got to see that manuscript, did you? If not, what do you think he did with it? Did he set it aflame? Scatter its pages into an African river? Have it interred in a vault in the Vatican? Or have Xeroxed copies been distributed among so-called “playgroups,” a phenomenon that, according to Crooked Timber, can be found in schoolyards in the Netherlands? Does Plimpton’s porn circulate samizdat-style, under the hashed-out orbs of Dutch dads? (Readers are invited to send in their own suppositions as to the book’s whereabouts — assuming, of course, that it has retained corporeality).

Anyway: about porn. Or, if you will, erotica. Nerve.com seems to be the most plausible creative realization of Hugh Hefner’s youthful notion of enjoying a romantic evening involving a “quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, [and] sex.” Except their aesthetic would be more along the lines of Bacon, Foucault, goth and… well, I guess sex makes the list, too. Really: if discussions of Nietzsche were to have ever figured into such an evening back in Hef’s heyday, it would have to have occurred post-climax; and I’m pretty sure that such a discussion would have gone only as far as the Übermensch.

Unfortunately, 21^st-century pillow talk isn’t that elevated — not yet, anyway. Merely reiterations of the standard “Was it good for you?”-style idiocies. Why not enliven the post-coital discourse with some observations? For instance, doesn’t it kind of suck that, while soldiers are dying in Iraq, people in Hollywood can’t think of anything to do but talk bullshit cinema and have meaningless sex? Doesn’t Adam Gopnik just totally blow the bishop’s sausage? I think he, David Denby and Lillian Ross ought to be placed on a block of ice and kicked out to sea. I’m glad this Mark Savas chap sees things my way. Ditto Morgan Meis of 3 Quarks Daily.

I think we’re living in an “inside the whale” moment all over again, Fi. How's that for a graduate thesis: George Orwell’s relevance to the public’s fascination with the dissolute life of the late Anna Nicole Smith? I think there’s something there: ANS was an un-missable spectacle, and why do I think that, like Orwell’s memory of the sinking Titanic, she’ll be better remembered in twent years than the siege of Fallujah? This is a line of inquiry worth pursuing, if only to get more people thinking about Orwell whenever they turn on E!.

Thinking about Orwell gets me to thinking about others who have thought about Orwell; and one who has expressed his thoughts on his subject most eloquently is the London-based Australian-expat writer/critic/personality Clive James. His essay “The All of Orwell,” which is included in As of This Writing, his most recent collection — that is, until this coming March, when Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts comes out — is worth checking out. “Primo Levi and the Painted Veil” is another, demonstrating James to be one of the best critics of bad books around. How so? Because his essays have the effect of making us remember the bad books, if nothing other than an object lesson on how not to write: fiction, poetry, history, journalism, et al. Carole Angier should thank CJ for saving her execrable bio of Levi, The Double Bond, from oblivion for that very reason. Someday he’ll go to town on Gopnik — perhaps even Denby — in his inimitably urbane yet devastating way.

The ever-insightful Daniel Drezner says that ‘Everyone Plays Hard-to-Get Before the Six-Party Talks.’ I think everybody would be happy if these people just cut through the foreplay, dropped a load of E, and screwed each other like rabid bunnies. I mean, this coy shit is getting old, man.

I like Drezner. Academician though he may be, he’s trying to bring matters of arcane policy down to a level that everybody can understand. Much like Orwell. How, you ask? Sex. For instance: the notion of playing “Hard-to-Get.” Hard. And “Six” kind of sounds like “sex.” I do declare that if Orwell lived a few more decades, he’d have tried some of the same tactics as Drezner.

I’m sure you have observations, and boy, would I love to read ‘em. Fire away.

Fiona's reply will be posted at 11:00 a.m. EST.