The other day I saw a hipster-type guy driving a Mini Cooper with a big
Route 66 bumper sticker on it. I wanted to stop him and ask, "Did they
let you drive on Route 66 with that car and those glasses? I thought you had to ride a Harley or drive an RV or William Least Heat-Moon would call the state police."
Nicholas Howe precisely identifies the phony authenticity of those off-the-beaten-track travelogues that shame us into believing we're cultural traitors for stopping at a rest area Burger King. Howe says the genre as exemplified by Heat-Moon's Blue Highways (1982) is based on a misreading of late regionalist writers such as Edwin Arlington Robinson and Sherwood Anderson. Least-Moon saw in their novels the last vestiges of the real America, while those writers saw the same small towns as pockets of drabness.
Howe continues,
I think about this sometimes when I’m drinking coffee in a fast-food place along an interstate. Usually, I’ve driven too far that day and need to slow down; the discipline of hot coffee is that it takes more time than a cold drink. I like chain places because they clean the toilets and keep the place anonymous. They remind me that the most enviable of travelers—adaptable and graceful medievals like Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo—stuck to the main roads, the caravan routes, the pilgrimage ways. On the beaten track, they found what they needed: the exchange of goods, the ebb and flow of human beings moving about for all imaginable reasons, confirmation that life lies in motion and transfer. They knew that routes, like places, have their stories.
The reality of rural America today is that a good portion of its residents work in fast food franchises, along with national retail chains. In most of America the blue of the highways is Wal-Mart blue mixed with the Golden Arches yellow.
John Dugdale traces the history of the campus novel, which is pretty short. It had a brief flowering in the US, then again in England as US-styled colleges became popular. Now he says the campus novel is dead, even though writers are still trying to mine their immediate surroundings for the stuff of fiction.
The cut-off communities that writers love to observe are hard to find in the interconnected contemporary world, and they're otherwise usually forced to visit the past (the Tudor court, the monastery, the long-ago country house) to satisfy such cravings. Also not to be overlooked is their collective reluctance to leave any experience not translated into fiction, whether it's the almost universal experience of being a student or the now widely shared one of teaching literature or creative writing.
Looking over the most recent set of campus novels, Dugdake suggests the genre has simply exhausted itself. I wonder if the decline of the campus novel is a symptom not of bad writing so much as a decline of a whole experience of the humanities on campus. The intellectual foppishness lampooned in so many campus novels has died out, killed off by the relentless spread of empiricism in much the same way as eighteenth-century philosophical eccentricity was pushed out by nineteenth-century Utilitarianism. There's no way we could laugh at Timofey Pavlovich Pnin today.
Alexander Nazaryan warms to the idea that Vladimir Nabokov was deeply political, even though you have to look closely at his writings to see it. Nazaryan is pursuaded by his own reading of the early Nabokov play, The Tragedy of Mister Morn, and by Andrea Pitzer's biography, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. Nazaran writes,
history—if not politics—was never far from Nabokov’s considerations. Nabokov was, for example, an ardent enemy of anti-Semitism and a supporter of civil rights in the American South. (“Admirable work you are accomplishing,” he once telegrammed to LBJ, who had largely staked his reputation on the Civil Rights Act.) Pitzer does not really discuss Nabokov’s plays and their political content, but she capably reconstructs the young Nabokov’s mindset at the time he wrote Morn. The elder Nabokov was being hailed as “a bright paladin of freedom” in obituaries. And yet the pull of filial duty only extended so far. “He admired his father’s ideals,” Pitzer writes, “but unlike V.D. Nabokov, he stood apart from the fray.” Morn shows that he was not immune to the forces that had so dramatically acted upon his father, though his own political convictions would thrive within the rococo folds of his language.
Here's a travel guide to London based on the exploits of the employees of Blue Ant, William Gibson's imaginary advertising agency from his novels Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History. Mostly the idea is that you'll be a flâneur collecting impressions and stuff.
Blue Ant is the high-speed, low-drag, advertising agency with a penchant for sending
Gibson’s protagonists off around the world cool-hunting for various neat MacGuffins
like viral filmmakers, secret jeans brands and mysterious cargo containers. In other words, the kind of specialist contracting role you’re unlikely to find advertised on Monster.com anytime soon.
In the summer of 1816 Percy Bysshe Shelley hiked to Mont Blanc in the Swiss Alps and began jotting down notes. He was trying to understand what he was seeing--not just a mountain, but Mont Blanc, a craggy peak in the most famous mountain range in Europe. As Carol Rumens puts it, the poet was embarking on "a journey through philosophical and scientific concepts that had yet to find a modern vocabulary." Rumens sees the poem as a record of Shelley's confrontation with the possibility that the mountain may mean nothing at all, that the perceiving imagination may be helpless before the sublimity of the mountain--Kant's terrifying sublime without the pleasure of the entirely new idea that makes the sublime comprehensible.
Shelley was struggling with an aesthetic question: how do we see something as individual within a larger conceptual framework? For a surveyor Mont Blanc is just another point on a map. A resident of a nearby village would know every detail of the mountain, but he or she would be unlikely to grant the mountain any higher meaning.
Shelley was trying to do two things at the same time: See it as a unique thing and as an exemplar of a larger idea. In other words, he was trying to see Mont Blanc aesthetically, as a balance between the concrete and the abstract, between object and idea. He recorded his close observations in his poem "Mont Blanc," but he never just lists the features of the mountain. He also tries to record his own poetic experience.
Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears--still, snowy, and serene;
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
And wind among the accumulated steeps;
A desert peopled by the storms alone,
Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,
And the wolf tracks her there--how hideously
Its shapes are heap'd around!
In the poem's concluding lines, he oscillates between two opposing propositions. First that Mont Blanc is a work of art, an embodied idea.
The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
The second is more terrifying than the initial glimpse of the peak: that the mountain may mean nothing at all.
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
So we finally know what happened to Richard III. After he lost the Battle of Bosworth Field, he was stripped of his armor, beaten, then buried under a parking lot. According to tradition, this was exactly as he deserved. History, as the Tudors came to write it anyway, saw him as a high-strung, shrill agent of evil from birth until death. It was recorded by Thomas More, England's most illustrious humanist, that his birth had been a difficult one. Richard emerged from his mother, the Duchess of York, baring teeth. He seemed ready for battle from his first moment of existence. As it turned out, he was the last English king to die in battle--that's 528 years without losing a monarch on the battlefield, an impressive achievement, all things considered.
Early reviews of his reign weren't positive. Shakespeare dismissed him as "That bottled spider, that foul bunch-backed toad." The skeleton unearthed in Leicester confirms Richard had a crooked back. Shakespeare knew that long ago. Richard was “Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world scarce half made up.” Monstrous in form and ambition, even Shakespeare grants him some appeal. In Richard III the hunchback king won over Lady Anne, despite murdering her husband and father-in-law.
However, as Walter Benjamin remarked in "Frank Kafka," "unfinished" creatures have one foot in nature, the other in culture. They are harbingers of mythic violence--myth being Benjamin's loose term for natural history. Richard III's death ended the War of the Roses, but it did not end the violence surrounding royal succession. The Tudors were hardly peaceable people and much blood was shed in their dynastic squabbles. Richard's antagonist Thomas More was beheaded by Henry VIII, who didn't stop there. The War of the Roses was a playground spat compared to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the seventeenth century.
For this edition of Fun Friday, a novel about drug addicts in India, an exhibit on digital fabrication, a digital Shakespeare, a chance to revisit the work of a major American architect, and Martha Stewart.
Boredom seems like an eternal state, but that’s the nature of boredom. It has no beginning or end, just pure middle. In fact, boredom has a history, and it hasn’t always been the same. The ancients were familiar with boredom, but it was an unusual state of mind not generally encountered in daily life. Plutarch reports the Greek general Pyrrhus complained he was bored in retirement. The Roman philosopher Seneca described boredom as a kind of nausea. The Christian tradition declared chronic boredom (acedia) a sin. The Renaissance assumed a more laid-back attitude, likening boredom to melancholia brought about by studying of math and sciences too much. Eighteenth-century Quakers revived the notion of boredom as sin, constructing a prison in Philadelphia in which inmates were kept in isolation at all hours of the day. Boredom was supposed to drive miscreants to God. Mostly it drove them deeper into deviance.
Boredom became an existential condition in the industrial age. Dickens, who was probably never bored, is credited with the first published instance of the word “boredom,” which he worked into Bleak House (1852), along with a few hundred thousand other words. During his research for the Arcades Project Walter Benjamin found that boredom emerged as a social condition in the 1840s. “France is bored,” announced Lamartine in 1839. In Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina boredom is something akin to depression. Nineteenth-century boredom is a social condition in which social relations are stuck in place while technology advances. “We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for,” Benjamin writes. The upper classes embrace boredom because it means history has stood still, freezing their place in the social hierarchy. The working classes are bored because they can’t stop working; for them, history never changes. According to Benjamin, the gambler, the drug addict, and the flâneur are best able to resist boredom because they choose their own fates. “The more life is regulated administratively, the more people must learn waiting,” Benjamin writes in the Arcades Project. “Games of chance have the great attraction of making people free from waiting.”
The gambler is just killing time. The flâneur, on the other hand, “charges time like a battery” by continually attending to his immediate surroundings. The flâneur sees through the false novelty of fashion in one of its most famous homes. “Monotony is nourished by the new,” Benjamin observes. Modern history itself is periodically jolted by uprisings only to settle back into the status quo. The revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 erupted in the name of universal democracy and justice, only to end in the reconsolidation of special interests and upper class control, leaving social relations unchanged.
Nevertheless, Benjamin held out hope that boredom was a portal to bigger and better things. When you are bored you will entertain any notion just to escape boredom. Benjamin described boredom as “the threshold of great deeds.” When we’re bored, we’re ready for anything.
This receptivity to the genuinely new—a condition important to Benjamin even if he never adequately distinguishes it from the false lures of fashion and novelty—may have passed into history. The culture industry has trained us to passively entertained by constant distraction. In place of Benjamin’s metaphor of the dreaming collective waiting to be disturbed, we now think of the human condition as one of a vessel that needs to be filled. Distraction is like a drug we need to remain at the same level of satisfaction. Maybe a new set of social relations will be declared in a text message or on Twitter. We can only wait, listlessly, to find out.
Mention the Latin American novel and most likely someone will picture some form of regional exotica. While magic realism can be great in the proper hands (Gabriel García Márquez), it can also be trite and formulaic in the wrong ones (Isabel Allende).
But there's another type of Latin American novel that starts with Jorge Luis Borges and continues through Julio Cortázar and Roberto Bolaño. This strain of fiction derives from the European modernism of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Günter Grass, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Sometimes, as in Bolaño's work, the setting is Europe, usually involving Latin Americans in temporary exile there.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez perfectly captures one of the salient qualities of this type of Latin American novel in his discussion of Andrés Neuman's Traveler of the Century. Gabriel Vásquez writes,
In the end, and despite (or because of) its European obsessions,Traveller of the Century belongs in the quintessentially Latin American genre of the "total novel": the all-encompassing narrative bent on exploring every theme, every social milieu, every emotional possibility. I stress this because it would be both easy and wrong to look at Neuman's book in the context of "globalised fiction" – novels desperate for acceptance by everyone that end up talking about no one. No: Neuman's novel is solidly inscribed in the Argentinian tradition, advocated by Borges in a famous essay, of not being recognisably Argentinian.
Neuman's novel is an example of an international style in Latin American fiction. This style isn't about a uniquely Latin American reality, as in magic realism, but about Latin Americans in world space.
It's been busy here in One-Way Street land. I spent a blazing hot Memorial Day weekend (Fourth of July on Memorial Day, as a weatherman someplace said) camping with the family--we made it through one of two planned nights. That blast of summer was followed by a forty-degree plunge in temperature, capped off with a miserable walk across the Loop this morning in a driving rain. I did manage to pause at Wolf Point long enough to wonder, again, how the Kennedys are going to cram three buildings into that site.
These past few weeks I've been on the front lines of the monetization of content struggle faced by virtually every media outlet on the Web. But I have been keeping an eye out for interesting articles that are worth reading more in depth.
First up this week is an interview with Paul Gyford, the man behind Samuel Pepys blog and Twitter feed. Pepys was a high-ranking government official in London who started keeping a diary in 1660 to record his recovery from intestinal surgery (without anesthetic). He recorded every event big and small until 1669, when he feared he was going blind. He saw some big events: the restoration of King Charles II, both a Great Plague and a Great Fire, along with several hurricanes of spousal fury (he would follow a pretty ankle pretty much anywhere). His approach to government administration and prose style were both modern: efficient and honest. English literature during the 1660s was especially lively and witty, and Pepys' diary is one of the most important literary artifacts from the period--and among the most enjoyable to read.
Another lively chronicler is Gail Collins, the New York Times columnist. Her droll humor seems very Atlantic corridor, but she's coming out with a book-length study of how the Texas approach to conservation and energy policies (basically, turn them over to a guy named "Smokey" to eviscerate them) went national. Collins recounts the time when the nation awaited the output from Dick Cheney's infamous National Energy Policy Development Group.
“We’ll have a strong conservation statement,” the president promised as the world awaited the Cheney energy policy’s arrival. Later that day, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was also asked whether Bush would be calling on Americans to use less energy, and took the opportunity to clarify his boss’s statement a tad. “That’s a big no,” Fleischer said. “The president believes that it’s an American way of life, that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.” God, it seemed, smiled upon the Hummers in his flock. He looked upon the empty room with a burning lightbulb and found it good.
The on-again-off-again New City Reader project is back on. Architectural theorist Kazys Varnelis has decided not only to revive the printed newspaper, but also the old tradition of tacking up an issue on a wall in public space so that anyone can ready it. Varnelis and his team discovered that posting newspapers on a public building in New York City required cost-prohibitive permits. The wooden barriers around construction sites seemed promising until they were threatened by mobsters protecting construction workers, who you would think could protect themselves. Anyway, Varnelis remains committed to supporting the print edition of newspapers as a political object:
Newspapers [. . ] identify you. Reading one telegraphs the political implications of reading in space. When an adult opens one at the breakfast table, it signifies to children that news is important, something one attends to as a citizen. Reading a newspaper is not reading one’s e-mail for pleasure or profit. It is an engagement with the news, a declaration of interest in public matters. It is hardly an accident that reading has universally been a precondition of the right to vote, and that mass democracy could only take hold after mass literacy. Reading a newspaper in public, or even carrying it in public identifies you as a member of a community, often betraying your political affiliation and even, in the case of papers addressing a diaspora, your ethnicity. Newspapers are not just a public matter, common to all, they are a matter of diverse publics, joined by the common experience of reading the paper, an experience reinforced by the appearance of papers in the public realm. Reading a newspaper in public is a provocation, a call to action, to at least bury one’s nose in a newspaper of one’s own.
That's all from me this week. I'm about to hop on a train, where I will read a newspaper, via a paid subscription, on an iPad.
One-Way Street [Einbahnstrasse, 1928] was Walter Benjamin's first effort to break out of the narrow confines of the academy and apply the techniques of literary studies to life as it is currently lived. For Benjamin criticism encompasses the ordinary objects of life, the literary texts of the time, films in current release, and the fleeting concerns of the public sphere. Following Benjamin's lead, this blog is concerned with the political content of the aesthetic and representations of the political in the media. As Benjamin writes in One-Way Street, "He who cannot take sides should keep silent."
. Nazaran writes, 
. Gabriel Vásquez writes,
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