Library sale

Originally scheduled for February but the snow storm pushed it back.  Pickings were slim this time - there were a few other interesting things but in poor condition.

I found:

The Best of Dryden (1933 edition that includes none of his drama)
Gibbons - The Poet's Work
Smith - Virgin Land
Smith & Parks - The Great Critics
Bianculli - Dangerously Funny (about the Smother Brothers show)

Two "100 Book" lists

In 1898 a scholar and sometime editor named Clement K. Shorter came up with his list of the 100 best novels.  I find these type of things, no matter how canon-defining they're attempting to be, fascinating.  Partly because they track shifts in taste and partly because they can show how limited our own might be.  Many older lists include Walter Scott, a choice for canonical author that's baffling today when he's considered more of an entertainer and only barely read at that.  Lists might also be more inclusive and not like so many today mainly focused on novels, drama and lyric poetry.

Shorter's list feels a bit eccentric even by what I know (or think I know) of tastes from that period.  Bunyan's The Holy War instead of Pilgrim's Progress?  Gil Blais?  Clara Reeve?  And starting with #18 (Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl) are a few books that I've never even heard of.  Who was Jane Porter?  G.P.R. James?  Theodore Hook?  James Grant?  Certainly some of those are works that feel into scholarly interest but at the time were more current.  At the time Shorter was writing they were about as far into his past as the 1950s and 1960s are to us - in other words pretty modern.  Interestingly there are a larger number of women than I think most of us would have expected - 32 unless my count is off.  The list also seems to lean a bit toward adventure in a broader sense.  I've seen Marryat praised for his style but he's generally considered (rightly or wrongly I don't never having read the book) a precursor to sea stories like Hornblower.  It's also heavily British with a few French, American, German and Italian writers.  And then the choices.  Not just the Bunyan but Salammbo for Flaubert?  Bracebridge Hall for Irving?  The Last of the Barons for Bulwer Lytton?  Or maybe just "Bulwer Lytton?!?"

Still I'd like to check out a few of these obscurities, not because they may be lost classics but because they might just be overlooked but worth reading.  Open Library has some that I checked.  The book about Richelieu by James ("doyen of historical novelists") sounded promising but flipping through looks a bit drier than I'd like.  Or maybe it finally is time to read Marryat.

The other list has appeared in many news reports this week - Amazon's 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime.  (No, I didn't forget the link - if you want this one you'll have to look it up.)  The purpose is unclear.  The banner says "to create a well-read life" but it misses so many of the truly important books that apparently they're assuming you've already read those.  The inclusion of kids books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Where the Wild Things Are goes against "well-read".  No matter how charming or developmentally important children's books are, they are also by definition of no real artistic value.  The non-fiction titles are almost random (Unbroken? Born to Run? Daring Greatly) and there are far too many recent books that simply can't be evaluated yet.

The real purpose of the list is clearly those news reports - it's just more marketing.  The list is carefully chosen so that most readers will find a decent number that they already know and more that they know about.  Nothing too off-putting or obscure or difficult. There are some books that I think are irrelevant or even bad on it but for the most part people could do worse and that is more or less the point.  It's not a serious list in any respect but one like, say, the Oscars or Grammys to make readers feel comfortable rather than acknowledge genuine accomplishment.  

Notes on Re-reading The Turn of the Screw

The Norton Critical Edition which reprints the New York Edition text and includes background material, contemporary reviews and selected criticism.

It’s odd to discover Turn was initially serialized in 12 installments – the Norton marks the end of each.  So much of the effect depends on a unity of purpose which must have been lost in such a presentation, or if readers even remembered the story.  If the journal was a weekly that’s three months for what now most of us read in one sitting.  If twice-weekly that’s still a month and a half and even if it came out every week day that’s over two weeks.

I’d never noticed before that the governess is not named.

Are Quint and Miss Jessel evil?  That’s clearly how the apparitions are given though even being presented through the governess’ account they don’t do much.  In the backstory all they seem to have done is engage in a romantic liaison – outside good taste perhaps but even in 1898 hardly evil.  (Though the story is set decades earlier it still feels much of the time of its composition.)

Surely somebody has written a story about Flora after the events of Turn.

What’s the purpose of the frame story?  To some degree this is a convention but I suppose partly it serves as evidence that the governess is in fact not insane, to account for some readings of the actual text by earlier representing these in the frame’s characters, and possibly to make the story more “final” by presenting it as a fixed text two removes in time (many years from when it was actually written by the governess who was then recounting events many years in her past).

This second edition of the Norton Critical came out in 1999 and most of its sampling of recent criticism is already useless.  Remember when academics valued the ability to write well?

The impression I get from the supplemental material is that it didn't occur to readers for years that the governess might be imagining the spirits.  Not sure I quite believe that.  If that’s true though the interesting point is how ingrained a way of interpretation is that it’s hard to imagine another way.

If I’m reading the Blackmur piece correctly he’s suggesting that both the ghosts are real and also that the governess is imagining – basically that the ghosts are mostly blank and she’s projecting the evil onto them.

Interesting that James called Turn a “potboiler” several times and dismisses it for not being as attentive to reality as his other work.  I’m hardly a pro-realism guy but admittedly do see some of his point. 

Also can’t help but wonder how conscious James was of class differences.  He was certainly aware of it but I suspect in a way that would be offensive today.  Some of the servants are listed in Turn but barely figure in the story though you have to wonder why not considering the events that may or may not be happening would have involved them as well.  In A Portrait of a Lady servants sometime flick by almost like, well, ghosts with just a passing mention during scenes where until then I didn't suspect they were even present.

Since the Quint and Jessel relation is never clearly defined it’s hard not to think that the most offensive transgression was their difference in class.

Is Mrs. Grose’s illiteracy an indication of her inability to interpret the events? Of course if the governess is imagining then she’s not missing the ghosts, she’s missing the threat of the governess.

There are many more film versions than I realized.  This would appear to be a book very unsuited to film but must be tempting to filmmakers.

Some recent reading

John Man - Ninja: 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warrior (2013)

An odd book.  The purpose is worthy – to write an accurate history of ninja without the vast amount of myth and exaggeration built up around them.  But Man quickly runs into the problem where he has few sources of uncertain reliability.  He solves this as many other authors in a similar situation have by writing about the period, using short profiles of people, adding stray facts and interesting stories, tracing some of the remnants of the activity.  The result, though, is a clunky grabbag of material.  He focuses mainly on 16th century wars that certainly involved the ninja even if the historical record isn’t always clear about their activities or capacity.  This account gets a bit confusing which might well be my ignorance of the period but then again I’m exactly the type of person he should be write towards so if I’m lost then that can’t be entirely me.  At times he has interviews of modern historians, collectors and buffs though it apparently never occurred to him to write a combination history/travelogue much as Tony Horwitz does.  If that doesn’t work then how about tracing the development of the ninja myth?  Again there’s a brief bit about how this happened in Japan but much more about how James Bond started ninjamania in the West.  He doesn’t follow too much past that.  Towards the end of the book he’s really stretching for material.  There’s a chapter on the Nakano spy school that’s interesting and has a conceptual similarity to real-life ninja activities though there doesn’t appear to be any actual connection.  The final chapter relates the story of a Japanese soldier who didn’t believe the war was over and lived for decades hidden in the jungles on a populated island.  Man claims to see the spirit of ninja here but this is such a weak link that it’s laughable.  In one odd part so utterly unrelated to ninja history that you feel the author is trying to pad out the book he includes a bulleted list of survival characteristics including the claim that people with stable childhoods are better survivors because they don’t expect the crisis to last.  You could just as easily make the opposite claim – that people with unsettled childhoods have more experience (and might just as well know this won’t last).  It’s unlikely that either is true and there’s no source for the statements anyway.  This sort of thing makes me wonder how reliable the rest of the book is.

Jeffrey J. Kripal - Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (2011)

Kripal wanted to trace the development of comics in relation to contemporary trends in science fiction and pop culture ideas of paranormal activity.  There’s a lot of potential there but this isn’t that book.  He quite early lets us know of his genuine paranormal encounter (though what he describes is a well-known psychological effect) and his seemingly proud believe in something both so trivial and so ludicrous casts the rest of the book into question.  It’s sort of like starting a book on 20th century Italian history where the author proclaims his admiration for Mussolini – it doesn’t negate the accuracy of the history but does make a reader dubious about it.  Kripal at several points claims that the truth or not of the various paranormal events (he includes one from Doug Moench that is so clearly a mistaken memory that it’s hard to imagine anybody taking it seriously if in fact I wasn’t reading somebody taking it seriously), anyway that their truth or not isn’t important.  Fair enough.  The catch is that Kripal is using this more as a smokescreen and as the book goes on it’s more and more obvious that whether or not he personally believes this (though he’s told us that he does even if with a wink and nudge) that he’s presenting it as fact.  The bigger problem is that despite all this the book doesn’t do justice to the connections that it’s supposedly intended to explore.  Superhero comics roots in Victorian adventure and 20th century pulp fiction are well-documented (though more wouldn’t hurt) but its ties to the parallel development of modern SF is more scanty and to paranormal and alternative religious beliefs almost nonexistant (other than UFO and related which aren’t typically considered paranormal but in all respects actually are). 

David Sedaris - When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008)

People have always told me Sedaris is a writer I’d love so a few years ago I tried to read something but didn’t get far.  Lately my boss went on several long spiels about Sedaris and her descriptions were funny so off to the library where I picked this as the most likely choice.  Then I read it.  It is, to borrow a better writer’s phrase, a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again.  The first surprise is that despite his reputation Sedaris really isn’t a humorist.  I don’t mean that I didn’t find him funny (he has moments) but for the most part that’s not what he’s trying to achieve.  Mainly he writes memoirist essays, which I realize is a clunky phrase but best describes these little bits of his life stuck into this form.  I have no idea how much of this is true but that really doesn’t matter.  When Sedaris goes off in one of the longer, more unpleasant essays about a bad airline trip it’s clear that this is just the literary equivalent of a talk radio caller.  He’s merely venting with no reason that we should care.  Some of his character profiles offer more substance but again without much to recommend them.  In fact after finishing the book I admit to being completely mystified why anybody would think this was worth reading at all.  

Literary fiction roolz! Or does it?

The big news recently, at least in my circles, is that scientists have finally proven that literary fiction makes you a better person!  Yep, actual scientists and everything.  Of course this sounds so ridiculous that my first thought is that the study is a hoax but after reading a bit more it instead sounds more like a junior high science fair project that copy-hungry journalists picked up.  Though I don’t think we can still entirely rule out the hoax possibility – it really is that silly.

Some points:

*  The study was published by Science who have it walled off so that means I have to rely on news reports about the study.  The most detailed (but still not enough) is in the NYT.

*  The articles I’ve seen show why news outlets so often have trouble with science.  This is one study but it’s being reported as having “proven” that literary fiction creates more empathy.  This is all too similar to countless health articles reporting on a new single study that proves all sorts of things, often when the bulk of other studies show the opposite.  Just look at the stream of reports on any new diet trend or beneficial food to see journalism at its worst.  All that one study shows is that one study shows this. 

*  In fact this one study goes against decades of what we might call empirical observation.  Think about it – the people who most engage with literary fiction are authors, editors, critics and literature professors.  Does anybody think such people (which includes me) are in any way more moral, more empathetic, more observant or even more intelligent?  Or for that matter any student currently taking a lit class would qualify.

*  This study sounds very similar to the much-discussed and utterly untrue “Mozart effect” except in this case it seems like the researchers are making the larger claim.  Also, though the study bases its claims on showing more empathy it’s all too reminiscent of early studies about videogames that proclaimed games made children more violent.  Closer looks showed those studies weren’t in fact measuring violence but aggression and more recent work has revealed that they weren’t even dealing with aggression but competitiveness.  In other words, just because they say they’re measuring something doesn’t mean that’s what’s actually happening.

*  The NYT quotes one psychologist who says this report was not one but five experiments but that doesn’t matter for two reasons.  For one thing these aren’t five separate studies/experiments but five repetitions so that any flaws or blind spots are just repeated as well.  Second, the five experiments all include literary fiction but otherwise test it against something else (popular fiction, nonfiction, no reading) meaning they aren’t exactly comparable.

*  The point of the above?  Because one part of this study has participants viewing a photograph of eyes then choosing one of four adjectives that describe them.  Basically that’s not measuring empathy at all but asking for an evaluation of a mental state.  More to the point is why would the psychologists think that verbal activity helps with visual processing?  Participants had a 25% chance to guess the correct answer anyway so I’ll just assume the psychologists had statistically significant (love that term) results.  Obviously I’m not at all familiar with these testing procedures so whether or not I think they actually work isn’t entirely to the point – but it’s not missing it because this isn’t at all settled among the scientificcommunity.

*  Look at it this way:  If the reading supposedly creates empathy by putting you in the mind of another person (we’ll ignore how problematic that is on so many different levels) then how does evaluating eyes reflect that?  Actually how does evaluating eyes have any bearing on empathy at all?  I’m sure there are plenty of psychopaths who are quite good at reading faces but my understanding of “psychopath” is that by definition such person lacks empathy.

*  None of the reports say if study accounts for class differences.  My understanding is that this has a noticable effect on empathy and charity.

*  Perhaps the biggest problem is one that still suggests a hoax but if not then it indicates that the study should be rejected outright.  One report says participants read “a few minutes” which another person later specifies as 3-5 minutes.  This isn’t reading literary fiction but swallowing a pill.  In fact in many cases that’s not even enough time to distinguish literary fiction from anything else.  I suspect the psychologists would argue that this is irrelevant because lit fict works regardless but that goes against the claim.  If lit fict works because it’s more ambiguous, requires more thought about character, needs involvement then reading just a few pages isn’t enough for that to happen.  You could read three pages of a Harlequin romance or some D&D novelization and the character motivations might be unclear but for entire chapters of A Portrait of a Lady Isabel Archer’s intentions and thoughts are perfectly clear.  It’s only in the whole – in all of A Portrait - that a reader can see that Isabel is much more ambiguous.

*  The study selected “good” literary fiction by choosing award winners so would these results still apply to “bad” literary fiction?  Or the difference between on of Updike’s Rabbit novels and his Terrorist?  (I haven’t read either but basing purely on reputation – and it doesn’t matter whether this specific example is accurate since there are plenty of others.)  The point being that “bad” lit fict might intend to be ambiguous and require interpretation but it doesn’t.  I’d argue that this is also true to some extent of much “good” lit fict – it tells you how to think about it.  I recently read some Raymond Carver stories and was surprised and how heavy-handed they were and how he underlined everything – nothing unclear or needing interpretation there. 

*  If literary fiction creates more empathy becauses if focuses on character then shouldn’t popular fiction create better problem-solving skills because it focuses on plot?  There’s the subject for the next study.

*  It’s very odd that the psychologists apparently think there’s no literary nonfiction.  (“Nonfiction” being really a classifiction people encounter in public libraries that doesn’t quite exist anywhere else – just one of many reasons that I’m pretty sure these psychologists have no idea about literature, fiction or art.)   So would they get the same results from that?  Is it the “literary” or the “fiction” or the combination? 

*  Poor Louise Erdrich comes off so badly in the report that I suspect she didn’t know what she was responding to. 

*  I was going to avoid the entire idea of separating out literary fiction but not after reading the articles that all simply assume it’s superior.  Today “literary fiction” is itself a genre as many (but far from all) writers and critics would admit.  As the articles point out it’s realistic (a loaded term that I’ll leave alone for now), based on character, psychologically familiar, a bit more ambiguous (at least at times) and stylistically delicate.  Historically this is something of an anomaly or just a phase depending on how you want to look at it but the literary fiction crowd have been nothing if not self-promoters and positioned lit fict as the pinnacle of literature.  It doesn’t help that most literary fiction people that I’ve encountered are remarkably ill-informed about literary history but to be fair that’s not just them and is also true to different degrees for musicians, filmmakers and other creative types.  Greil Marcus once commented on the difficulty of convincing people that one of the most important living writers wrote almost nothing but record reviews (Lester Bangs) and that gets to the point.  If your reading habits and possibly even career are tied up with the idea that novels and short stories set in plausible everyday surroundings involving plausible everyday people with plausible everyday problems told in an ever-so slightly showy but really quite timid style is really the only thing that MATTERS then yeah you’ll dismiss everything else as mere entertainment.  This is why it’s so amusing to watch the twists such people have to make to avoid acknowledging that “literary” writers sometimes write “genre” – Margaret Atwood (three science fiction novels), Toni Morrison (at least one fantasy novel - Beloved), Cormac McCarthy (one SF – The Road), Philip Roth (one SF – The Plot Against America), Michael Chabon (one fantasy – Kavalier & Clay), Jonathan Lethem (who at least is open about his).  Diane Johnson and Cathleen Schine have played with elements of romance fiction while mysteries have become so close to acceptable that somebody like John Banville can have a separate, fairly respected career writing it.  My point isn’t that literary fiction is a sham but that it is inherently of no greater artistic value than any other genre and that most people claiming it is are making unsupportable rationalizations.

The Internet described....in 1777!

DISPUTES with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy, from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity, superior to the rest of mankind. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in inforcing sophistry and falsehood. And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.

David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1777), p1

Marisha Pessl - Night Film (2013)

Perhaps aestheticians have a name for this issue: I consider the book not very good but yet read all of it.  If I didn't force myself then maybe it's not so bad after all?  Aren't good, simple stories their own reward?  Most likely it's more that the book is mostly a subject that interests me and admittedly has a narrative question that feels worth seeing how it plays out.  (It's not worth it.)  And yes good, simple stories have a definite value but they're not so easy to find.  (Instead of Night Film if you're looking for a book about obsession and subterranean cinema then try Tim Lucas' Throat Sprockets and if you prefer the conspiracy/maybe supernatural approach then Ben Wheatley's genuinely bizarre film Kill List.)

Stanislas Cordova is an admired director whose films are considered unusually intense and deeply disturbing proves into the human mind but who lives in seclusion.  The narrator is a journalist whose career bottomed out when he threatened the director in an interview.  (Exactly, or even roughly, why he did this is never adequately explained though it's a flaw so obvious that even the narration offers a weak attempt.)  When Cordova's daughter apparently commits suicide the journalist decides to investigate, dragging along a part-time drug dealer and a homeless naif who moved to the big city to be an actress.  Along the way are conspiracies (or are they?), hints of the supernatural (or are they?) and possibilities of criminal depravity (or are they?).

The book starts basically like a mystery with our fearless investigators tracking down leads and collecting information.  Or at least that appears to have been the intention since it really feels more like a videogame - the trio goes to one person, hears their story, goes to the next, hears their story, goes to the next and so on.  It's a stream of stories with no real attempt at sifting the evidence, at deduction, at thinking.  Basically they just go for a ride.  It does get more complex as it becomes apparent that the journalist's two helpers have hidden agendas and as the stories start to form an odd picture.

For such a narrative the book is far too long.  I read the ebook and wondered why it seemed like I wasn't making much progress until finding out that the physical book is listed at 624 pages.  Yes, maybe Pynchon could have done something with that but Pessl seems to have no real idea where this is going.  When I say a book is too long usually I mean about 10-20% could have easily been cut but in this case I think almost half the book could have been trimmed and vastly improved it.  Where indeed is Max Perkins when we need him?

The supernatural element builds slowly and not very effectively.  Pessl clearly was aiming for a story that could be interpreted either as supernatural or as mundane but she should have read Turn of the Screw more closely, or perhaps more to the point John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court.  The supernatural parts are mostly second and third-hand stories until we get to one extended section where the journalist has his own encounter. (In the ebook it's between two completely black pages but I don't know if that's a quirk of the ebook or if the finished book will have that.  In any case it's separated from the other, number chapters.)  Maybe we're supposed to be in doubt about how to resolve this section but even within the story it's so clearly an hallucination that the supernatural part comes across half-hearted.

One odd element of the book is the director Cordova.  He's considered one of the greats and so famous that non-film buffs recognize his name.  In a clever move Pessl gives him half a career in Hollywood complete with Oscars for readers who think that means anything then a second half as a barely distributed independent for readers who think that means anything.  The odd part is that none of the descriptions live up to this - they sound like rather routine efforts.  The discrepancy is so blatant that I almost think Pessl is doing this deliberately except that after going through the whole book it's hard to see that she has the ability to pull that off.  Cordova's films nearly all sound like gialli and I don't mean that in a vague way - if I heard the plot descriptions with no other information I would have assumed the film was a giallo.  (Though one sounds like a loose remake of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt.)  But it's not just the plots since nothing about the films' atmosphere or style or mood or anything really sound at all substantial.  I think mostly Pessl just lacks a critic's ability and consequently can't describe imaginary works except in the blandest press-agent way.  This isn't helped that the novel has a film professor who is basically satirical (and this time I do think it's deliberate).  He spouts superlatives, obsesses over "symbols" in a way that has nothing to do with actual art (metaphysical poets notwithstanding) and gathers fawning students literally at his feet.

The book does have recreations of websites, newspaper clippings, photographs and other such things that perhaps are intended to make the story more "real".  To me they're more a distraction - hey the designer really did peg the look of Time's website.  And of course rather than think that's a photograph of the actual daughter in the story I can't help but wonder who the model is?  A friend of the author?  Or just somebody the photographer hired?  It doesn't help that the tone is just a bit off.  There's a mention of a film being "condemned" by the MPAA which is something that doesn't happen.  (Unless you want to argue that the ratings system does that.)  At another point is a DVD that can't be copied which of course has never existed.  This whole attempt to make Cordova as a shadowy director of barely seen films doesn't ring true.  Such films would have been torrented in an instant.  There are in fact films that are very difficult to see but mostly it's because these have very limited audiences unlike Cordova's aggressive fan base.

By the time Night Film starts to wrap up the story it goes through several endings - not conflicting ones but just like it won't stop.  Imagine a romance where after two hours you watch the couple walk hand-in-hand off into the sunset....and then see them wake up the next morning to figure out something about their mutual friends before a fade out....and then they head off to lunch....  You get the idea.  It's annoying, though, that when the book gets to the final final end Pessl pulls a trick.  Most of the book is overly detailed about movements and talks but now the narrator gets coy and stops before revealing anything else. The end.  It's not mysterious or ambiguous or artistic - it's just a flat-out cheat because it's so unlike the rest of the book.  (Though to be fair much of this last sequence reads like another hallucination and I wouldn't be surprised that it was all written well after the book was completed as an afterthought.)