Voltaire Rocks La Maison

I don't think much about Voltaire usually. After an unhappy encounter with Candide in a high school French class for which I was inadequately prepared, I've been content to consign him to the same category one consigns any other elder: well-meaning, no doubt, and perhaps brilliant in his own outdated way, but not relevant. Voltaire, of course, wouldn't have seen himself this way, judging by a book review by Adam Gopnik in the March 7th, 2006 issue of The New Yorker. To explain why Voltaire would have begun his campaigns for human rights at all, Gopnik writes of him that, "there is the kind of egotism so vast and so pleased with itself that it includes other people as an extension of itself. Voltaire felt so much for other people because he felt so much for himself; everything happened to him because he was the only reasonable subject of everything that happened. By inflating his ego to immense proportions, he made it a shelter for the helpless."

And Gopnik makes a convincing case that Voltaire was indeed important, not just because he was one of the first campaigners for human rights, but because he refused to countenance religious violence, and with it, he also refused faith itself.

If you've read Candide, you know that Voltaire pokes merciless fun at Leibniz' idea that "the world is optimally designed," and that suffering is part of "some universal balance." Gopnik writes, "Voltaire's target throughout Candide is not optimism in the sense of fatuous cheerfulness but optimism in the sense of optimal thinking: the kind of bland reassurance that explains pain with reference to a larger plan or history." Generally speaking, Gopnik asserts that we no longer believe that natural disasters are part of a benevolent universe, as people did in Voltaire's time. (As an aside, I think Gopnik is wrong in this: after Hurricane Katrina, I was startled to hear more than one educated colleague refer to it in a way that made it clear they thought of Katrina as divine retribution for the sins of New Orleans. I wondered what would happen if they'd said that to anyone in Mississippi whose homes and livelihoods were also destroyed.)

"But almost all of us still do believe, stubbornly, in some kind of optimal thinking. We believe, vaguely or explicitly, that liberal democracy, with all its faults, is the best of all possible political systems, that globalization, with all its injustices, is the best of all possible futures, and even that the American way is the best of all possible ways ... We are all optimalists of this kind, perhaps reinforced by the doctrines of evolutionary psychology ... or by faith in an inevitable evolving 'future of freedom.' Attacks on these beliefs -- September 11th was the most acute -- shake us up the way eighteenth-century people were shaken by the Lisbon earthquake. The realization that all may not be tending toward the best, that religious fanaticism and tribal intolerance could prevail over liberal meiliorism, is the earthquake of our time.

"Voltaire's radicalism, then and now, lies not in his refutation of optimism but in his refusal of belief. Candide is not really, or entirely, a satire on optimism. It is an attack on organized religion."

I think Gopnik is correct that most Americans share a vague, benign belief that everything is getting better in small ways, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it isn't - famine persists, genocide proliferates, we are doing rapid damage to the environment, and the poor in this country are getting poorer. And many people believe that "things happen for a reason," and will say so regularly. Or they'll say that "God doesn't send you anything you can't handle." To both of which I say, Horse-hockey! Yes, I know that it can feel that the course of one's life seems, in retrospect, to make more sense than it did at the time one was living it; and yes, human beings are capable of great endurance and change to meet enormous personal, physical, and psychological challenges. But try telling someone who survived the Rwandan genocide that "things happen for a reason." Try telling that to the next homeless people you meet and see if they agree. Or consider telling someone who was brutally raped and maimed as a child that "God doesn't send you anything you can't handle." Assuming there is a God, it's clear He's got no qualms about sending people trouble they can't handle. People break all the time.

I have no quarrel with spirituality or people of faith. But lately it's become clear to me that this meliorist view is based on very sloppy thinking. The flip side of what we usually mean when we say that "things happen for a reason" is this: if you're suffering, you better suck it up because it's what's on the menu. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't: if you're suffering at the hands of other people or if your suffering is due to our collective short-sightedness and stupidity, then the platitudes don't cut it. No one should have to suffer, or suffer evil, and be told to simmer down because the Big Guy Upstairs has got it all under control.

But to get back to Voltaire, is it possible that his denial of faith brought the horrors of the Nazi death camps and the like upon us? No, says Gopnik:

"Of course, in the light of later horrors, the horror that Voltaire wanted to crush doesn't seem a horror at all ... His enemies were local lynch mobs, not centralized terror. A Nazi or Soviet regime would have crushed him, horribly, and everyone else with him. The argument has even been made that Voltaire's rejection of moral order and God helped lead to the later horrors. But unless one believes, against all the evidence, that faith in God keeps one from cruelty, this is a bum rap. There are absolutist and totalitarian elements in the Enlightenment, of the kind that Burke and Berlin alike opposed: the desire to rip up the calendar of the past and start over implies murdering whoever isn't with the program. This wasn't Voltaire's spirit by a mile."

And finally:

"It is still bracing, at a time when the extreme deference we pay to faith has made any attack on religious beliefs unacceptable, to hear Voltaire on Jesuits and Muslims alike -- to hear him howl with indignation at the madness and malignance of religion -- and to be reminded that that free-thinking, which inspired Twain and Mencken, has almost vanished from our world."

Yes.

The Literary (Un)Scene

Literary innovation isn't dead yet -- because it's undead, I guess. In the September issue of LOCUS, I was fascinated to read about author Laurell K. Hamilton, whose new book, Danse Macabre, is an instant hardcover bestseller. Seems she's got 6 million copies of her work in print (with no help from an Espresso Book Machine) because she helped create a new subgenre: paranormal romance. Evidently, "almost 20% of romance novels sold in 2005 had some paranormal content." Who'da thunk?

Things No Author Wants to Hear

In a blurb in the September 2006 LOCUS, I found a blurb describing the ongoing merger of the British bookselling chains Waterstone's & Ottaker's. Apparently, about 30% of Ottaker's stock has to be "sold, pulped, or returned during the process of converting the stores." Here's the revealingly descriptive language Waterstone's PR flak used:

"[A]bout 30% of the stock needs improving; it can be broken down as roughly 5% that is dead and of no use to anyone, 10-15% that is dead range but is still saleable and the balance as excess copy depth."

My heart goes out to those authors whose work is "dead and of no use to anyone," but I'm also curious about how something can be "dead range" but "still saleable." Many of my favorite authors would probably be described as the reverse: unsaleable, but not dead range.

Grand Prize: Best Dream Involving Robert Hughes and a Sea Plane

In a recent memoir, Robert Hughes, former art critic for Time magazine, writes about the coma-delirium he was in after a horrifying head-on crash in Australia in 1999. He was in the coma for five-and-a-half weeks, in the care of an intensive care unit. Most of the time, he was unaware of his visitors, or unable to apprehend them accurately; he hallucinated, and spent many hours in pain and dread. Two lighter moments:

"At a certain point, Cathy reported, I started signalling wildly, miming the act of writing. Pencil and paper were brought, and with a shaking left hand I managed to write a sentence in Spanish -- a language that neither Cathy nor any of the doctors and nurses understood. Eventually a Filipino wardsman was found. 'I am dissatisfied with the accommodations,' my note read, rather formally. 'Please call a taxi and take me to a good hotel.'"

Later, after a dream in which he believed he was crewing a "Torres Strait pearling lugger," he imagined he was captured by Chinese pirates and then he found his means of escape.

"It was a World War II flying boat: the high-wing, twin-engine PBY Catalina, with its bony Art Deco lines and its twin gunners' blisters on the fuselage -- to me, one of the most elegant aircraft ever designed ... I was on board her ... before I quite realized that she was empty, rocking on the deep-water swells. But she was not the Catalina of my childhood. She was tattered and sooty, her skin faded and laced with dried-out fish guts. Her fabric was torn. Odd designs and images had been painted on her: stones, a fish, a falling parachutist, a ladder-back chair. Who had done this? Who but the artist I most admired among all the living -- my dear, benign friend of twenty-five years, Bob Rauschenberg.

"Inside, the Catalina -- whose interior spaces lengthened irrationally into tunnels and broadened into halls as I gingerly explored it -- was a small Rauschenberg museum, full of combines, cardboard assemblages, cast-off truck tires and even a stuffed goat, cousin of the emblematic beast from Bob's great signature piece of 1955, Monogram. It became clear to me that my task would be to fly the Catalina and its contents from island to island around the Pacific, a small traveling retrospective, landing in lagoons, mooring at rickety jetties, semaphoring the message of American art from the second half of the twentieth century to peoples who had no reason to give a damn about it."

--Things I Didn't Know, by Robert Hughes, pp. 18 & 19.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who's the Fairest Pachyderm of them All?

Fascinating article in the Washington Post about a recent experiment to measure the extent of consciousness in elephants:

Researchers over the years have provided body-size mirrors to hundreds of animals in zoos and other habitats. Almost always, the animals act as though the image they see is of another.

"Most animals seem incapable of learning that their behavior is the source of the behavior in the mirror," Gallup said. "They are incapable of deciphering that dualism."

By contrast, human babies get it by age 2, as do adult chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans.

The elephants passed the test. Check out the Post link for video.

That's My Kind of Award

Just found about the Jack Trevor Story Memorial Cup, a literary prize I could really get behind:

"The prize, not given every year, is awarded for a work of fiction or body of work which, in the opinion of the committee, best celebrates the spirit of author Jack Trevor Story, who died in [1991]. In addition to the cup, the award includes a $1,000 prize, with the stipulation that the money must be spent within a week to a fortnight, with nothing to show for it at the end. "

--LOCUS, September 2006, p. 78.

How to Have a Million Copies in Print without a Publisher

"In April 2006, On Demand books launched a beta version of their new Espresso Book Machine, which can print a paperback book, complete with laminated color cover, in minutes. The device -- a print-on-demand vending machine -- looks like a large copier, and can produce 15-20 paperbacks per hour. It was tested at the World Bank InfoShop in Washington DC, with other installations planned at the New York Public Library and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. Commercial production is expected to begin later this year, and the creators hope the machines will someday be ubiquitous, with readers swiping their ATM cards and printing any of thousands of digitized titles."

--from LOCUS, September 2006, p. 77

What Knowledge Workers Don't Know

Check out this eloquent piece in The New Atlantis that decries the move to eliminate shop class from American secondary schools -- and, indeed, an apparent trend away from educating ourselves in how things work. Don't buy it? Then consider this:

"While manufacturing jobs have certainly left our shores to a disturbing degree, the manual trades have not. If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help. Because they are in China."

Working as I do with juvenile delinquents, I can attest to the fact that many of them are not auditory or visual learners. They learn with their hands: by doing. They'd do great at manual trades, but this opportunity to engage their minds (and no matter what anyone says, manual labor is also mental) and to make a good living is increasingly denied them.

Just Water for Me, Thanks

"The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much."

-Sarah Vowell , in The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Upon Finding Oneself in a Friend's Novel: One Approach

Anthony Powell, the Welsh author of the 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time, appeared in a his friend John Heygate's novel, Talking Picture, thinly disguised as a Welsh writer named "Rightlaw." Here's an excerpt from Powell's review of the book as quoted in Michael Barber's Anthony Powell: a Life (2004):

There will be few readers who do not succumb to Rightlaw's charm, even though he appears for a few pages only. His considered, brusque remarks about himself, followed up by equally brusque questions about other people, make us feel at once that we have been privileged to meet a really delightful person, intelligent, sensitive and reserved. If there were more Rightlaws about, the world would be a pleasant place to live in; if there were more characters like Rightlaw in literature, novels would be a joy to read.

Aslan: the Un-Cola - Er, I mean Un-Christian

Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, puts his finger on the very thing that no doubt troubles every fifth-grader reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for the first time: "Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol ... is, after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter's son -- not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure."

He goes on:

"[A] central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible -- a donkey who reemerges, to the shock even of his disciplies and devotees, as the king of all creation -- now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life a the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth."

--From "Prisoner of Narnia: How C.S. Lewis Escaped," by Adam Gopnik, from The New Yorker, November 21, 2005, p. 92.

Travels in Absurdistan

Now that the summer issue of The King's English is out, I've been trying to catch up with all the submissions that have come in -- not a job, by the way, that I do alone. (Thanks Bill, Mark -- and of course to the Czarina.) One thing I never see enough of is submissions from outside the United States. We get a decent number from India, and we've certainly received one or two from many other countries, but nothing like the volume we need in order to have a reasonable chance of getting top-notch work.

Fortunately, you don't have to look far to satisfy my desire for writing from elsewhere. Check out Christopher Hitchens' review of an anthology of recent writing from Iran. If you're not quite ready to embrace other cultures, maybe you'd prefer this cranky (as in, crank alert) review examining a legitimate question: why do we romanticize "primitive" people as peaceful, living in harmony with the land, etc., when in fact they were and are just as contentious, warlike, and rapacious as contemporary western culture?

Meanwhile, in completely unrelated news, the world's biggest fusion reactor -- that's right, fusion, not fission -- is being built right now in France. Check out what one of the physicists says about it: "We think it's going to work. We have to, or the politicians wouldn't give us the money."

Armageddon: the Flowchart

Just in case you were wondering how Armageddon would play out in Britain, here's the flowchart.

Gauss Again

Remember that story about Gauss, the brilliant 18th-century mathematician? As a schoolboy, he showed up his teacher when he tried to give the class a make-work problem involving adding up all the numbers from 1 to 100, and Gauss solved it in just a few moments? I do. I first heard it somewhere in elementary school, and it made me feel incredibly inadequate. (I knew I'd never make it to junior high school.)

Turns out, however,that the story's a very old urban legend. Brian Hayes, writing in American Scientist Online, has collected over 100 examples of the story in eight languages. According to Hayes, the earliest account of the story, though able to claim Gauss himself as its source, was written long after the fact and does not specify what arithmetic problem was assigned to the class. In other words, the anecdote simply says Gauss solved an unnamed problem very quickly. It was later authors who inserted the detail about the problem being to add up a series of numbers from 1 - 100. Hayes' account of what he's learned about the history of the story and its evolution is worth reading; more interesting still is his point that the other students -- the putative dunces who couldn't see a shortcut to adding up a series of integers -- would have found lesser shortcuts of their own if they actually tried adding up all those numbers, because they would've seen obvious patterns. As he writes,

Let me invite you to take a sheet of paper and actually try adding the numbers from 1 to 100.

Finished? Already?

All right, all right, no need to show it to me. So you've guessed the next part of what Hayes says:

On a small slate or a sheet of paper, it's difficult to write 100 numbers in a column, and so students would likely break the task down into subproblems. Suppose you start by adding the numbers from 1 to 10, for a sum of 55. Then the sum of 11 through 20 is 155, and 21 through 30 yields 255. Again, how far would you continue before spotting the trend?

Which brings us to Hayes' real point:

On first hearing this fable, most students surely want to imagine themselves in the role of Gauss. Sooner or later, however, most of us discover we are one of the less-distinguished classmates; if we eventually get the right answer, it's by hard work rather than native genius. I would hope that the story could be told in a way that encourages those students to keep going. And perhaps it can be balanced by other stories showing there's a place in mathematics for more than one kind of mind.

... and in many other fields as well.

Got it in One, I'd Say

From an obituary for Dr. Philip Rieff:

"Dr. Rieff argued that traditionally the primary function of culture was to integrate individuals into a larger corporate body. He showed how art and literature weren't just aesthetic pursuits but tools to teach people morality. To see Hamlet was as much an object lesson about duty as a leisure activity.

In modernity, Dr. Rieff wrote, this has been supplanted by the idea that culture is there merely for our gratification. This, he said, teaches that we have no ultimate goals or a higher good, except an obsession to maximize individual advantage and pleasure."

The War on Everything

Notice how we seem lately besieged -- at least in popular discourse -- with large, global-scale threats to our well-being? Terrorism, global warming, overpopulation, bird flu, vanishing oil and natural resources ... each can lead to massive loss of human life, destabilization of our society, and the end of life as we know it. Without disputing that each of these has the potential to be every bit as bad as we can imagine, if not worse, it's an interesting phenomenon, sociologically speaking. Why, at this juncture in our history, are we fixated on large, almost insoluble threats? (And for the literal-minded among you, yes, I've heard all about Al Gore's new movie on global warming, and I think I remember hearing something about 9/11, too.)

Frank Furedi at Spiked points out that when we talk about these threats and what to do about them, we now use, almost exclusively, rhetoric about our "security" to do so. Everything -- overpopulation, bird flu, and so on -- is made to fit under the security rubric, implying that these problems require military or security solutions, rather than technical or political solutions, or adaptive changes. That our discourse has become so warped by "security" is to some degree a reflection of the current administration's insistence on its importance, and the diversion of funding to "homeland" security (does no one else feel any authoritarian chill when they hear that phrase?). But it's also a fascinating case study in how dominated our society is, right now, by fear -- and, I suspect, by fear of massive social change brought on by globalization and the speed at which technology is changing our lives. This is not to say that the threats being waved in our faces aren't real, but the narrow way in which we conceive of them -- strictly through the lens of security -- reveals how limited our ability to deal with them really is.

Who Wants a Retired Harry Potter?

Rumors that J.K. Rowling may kill off Harry Potter in the last book of her series have stirred up, so I gather, some indignation and disbelief among her fans. Charles McGrath, writing in The New York Times, has a good point to make about this:

Would we even remember Little Nell if she hadn't died in such spectacularly mawkish fashion? Would we prefer that Emma Bovary didn't swallow the poison and instead became a clochard, cadging francs at the agricultural fair? And do we really want to contemplate Harry, now bald and grizzled, the lightning-shaped scar faded into an age spot, retired from magic and, pint in hand, prattling on about old quidditch matches? Surely it makes more sense to employ the other kind of magic, and go back to Volume 1 and start over.

This is, of course, the sort of heartlessly clinical thing that only a critic could seriously propose. If Dickens or Flaubert were writing today, they would've found a way to revive their characters. ---No, scratch that. Dickens wouldn't have bothered with writing novels if he were alive today; he'd have gone straight to scripts, and even now be hard at work on An Even Bleaker House. Flaubert, well ... he'd probably be unpublished.

Svidrigailov Circa 1977

Philip K. Dick must've been thinking about Dostoyevsky when he wrote this exquisite image:

"Her heart, Bob Arctor reflected, was an empty kitchen: floor tile and water pipes and a drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces, and one abandoned glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about."

It comes from his 1977 book, A Scanner Darkly -- the entire text of which, incidentally, you can find online (no doubt illegally), though I ran across the quote on page 94 of the 1991 Vintage edition.

Now compare it to Svidrigailov's chilling vision of the afterlife in Crime in Punishment:

"Eternity [says Svidrigailov to Raskolnikov] is always presented to us as an idea which it is impossible to grasp, something enormous, enormous! But why should it necessarily be enormous? Imagine, instead, that it will be one little room, something like a bath-house in the country, black with soot, with spiders in every corner, and that that is the whole of eternity. I sometimes imagine it like that, you know."

--Feodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Jessie Coulson, (W. W. Norton & Co., (c) 1975), pp. 244-245. (Compare to the Constance Garnett translation.)

True, Dostoevsky and Dick are talking about different things -- the fate of the soul in the afterlife vs. the state of a particular person's soul in this one. But one has to allow for this, I think, since their different concerns exemplify the historical trajectory of literature's concerns in miniature. What both images have in common is an absolute terror of the mundane; the echo is remarkable. (I always thought Svidrigailov had it about right -- another instance, as in Milton, where the bad guy [Satan, the nihilist Svidrigailov] is so pungent and interesting that the good guys can't compete.)

Don't bother with reading Scanner, by the way. It's flabby and meandering, much like conversation with an addict, Dick announcing his insights into drug culture and the blurred roles of dopers and cops solemnly, without the surprising veer of his usual narratives. I much prefer Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Man in the High Castle, and Dr. Bloodmoney (which really has nothing at all to do with Dr. Strangelove, except the title). Even his slighter novels usually have an element of surprise, a spark missing from Scanner's leaden, misogynistic narrative. I've just shared with you its brightest moment; now go and read something else.

Why We Read Fiction & the Nietzche Diet

Who's more generous, women or men? Regardless, they certainly have different tastes in reading, according to a piece in Reason, which summarizes a recent British survey of each sex's favorite novels ever. (Where women's tastes are varied, men's choices, interestingly, tend to center around only four books by Camus, Vonnegut, Salinger, and Marquez.) Apparently, there's also an interesting theory (supposedly new) about why people read fiction, based on cognitive theory: essentially, it gives us practice doing something we like to do anyway, which is figure out what other people are thinking and why they do what they do. Does this mean that women spend more time thinking about others than men do?

Bonus reading tip: Friedrich Nietzche's new diet book.

Wish I Could Dance Like That

"Fred Astaire, whatever he may do in whatever picture he is in, has the beat, the swing, the debonair and damn-your-eyes violence of rhythm, all the gay contradiction and irresponsibility, of the best thing this country can contribute to musical history, which is the best American jazz."

--Otis Ferguson, film critic at The New Republic 1936-1942, quoted in a review by Clive James of Philip Lopate's encyclopedic collection of film criticism. James admires the placement of the word "violence," but this seems wrong to me -- that "damn-your-eyes" has been ringing in my ears all week.