Via Andrew Sullivan (“Death as Metamorphosis”), a previously unpublished interview in which John Updike talks about death in Vladimir Nabokov’s writing and says, “I take dying to be for a lepidopterist like him a kind of entry into immortality, just the way a butterfly on its pin becomes deathless, in a sense, and is preserved.”
I’m not sure whether the reassurance that Updike found in a lepidopterist’s metamorphic rather than terminal vision of death has much of a real basis in Nabokov’s work, but I’ve always found a very different kind of comfort regarding mortality in the writing of the Russian master, especially in this passage from the opening of Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence... But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.
The first time I read this, I realized I’d never feared “the prenatal abyss” in the same way I instinctively dreaded the possibility of permanent extinction after this life. If there is a God, I thought, then the Creator who cared enough to bring me into being out of an eternal and untroubled preexistence might have something equally benign and purposeful in store after I’m dead. And it is Nabokov’s smiling imaginative eloquence, rather than the Gothic spookiness of that empty baby carriage, that has stayed with me.
At Five Books, the Stockholm-based spy novelist Jeremey Duns offers a fascinating survey of some compelling thrillers from the Cold War era, including Yulian Semyonov’s Seventeen Moments of Spring, a Russian genre classic featuring the exploits of Maksim Esaev, a Soviet rival to James Bond; and Noel Behn's “unbelievably bleak” The Kremlin Letter, which was adapted into a 1970 film directed by John Huston, with a cast that included Orson Welles and Max von Sydow.
Over at The Millions site, Garth Risk Hallberg administers a comprehensive whipping of criticism's most notorious pleasure-killing machine, B.R. Myers, author of A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American LIterary Culture and The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. Myers may be a skilled interpreter of North Korean political culture, but he’s a one-man North Korea of literary sensibility. His primary bête noire is anything he deems postmodernist, and he beats on it like Camille Paglia humping a Madonna mannequin. You can discern both the style of his wooden invidiousness and the substance of his captious manifesto in a sample sentence like this one: “I would also rather join the reactionaries than those who want to reduce the printed sentence to an elongated Rorschach blot.” The only thing I regret about Hallberg’s counterstrike is his pinning it largely on a defense of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom against the perfidy of Myers’ recent review in the Atlantic; you don’t have to love the Franzen to have the Myers make your skin crawl. It's not really about the targets that Myers chooses (Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLilo, Denis Johnson, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer), the narrow shelf of writers he's admired (John le Carré, and no one else I can recall at the moment), or the crabbed virtues he dimly champions. His disapprobation and praise amount to the same thing, a vivid instance of the malady that Samuel Johnson called “the general conspiracy against contemporary merit.”
Photograph of B.R. Myers courtesy of Seoul Rotary Club
Below, Greil Marcus offers a lovingly accurate evocation of the perils of the late Pauline Kael’s deadly-shot frankness. Pauline was incapable of euphemism or subterfuge, even with her dearest friends, when it came to movies, writing, or any other realm of art or shop talk that came under her raptorial critical scrutiny. Marcus, who is promoting his new collection, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010, was interviewed by PopMatters and asked what his ideal dinner date would be:
I’d go to Chez Panisse in Berkeley with Pauline Kael. She’d be cranky and funny and outrageously cutting. The food would be simple, gorgeous, so full of flavor it would stop the conversation. We’d argue about movies, books, she’d tell stories of Berkeley in the ‘40s and ‘50s, we’d argue about our own writing—“I was reading your book, every word seemed to lead to every other, and then there was this thud—what happened? What is that terrible sentence about ‘the catacombs of visible culture’ doing there? “But that was the sentence I was aiming toward all along—” “Your aim was off. Take it out. Believe me, you can live without it.”
As one of her best movie friends told me, “He sounds just like her.”
Pauline’s books (I can’t bear the cool professionalism of referring to her as “Kael”), the early collections (I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) and the compendiums of her movie writing for The New Yorker from 1967 to 1991, have largely disappeared from bookstores since her death in 2001, although older editions are available at Amazon. Her work is long overdue for a serious revival (I’m looking at you, Library of America).
If you have a hankering to hear Pauline’s actual voice, you can’t do better than this paint-blistering, zero-bullshit talk at the University of California, Berkeley on April 26, 1968. It’s just thrilling to think that this badass dynamo in her late 40’s, mowing down sacred cows right and left, had just been hired by The New Yorker — “the first place I’ve ever written for in which I’m totally free and in which I can also make a living.”
(If you’re a New Yorker subscriber, you can read “Kael Talks,” my 1994 interview with Pauline, in the magazine’s archive. It was also included in Conversations with Pauline Kael, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 1996.)
One of the reasons I started this blog was to write about other bloggers, especially Rod Dreher. The Crunchy Con himself, the lovable, hate-able quintessence of the guy with an Internet connection whose charm is that you never know what he’s going to write about next. His conversion to Catholicism. His conversion from Catholicism to Greek Orthodoxy. Gay marriage—that’s a big N.O. Enviro-foodie advocacy—yes! His sister’s heroic struggle with cancer—very moving (really). Quantum physics and healing prayer! Christopher Hitchens and healing prayer! Doubts about Darwin—let’s voice them! Countercultural conservatism— dude! Science and religion—we can be best buds! “Trying to build a case that the global Catholic child abuse scandal was actually caused by hippies” (as the Alicublog put it)—you can’t make this stuff up.
But just as my humble blog is going online, Dreher has disappeared, leaving me with nothing. After moving from Dallas and Beliefnet to Philadelphia and the Templeton Foundation’s Big Questions Online site over the summer, the flowing faucet of Dreher started to sputter. His freewheeling ways and urge to hold forth on hot-button political and culture-war topics had already caused trouble during his final months at Beliefnet, where he proved incapable of honoring his vow to avoid politics and stick to spirituality, philosophy, and other higher things. Although at first Dreher’s new Templeton-hosted Macroculture blog simply picked up where his Dallas/Beliefnet gig left off, something happened. On August 20, Dreher posted this enigmatic message:
Folks, I'm going to suspend comments for the time being, both on this blog and all over the site, pending the outworking of some technical and editorial issues. I apologize for this, and ask for your patience.
UPDATE: I will not be blogging for now. I hope to be blogging again soon. You readers are faithful and important to me, so I ask for your patience during this down time. Please continue to enjoy other content on BQO -- but remember, we're not posting comments at the present time.
Dreher-watchers reported that some of his earlier posts had been deleted, and then, on August 23:
The debut this summer of BQO has been a "soft launch" intended to try out our ideas for the magazine, to see how they work, particularly in relationship to Sir John Templeton's ideals. We are still working on the site, and will be changing some things in response to feedback. With respect to this blog, we are reconsidering a style and format that will be more in tune with Sir John's forward-looking, positive, constructive ways to engage the Big Questions. We hope to fine-tune things to make BQO better for you, our readers. So, please be patient, and thanks for reading.
Since then—silence. Nada. A week ago, I emailed Dreher and Big Questions Online editor Gary Rosen to ask about the hiatus and the status of Macroculture, and I haven’t yet received a reply.
It’s hard not to conclude that Sir John Templeton’s ideals and Dreher’s emotive style have clashed, and that forces within Templeton who cannot stand their new guy’s Dionysian messiness have decided not to spare the Rod. The result is the silencing, voluntary or otherwise, of one of the most widely read bloggers in the country. So what if he’s a little nuts? Free Rod Dreher!
[Update below; all of the Todd Henderson links in the first and second paragraphs are now dead links]
The weekend’s most diverting blog eruption, without a doubt, is the hot-lava reaction to Professor Todd Henderson’s sardonic cri de coeur, “We Are the Super-Rich” about the perceived impoverishment and straightened circumstances he experiences living with his family in Chicago on an income of more than $250,000 a year. (That number is one key to this story’s Darwinian meme fitness, its viral potency, since the Obama administration has pegged $250K as the Mason-Dixon Line of tax and budget policy: below it, the middle class and working poor; above, the target-rich wealthy.) Henderson, a professor of law married to a physician, posted his essay four days ago on a collaborative economics blog called Truth on the Market. Since then, whoa Nelly, we’ve got a flame war—which is our moral equivalent of Class War.
A Sunday morning James Fallows post titled “Mauve Gloves & Madmen, 2010 Version” sent me back to a Michael O’Hare takedown of Henderson's post, “The Whining of the Rich.” O’Hare characterizes “We Are the Super-Rich” as a “truly amazing pasticcio of mendacity, ignorance, and small-minded cupidity.” Fallows, who, with trademark mildness, limits himself to calling the offending post an “unwise confession,” also links to Brad DeLong, piling on. Paul Krugman cracks his Nobel medal on Henderson’s exposed pate here. Memeorandum is aggregating the fray, and Henderson has responded to “the overwhelming negative response” with increasingly embattled weariness here and here. Below many of these various posts are sulphuric comment threads unfurling to the vanishing point, so be my guest. (A DeLong reader named will provided the title for this post.)
Expressions of upscale anxiety, defined by shifting and purely relative notions of affluence, are stringently policed by standards of seemliness and discretion, even in the wake of an economic collapse that wiped out $5 trillion in household net worth. Henderson is guilty, like British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward before him, of saying he wants his life back. But blurting out the wrong thing can be both offensive and illuminating. Henderson has given voice to the gnawing sensation of relative poverty that is imposed on middle-class Americans with overwhelming cultural force, not only by the neighborly pressure to keep up with the Joneses, but by saturation media portraying luxury as normative and attainable. Actual income almost doesn't matter; the greyhound will never catch the rabbit. In movies and television the camera adds 20 pounds of fat to the body and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the net worth of characters whose houses, apartments, furniture, and clothing are ridiculously beyond their real-world means. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to advertise to the rich without broadcasting to the not-quite-rich and further down the scale, and all those surplus eyeballs absorb the flickering message that just a little more will bring within reach those beautiful discretionary things people like me should own.
My own meddling get-richer-quick advice to Professor Henderson is to invest $10,000 in non-luxury travel in the Third World, say, Southern Africa. Perhaps make it a working vacation to support a cause: conservation, agrarian modernization, health care, evangelizing, anything will do. It will subsequently add at least $125,000 per annum to his relative income, and in my experience it does wonders for bursting the most persistent bubble in the American marketplace, the one inside our heads.
[Update: Todd Henderson, in manifest despair over the "firestorm" his original post stoked, has deleted "We Are the Super-Rich" and his two follow-up posts. He has apologized, renounced blogging, and revealed that his wife was appalled by what he had written:
The reason I took the very unusual step of deleting [the posts] is because my wife, who did not approve of my original post and disagrees vehemently with my opinion, did not consent to the publication of personal details about our family. In retrospect, it was a highly effective but incredibly stupid thing to do.
Brad DeLong has re-posted a version of "We Are the Super-Rich" retrieved from Google's cached pages here.]
"The book brims with Mongols, half-crazed Orthodox archpriests, fur seekers, ambassadors of the czar bound for Peking, tea caravans, German scientists, American prospectors, intrepid English nurses, and prisoners and exiles of every kind—from Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the czarina for copying her dresses; to the noble Decembrist revolutionaries of the 1820s; to the young men and women of the People’s Will movement whose fondest hope was to blow up the czar; to those who met still-ungraspable suffering and death in the Siberian camps during Soviet times."
Coming out on October 12. Can't wait.
