Here We Go Again: The First, Last Best Books? The Best List?

Guess what?

Isn’t anyone sick of the ceaseless shit-stream of lists of ‘best’, ‘hottest’, ‘coolest’ ‘781 must- projectile hurled into the ether by an ever growing horde of people with opinions, one of which is that their opinion will be valuable to the rest of the world? Really, how many of these inventories qualify as even useful.

If however you have an interest these predictable journalistic devices the literary website Large Hearted Boy offers an assiduously collected list of lists (which it has been offering annually for eight years)

And, so it was a pleasure and a relief to encounter that literary flower of Cambridge, Katherine Powers’s astute criterion —as in Favorite Books of 2015. In keeping with the spirit of Ms Power’s offering, I canvassed a number of friends and acquaintances for news of their own favorites of 2015*

George Scialabba

One of the great unheralded (except in Cambridge Massachusetts) English speaking public intellectuals.Here’s his website. And here is George’s psychiatric (diagnosis: depression) medical record as published in the Baffler. And of course you will want to read my conversation with George at this very journal.*

 

The Demise of Virtue in a Virtual America by David Bosworth

 

David Bosworth, The Demise of Virtue in a Virtual Age

The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

The Age of Acquiescence by Steve Fraser

Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence

Love Hotel by Jane Unrue

Jane Unrue, Love Hotel

What Kind of Creatures Are We? by Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky, What Kind of Creatures Are We?

*And keep an eye out for a new collection from that guy with the funny Wop name … George Scialabba, I think … called Low Dishonest Decades: Essays and Reviews, 1980-2015, coming in February from Pressed Wafer.

Howard Dinin

If Howard is not a man for all seasons, he certainly is one for many. A skilled photographer, gourmand and cook, he is also a man of many carefully chosen words. But most importantly he is a great and generous friend, advisor and IT consultant. Howard is working on a project ( that I am not at liberty  to discuss) which should I will bring to your attention in the fullness of time.Stay tuned.

I operate on the presumption, long since proven to my satisfaction, that any book worth reading, whatever the subject, is always about something greater than itself—usually falling under the rubric of either cosmology, epistemology, or ontology.

Loathe as I am to admit to reading fiction any longer, accepting the risk of appearing deliberately to be hipper than thou by doing so, the fact is, always admitted sheepishly, that I do read fiction. But I read a great deal of all else of the genera of literary forms. And by literary, I hasten to add, I don’t mean any snot-nosed distinction between what is always someone else’s notion of what is high and what is low; rather it may be what is words alone, or what is words accompanied, like a piece of chamber music, by other sensory instruments, usually sounds and images, but what you will when you come right down to it.

Here’s what amounts to a potpourri of the stack being in descending order from the current date, as it has accumulated. You may conclude that I have read at least some of each, and completed one or another, if not recently, then at least long enough ago that it was time for another intimate re-acquaintance. If the book looks worn or misshapen, it’s for a reason.

I’ve quickly snapped the covers for Brother Birnbaum as I was headed out the door, laden with luggage and food and a sack or two filled with the impedimenta of a gadgeteer/flaneur/photographe on holiday.

The physical books depicted will have to wait for my return, but not a small number are also in residence in e-form on a tablet which rarely leaves my possession.

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa

Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa

Photography by Ian Jeffrey

Photography by Ian Jeffrey

The Other Paris by Luc Sante

The Other Paris by Luc Sante

Two Towns in Provence by MFK Fisher

Two Towns in Provence by MFK Fisher

Portraits by John Berger

Portraits by John Berger

The Difficulty of Being a Dog by Roger Grenier

The Difficulty of Being a Dog by Roger Grenier

Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir by Truman Capote

Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir by Truman Capote

Zone: Selected Poems by Guilluame Apollinaire

Zone: Selected Poems by Guilluame Apollinaire

Submission by Michel Houellebecq

Submission by  Michel Houellebecq

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

FIN

 

Paul Buhle. 

As is frequently the case I became aware of, and filled in, a large gap in my cultural literacy, as I chanced to become aware of Paul Buhle— that happenstance stemming from noting his collaboration with Howard Zinn to create A People’s History of American Empire— a graphic recapitulation of Zinn’s magnum opus.

A People’s History of American Empire by Howard Zinn and Paul Buhle

From that useful discovery I found out that Buhle is a former member of the sixties era radical organization Students for a Democratic Society and a devotee of Marxist and cricket scholar, CLR James. He is the author/editor of nearly thirty books, among them: Images of American Radicalism, Marxism in the United States, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America’s Favorite Movies, The Encyclopedia of the American Left, The Immigrant Left in the United States, The New Left Revisited,Insurgent Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz,From the Lower Eastside to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture.
Che Guevara, a Graphic Biography, Wobblies! A Graphic history of the Industrial Workers of the World Jews and American Comics and Bohemians. Paul was kind enough to take the time to offer some suggestions…

Paul Buhle

Odd Angles of Literary 2015

These are some of the favorites that would otherwise hide themselves under my desk or in the attic. They deserve readers.

Crime Does Not Pay by OR: Dark Horse Books,

Crime Does Not Pay, Volume 4. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, from 2013 first edition. 217pp, color, $49.99.

These are the pleasures of sin, straight out of the middle to later 1940s as War Comics lose their charm and crime comics, with mobsters, molls (in “headlight” tight sweaters) and assorted victims get plugged full of lead thanks to this best seller of the era. Most oddly, publisher Lev Gleason had been a near-communist supporter of the Spanish Civil War’s Abe Lincoln Battalion, publisher of a short-lived slick lefty magazine and of a more successful knockoff of Reader’s Digest. He found his faithful readers in bloodthirsty teenagers. Actually the stories are lively and the art by some of the best, including bizarre figures like Bob Wood, alcoholic and murderer, just like his characters.

La Lucha Drawn and Written by Joe Sack,

La Lucha: the Story of :Lucha Castro and Human Rights in Mexico. Drawn and Written by Joe Sack, edited by Adam Shapiro, with a Preface by Lucha Castro. New York and London: Verso, 2015,96p, $16.95.

A Spanish Association for Human Rights project centering upon a true heroine in the world South of the Border, notably Chihuahua, more like the underworld where violence is a daily occurrence and violence against women. The art is soft-expressionist, suitable to murder and impunity from arrest, “disappearances” with no seeming resolution and heroic efforts at popular resistance. The happy ending promised US authorities by the Calderon government only brings more death and misery. Read, learn, wince.

Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose. Edited by Josh Neufeld and Sari Wilson.

Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose. Edited by Josh Neufeld and Sari Wilson. Indianapolis: Pressgang, 2016, $15?

This is one of the most unusual comics ever to find itself in my mailbox. Neufeld, an erstwhile collaborator with Harvey Pekar and acclaimed comic artist of post-flood New Orleans, joins editorial partner, novelist Sari Wilson, and many artistic-literary partners in trying to push fictional or semi-fictional prose and comic art against each other. A two-pager by Lynda Barry would, alone, make this book worth seeing. Perhaps the remainder is best seen as young people experimenting. I had difficulty following these brief and varied efforts, but appreciate the effort.##

 

Steve Fagin [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Steve Fagin

 

Frankly I believe it should be sufficient to point out that Steve and I have been friends since high school in Chicago (Mather, Class of 1964). And that once a year Steve comes up to Boston from Manhattan and we visit Fenway Park. However, I do feel compelled to note he was a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego. His videos include The Machine That Killed Bad People, Zero Degrees Latitude, Virtual Play, Memorial Day (Observed), The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel and TropiCola which focused on contemporary Cuba. Also, he is the subject of the book Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations With the Videos of Steve Fagin.

Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full edited by Steve Fagin

A Noah’s Ark of 10 2015 favs

Theater

Phoebe Fox, Russell Tovey, Mark Strong, Nicola Walker, and Michael Gould star in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, directed by Ivo van Hove

1) View From the Bridge @ the Lyceum
Van Hove does Miller

a super saturated rendition squeezes blood from a turnip of a play and reminds one that the over wrought , well done, can turn melodrama into great tragedy

A scene from Elevator Repair Service’s The Sound and The Fury

2) The Sound and Fury @ The Public theatre
Elevator Repair Service does Faulkner

Understanding , in certain cases , can be greatly overestimated. Being lost and confused only brings into focus the desperate ,hopeless idiocy of these terminally handicapped Faulkner babbling things .

Sports

1) Anderson defeats Murray 4th round of U.S. Open @ Armstrong Stadium

There is nothing better than the 4th round of the U.S. Open with upwards of 6 matches in a single venue . The intimate Armstrong Stadium with both temperature and humidity in the 90s is ectasy(SUMMER IN THE CITY)

2) Duel in the Sun,

deGrom outpitches Greinke as the first place Mets end Greinke’s 45 + scoreless innings streak and beat the Deserter Dodgers @ CitiField

LOVE,Love, love those pitchers

Movies

Films unlikely to win audience awards@ New York Film Festival

Film festivals have been kinda ruined by the audience award. The point of a festival should not be to pander but to challenge. I hate Sundance, I hate Sundance, I hate Sundance

J’taime Cet obscur objet du désir

!) Guy Madden’s Forbidden Room

2)Apichatpong Weerasethakul ‘s Cemetery of Splendour

Opera

More and less Kentridge

1)Kentridge’s Refuse the Hour at BAM

The first 21st century opera I have liked and liked it AND HOW. If forced to choose I liked the music by Phillip Miller better than the text and ART by Kendridge , but cannot squabble with the overall effect…WOW

2)Berg’s Lulu directed by Kentridge at the Met

Well, as I suspected I thought the Berg music , described by some “clever person “as Schoenberg and Mahler played at the same time, worked less well with the visuals of Kendridge than his spectacular version of Shostokovitch’s brilliant the Nose , but that was some hard act to follow. I’m sure many would squabble with my preference for Shostokovitch over Berg , but I think few would argue that Kentridge’s schtick works better with Shostokovitch than Berg

BOOKS

Sidewalks by Valerie Luselli’

1)Valerie Luselli’s Sidewalks , but not her rave reviewed The Story of My Teeth. I find Story of My Teeth derivative, but perhaps both books are and I just prefer the antecedents to her essays in Sidewalks? Put another way, Sidewalks feels like a book written by an old person, Teeth by someone very young.

The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

2)The Leopard: A Novel by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
I kinda cheated on this because I put it on my list every year and by the by I defy you to tell me a better book movie combo that the di Lampedusa novel and the Visconti movie

Peter Guralnick If you ended up in this way station you would , at the least. be familiar with Guralnick’s seminal two-volume biographical essay on Elvis Presley. But me not being a Presley admirer I didn’t come to Peter’s work until his excellent exposition of Chicago musician Sam Cooke’s (“A Change is Gonna Come”)life in Dream Boogie. I reconnected with Peter in conversatio with him on his latest opus devoted to the life of rock and rill pioneer Sam Philips( Elvis Presley, Howling Wolf, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, BB King and more. Soon to see the light of day will be that conversation…

Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson

Hemingway’s Boat – Paul Hendrickson
The digression (always) rules. Like Tristram Shandy and Footsteps by Richard Holmes, this is to be cherished both for its cunning narrative strategy and for the firm truths that reside at its center.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Lowland – Jhumpa Lahiri
Compact, emotionally and politically expansive, and broadly, tragically humanistic in the choices and resolutions that it tentatively offers.

The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary

The Horse’s Mouth – Joyce Cary
I’m not sure how many times I’ve read this, or seen the movie (written by, and starring, Alec Guinness), but I am savoring it all the more this time more for its Blakeian essence and unabashedly romantic celebration of freedom.

 

The Hollywood Trilogy by Don Carpenter
I had read a bunch of Don Carpenter novels, including The Class of ’49 and his celebrated down-and-out classic, Hard Rain Falling, but nothing prepared me for the rambunctiousness of these three novels. (Well, maybe his posthumously published Friday at Enrico’s…) I guess I should have paid more attention to his biography. I mean, he did write the script for Payday, starring the inimitable Rip Torn as Hank Williams?/Waylon Jennings? the ultimate archetype of a falling star.

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

A God in Ruins – Kate Atkinson
Sprightly, exploratory (better time-travel than The Man in the High Castle) but fundamentally rooted in the human equation, with deeply etched portraits that stay with you forever. Very much like her earlier Life After Life and her wonderful Jackson Brodie detective novels.

Dogs of Winter

by Kem Nunn
Mythic – and real. Great (melo) drama, probably the pinnacle of his surf-noir novels. Just as The Power of the Dog (what’s with all these dogs?) may be Don Winslow’s cartel peak. But in each case there’s so much more.

The Neapolitan Trilogy by Elena Ferrante

The Neapolitan Trilogy – Elena Ferrante
I haven’t gotten to the fourth yet, but I can’t wait. It’s as if the Patterson, New Jersey of William Carlos Williams had been transported to Naples.

Citizen Vince by Jess Walter

Citizen Vince – Jess Walter
Another great novel from a writer who defies categorization. Every one of his books is altogether different – every one is accomplished in its own right. (But start with Beautiful Ruins if you’re looking for sheer delight.)This is a re-read. I can’t believe how much – well, delight – I missed the first time around.

Three Junes by Julia Glass

Three Junes – Julia Glass
This was another re-read, I think prompted by her latest, And the Dark Sacred Night, and leading me back to all of her other interconnected books, with their thoughtful (and likeable) characters and depiction of a familiar and frequently interior world that you can go back and visit again and again.

Inherent Vice by P.T. Anderson

The Master by P.T. Anderson

Inherent Vice and The Master – P.T. Anderson
Like all of his films, great, detailed, and fundamentally uncategorizable literary landscapes. There Will Be Blood? Come on.

Carried Away by Alice Munro

Carried Away – Alice Munro
The tops. I read it every year. Every reading yields new levels of meaning and mystery. I can think of no one who can suggest all the manifold and contradictory dimensions of a world (in a short story!) like Alice Munro.

Richard Hoffman Although I think I was a Facebook friend of Richard’s I did not meet the poet/essayist/college mentor/social activist until we sat together before, during and after attending Professor Jabari Assim’s
surreal court hearing for a preposterous traffic violation (look it up in the Boston area newspapers) in my current hometown of Newton, Massachusetts. As with Peter Guralnick, you can look forward a lengthy unexpurgated conversation between 2 alta kackers (me and Richard). Look out, World.

You fill find here a recent essay by Richard Hoffman.

http://www.assayjournal.com/confronting-our-fears–richard-hoffman.html

Dear Citizen 786534219,

I’m going to chicken out when it comes to contemporaries whom I know, and especially colleagues; if I missed somebody I’d feel bad. Between my students’ writing, the reading I do for my literature classes, the work of my colleagues I try to stay up with, contest judging, reading ARCs for possible blurbs, there’s time for only a few of the growing stack next to my chair. However, among those who made it from that stack to a more permanent berth on my shelves are the following:

Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon

Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon. This hybrid of memoir and cultural commentary was recommended to me by bookseller Matt Pieknik when I read at McNally Jackson in NYC. He had read my Love & Fury and thought that Eribon and I were covering similar ground. He was right. I love the book because he isn’t afraid to throw over, revise, outgrow, his former thinking. He is a biographer of Foucault, a respected French avante-intellectual, but with the death of his father the long bungee cord of his parentage pulls him back to Reims and his working class family. He sifts through complex questions of loyalty and identity and the political consequences of the left’s near abandonment of working people. It’s just a terrific book.

Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shariar Mandanipour.

Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shariar Mandanipour. I am acquianted with Mandanipour through PEN New England. (He’s teaching now at Tufts.) This is what it is like to live as a literary person under the boot of authoritarian censors. The thing is, this book is a hoot! It’s a novel, like Catch-22, that renders its condemnations by illuminating not merely the cruelty of such a system, but its utter absurdity, all the while keeping in view the tragic price people must pay for resisting. A brilliant, inventive, laugh your ass off and get scared at the same time book.

The Violence of Organized Forgetting by Henry A. Giroux

The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine by Henry A. Giroux. For a deep cultural, economic, and political analysis of our current inability to act in our own best interests, Giroux has no equal. Maybe being Canadian helps him; maybe he can see the mess clearly by looking over the backyard fence. People may be familiar with him in his role as a political commentator on the web at Truthout.

The Last Interview: James Baldwin

The Last Interview: James Baldwin. Melville House Publishing brought together four substantial interviews with Baldwin here, including his last, with Quincy Troupe in France in 1987, the year Baldwin died. I think it is amazing how much Baldwin in conversation sounds like Baldwin in his essays: his voice is his voice. It makes me wonder how writing and speaking influence one another throughout a writer’s life. There’s clearly some kind of feedback loop. Both his talk and his essays are a perfect balance of the spontaneous and the carefully considered. His presence, his integrity, his anger, warmth, humor, and defiant wholeness knock me out. It’s something to aspire to, I can tell you that.

Something Crosses My Mind by Wang Xiaoni

I read a lot of poetry, but I know a lot of poets and as I said above, I’ll not name any of my friends or colleagues. Maybe I’ll stick to work in translation. One book I’ve enjoyed immensely is called Something Crosses My Mind by the contemporary Chinese poet Wang Xiaoni, translated by Eleanor Goodman. She writes of contemporary China in a way that de-exoticizes it for a western reader, there is enough of the observational (think Frank O’Hara,) the classical, and the epigrammatic, plus something that is the poet’s own, to make this a book of poems to read slowly, each one several times, for their resonance, their beauty, and their ability to reveal themselves a bit more with each reading.
on]

Sobbing Superpower by Tadeusz Rozewicz

Light Everywhere by Cees Nooteboom

Each Day Catches Fire by Bitite Vinklers.

I’ve also enjoyed reading the selected poems of the Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz, Sobbing Superpower; Light Everywhere by the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, who is known more as a novelist in the west (translated by Joanna Trzeciak), and I’ve just finished a remarkable little book of poems by the Latvian poet Imants Ziedonis, Each Day Catches Fire, translated by Bitite Vinklers. I became aware of this poet when I read on a bill with Vinklers for The Manhattan Review. He is unique in that he writes, literally, fabulous poems, but ones that always begin and end in the real world. Many of his poems are short bursts of prose, and many of them manage to talk about writing under censorship without, of course, writing about living under censorship. More than that though, they are a delight. In one poem he writes, “Along with the moths tonight, love runs into the windowpane./ (‘Turn off the light, or we’ll have no peace.’)”

(Citizen 7083921848)

Thomas Wickersham Thomas is the event maestro at the hallowed independent bookstore, Brookline Booksmith.I came to know of him through his mother Joan who mentioned him in a conversation I had with her upon the occasion of her wonderful story collection,The News from Spain. Thomas has been astute enough to invite me to chat with David Gates and Don Winslow during their appearances at Booksmith last summer.

Below are nine of my favorite books published or reissued in 2015 and a tenth bonus pick from the past. The books are in no particular order and the list could change tomorrow.

The Cartel by Don Winslow

I had impossibly high hopes for this sequel to one of my all-time-favorites, The Power of the Dog. Winslow miraculously delivered. Together, these two books are a stunning documentation of the 40+ year history of the Mexican-American drug conflict. Injected with political urgency while while remaining a page-turning thriller, The Cartel is epic in scope, yet heartbreakingly intimate. This is not a crime novel- it is a tale of war.

The Whites by Harry Brandt

Richard Price (writing as Harry Brandt)- The Whites

I draw a distinction between mysteries with a police protagonist and “cop novels.” While there is a mystery at its heart, The Whites ranks with Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys and Kent Anderson’s Night Dogs as one of the finest cop novels I’ve ever read. Its stark naturalistic world of Night Watch policing is a living breathing nightmare land. Cops guzzle energy drinks and take selfies with murder victims. Evil is not the enemy so much as the absurdity of the streets.

GBH by Ted Lewis

Ted Lewis- GBH (Originally published in the U.K. in 1980. First U.S. printing 2015.)

I read GBH exactly one year ago, almost to the day, and it has haunted me since. It is the story of a gangster in hiding. There are no nice people in this book. There are no happy endings. And yet, there is an intoxicating quality to the alternating storylines of terror and gloom. A cold sheen of glamor clings to the pervasive danger.

Fat City by Leonard Gardner

Leonard Gardner- Fat City (Originally published in 1970, but reissued by NYRB in 2015)

Nominated for the National Book Award against Slaughterhouse Five and Them when it was first released in 1970, Fat City was woefully out-of-print for years. Nominally a boxing novel, it’s truly a book about desperation and hope. Again and again it captures the disconcerting emotions you didn’t realize you had. The best prose I read all year

The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America by Colin Quinn

Colin Quinn- The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America

Based on his experiences growing up in ethnically-mixed Brooklyn, Colin Quinn tells the history of New York City through personal stories rich with laughs and rife with self-effacing humiliations. The Coloring Book is a memoir of one comedian’s formation, a celebration of what makes us different, and an ode to the life and death of American cities.

Peter Swanson- The Kind Worth Killing

A diabolically twisted web of double crosses that echoes Strangers on a Train. Sinister, but packed with sly irony, it is the most queasily enjoyable and ingeniously plotted thriller I read all year.

Those We Left Behind by Stuart Neville

Stuart Neville- Those We Left Behind

Stuart Neville has become a master at tackling psychological trauma. As an avid reader of crime fiction I am aware of my complicity in what is essentially violence for entertainment. For me, the “cozies” (The Kitty Who Painted a Poisoned Pie at the Beach) are in worse taste than graphically realistic police procedurals. Stuart Neville is by no means preachy or dry, but he doesn’t let you forget the cost of violence on victims. Reading Neville is the last time that a book literally made me miss my train stop.

Gang of Lovers by Massimo Carlotto

Massimo Carlotto- Gang of Lovers

Massimo Carlotto is my favorite writer going for straight crime fiction. His Alligator series echoes many of the tropes of modern Private Eye novels. You have the melancholy music-loving heavy-drinking detective aided by his two friends: the techie and the honorable triggerman. Yet there is still a jarring unpredictability and lack of morality to the books, no doubt greatly influenced by Carlotto’s own wrongful imprisonment for murder. The Alligator series is a fine place to start (though Gang of Lovers is a direct sequel of sorts to Bandit Love), but The Goodbye Kiss and At the End of a Dull Day are the Carlotto masterpieces.

A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar-

Lavie Tidhar- A Man Lies Dreaming (comes out in March 2016 in the U.S. but already released in Britain)

A Man Lies Dreaming is the most audacious perversion of the private eye novel ever written. Alternate history, revenge fantasy, or sorrowful daydream; each element of this book brilliantly forms a whole as mysterious for its structure as its plot. Approach it with as little foreknowledge as possible and never forget.

The Sluts by Dennis Cooper-

Bonus: Dennis Cooper- The Sluts (published in 2004, but on this list as the only book in 2015 that I read in one night)

* editor’s note—I forswore heavy-handed editing and graphic consistency, except to attempt to eliminate most ,if not all, graphic and grammatical infelicities. To paraphrase Voltaire, “Perfection is the Enemy of the Good.” And m st the time the Good is the best that I can do.

Various and Sundry: Ooh-Shoo Bee Doobee

George Scialabba by Stu Rosner

If you have landed on this sceptered isle serendipitously the name George Scialabba may not mean anything to you but even occasional visitors will know of my great admiration for George (see my recent chat with him)—thus I am happy to pass on the news of George Scialabba day in Cambridge and star-studded attached to that celebration

* * *

Arianna Huffington is right up there with the short-fingered vulgarian who has turned the presidential primary season into a bad reality TV show, as someone who is its easy to dislike. The ever vigilant Jim Romenesko files this item. Veteran journalist Lauren Lipton responds to a query from Huff Post’s research editor;

I have worked my entire career as a professional journalist….I am very, very good at what I do.

Unfortunately, your boss’s predatory business practices have deeply undercut the ability of all reporters, writers and editors to make any kind of living wage. The rapacious Ms. Huffington seems to believe that journalism skills are worth nothing, and that my beleaguered colleagues and I should be thrilled to help her make hundreds of millions of dollars in return for “exposure.”

If Ms. Huffington would like to know how I uncovered that particular statistic, she is free to hire me and pay me for my time and expertise.

Masks of Anarchy by

Historian Paul Buhle‘s body of work is impressive. Here he introduces Michael Demson’s Masks of Anarchy: The Story of a Radical Poem from Percy Shelley to the Triangle Factory Fire. providing a useful survey of comic art:

…the first decade of the new millennium has seen more significant developments in comic art than any time since the first comic strips appeared, in the dailies of the 1890s. Now, of course, comics as well as their artists and readers are found all over the globe, both in print and on the Internet. From a visual standpoint, today’s comics are inspired and shaped by a contemporary readership that is not only substantially larger than in the past, but also arguably more aesthetically sophisticated than its predecessors in the “reading” of the comics.

Comics have now become a full-blown field of scholarly inquiry, as numerous scholarly journals and books have vanished in their earlier forms to be replaced by electronic versions, and as comics scholars themselves gain status in the universities. This marks either a fitting irony or a kind of fulfillment of the art form.

The field of comic art, always subject to volatile market conditions and very often to a boom-and-bust pattern, with surges followed by collapse, has advanced so unpredictably that almost nothing seems far in the past….

A People’s History of American Empire by Paul Buhle and Howard Zinn

* * *

Keystone Kops— This might be funny but the police killed a dog…

Jez Burrow does some clever shit with the dictionary

Gaza

Whatever your geo-political view(s) on the debacle known as Gaza, there must be somethingthat can be done about this

How much does the rubber on a MLB pitcher’s mound weigh?

Two Stones [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

From Melancholy by Carina del Valle Schorske (found at Wood’s Lot)

Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collectionUnder the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?

***

Here’s the Associated Press on the coming inhabitability of Gaza and here is Agence France-Presse

***
We’re gonna miss these guys

Murder Roger Goodell? A joke?

News is seeping into view ahead of the December release of the film Concussion that perhaps the controversial story line was toned down (to please the NFL?)The film is based on Jeanne Marie Laskas’s book Concussion:

Concussion by Jean Marie Laskas

…is the of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the pathologist who made one of the most significant medical discoveries of the twenty-first century, a discovery that challenges the existence of America’s favorite sport and puts Omalu in the crosshairs of football’s most powerful corporation: the NFL.

In September of 2002, in a dingy morgue in downtown Pittsburgh, a young forensic neuropathologist named Bennet Omalu picked up a scalpel and made a discovery that would rattle America in ways he never intended. Omalu was new to America, chasing the dream, a deeply spiritual man escaping the wounds of civil war in Nigeria. The body on the slab in front of him belonged to a fifty-year-old named Mike Webster—aka “Iron Mike”—a Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the greatest to ever play the game. After retiring in 1990, Webster had suffered a dizzyingly steep decline. Toward the end of his life, he was living out of his van, Tasering himself to relieve his chronic pain, and fixing his rotting teeth with Super Glue. How did this happen? Omalu asked himself. How did a young man like Mike Webster end up like this? The search for answers would change Omalu’s life forever and put him in the crosshairs of one of the most powerful corporations in America: the National Football League. What Omalu discovered in Mike Webster’s brain—proof that his mental deterioration was no accident, but a disease, caused by relentless blows to the head, that could affect everyone playing the game—was the one truth the NFL would do anything to keep secret.

Clearly, the controversial subject (only controversial because it pits commerce vs science) of brain damage and football will be thrashed out into the foreseeable future and a good starting point for thinking about it is the Frontline special, League of Denial (from which, by the way, the NFL’s stenographer ESPN withdrew its participation).

Diverse Diversions: Not Aggravating Aggregations

Kodak ‘Brownie’

Recently I noted (in the cursory manner to which I am accustomed) Teju Cole’s commentary on a Rene’ Burri photo. Over at Howard Dinen’s 1standarddeviation.com, Dinin engages in a informed and illustrated exchange with another photography enthusiast

The big news is that Japan won the Little League World Series (which is a legitimate world competition, unlike some misnomered World Series to which we can point) but we should (and will) note a charming display of sportsmanship from the Chinese Taipei/Uganda (next big beisbol powerhouse) game.

RIP Oliver Saks ” poet laureate of medicine”*, whom millions knew as the physician played by actor Robin Williams in the 1990 film “Awakenings”

The box office hit documentary Amy is not the only recent memorial to MS. Winehouse. Two (so called) art exhibits in San Francisco, A Family Portrait and You Know I’m No Good

Hockey tradition comes to baseball when Edwin Encarnacion hits his third dinger of the game in Toronto

Jim Harrison and Dalai Labrador Rosie [photo: Robert Birnbaum circa 2004]

From Jim Harrison’s Songs of Unreason

When young I read that during the Philippine War
we shot six hundred Indians in a wide pit. It didn’t seem fair.
During my entire life I’ve been helpless
in this matter. I even dream about it.

***

In summer I walk the dogs at dawn
before the rattlesnakes awake. In cold weather
I walk the dogs at dawn out of habit.
In the pastures we find many oval deer beds
of crushed grass. Their bodies are their homes.

***

I left this mangy little
three-legged bear two big fish
on a stump. He ate them at night
and at dawn slept like a god
leaning against the stump
in a chorus of birds.

***

The fly on the window is not a distant crow
in the sky. We’re forced into these decisions.
People are forever marrying the wrong people
and the children of the world suffer.
Their dreams hang in the skies out of reach.

Vin Scully has been calling baseball games as long as I have been alive—he’s coming back for one more year

ALEX COX is the director who among other films made Repo Man, Walker (for which Joe Strummer did the soundtrack),Sid and Nancy. I recently received a this note, “Robert: This is what old filmmakers do when they show us the barn…”

Alan Watt observes

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the “I” out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate “I” or mind can be found.

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.

Eleven days before George Scialabba is feted in Cambridge and other parts of the known world

* from Washington Post obitituary

Disparate Dispatches: Far Flung & What Not

George Sciallabba [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Thirteen days to George Scialabba day and assorted star studded events. Did you miss my recent chat with George inspired by his revealing piece about his mental health history in a recent issue of the Baffler? Go here and here

Joy In Mudville or in this case ” The Friendly Confines”

James Baldwin exclaimed

I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked the cotton, I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing. The Southern oligarchy, which has still today so very much power in Washington, and therefore some power in the world, was created by my labor and my sweat, and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave. And no one can challenge that statement. It is a matter of historical record.

Hey American Exceptionalsts—celebrate two anniversaries this week:

The 60th anniversary memorial of the murder of Emmett Till

President Bush flies past Nw Orleans during Hurricane Katrina

And, of course, the 10th anniversary of the debacle known as Katrina (is the shameless George W Bush really going to show his face in New Orleans?). Randy Newman who has written more great songs than any living sing writer not named (Bob)Dylan or William “Smokey”)Robinson recently played at a benefit in New Orleans.

Newman’s song Louisiana 1927 is one of the few modern day acknowledgments of the devastating Mississippi River flood of 1927. In case you are interested there is an excellent and unheralded novel set in the greatest US natural disaster (up until 1927) by Beth Fenelly and Tom Franklin, The Twisted World and John M. Barry’s Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America

And then there is Newman’s great God’s Song: That’s Why I Love Mankind)

Cain slew Abel, Seth knew not why
For if the children of Israel were to multiply
Why must any of the children die?
So he asked the Lord
And the Lord said:
Man means nothing, he means less to me
Than the lowliest cactus flower
Or the humblest Yucca tree
He chases round this desert
‘Cause he thinks that’s where I’ll be
That’s why I love mankind
I recoil in horror from the foulness of thee
From the squalor and the filth and the misery
How we laugh up here in heaven at the prayers you offer me
That’s why I love mankind
The Christians and the Jews were having a jamboree
The Buddhists and the Hindus joined on satellite TV
They picked their four greatest priests
And they began to speak
They said, “Lord, a plague is on the world
Lord, no man is free
The temples…

I have been advocating ignoring the short fingered vulgarian political machinations for some time. Charles Blow agrees Matt Taibbi chimes in http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/donald-trump-just-stopped-being-funny-20150821:

[The Short fingered vulgarian] isn’t really a politician, of course. He’s a strongman act, a ridiculous parody of a Nietzschean superman. His followers get off on watching this guy with (allegedly) $10 billion and a busty mute broad on his arm defy every political and social convention and get away with it.

People are tired of rules and tired of having to pay lip service to decorum. They want to stop having to watch what they say and think and just get “crazy,” as Thomas Friedman would put it.

[The Short fingered vulgarian]’s campaign is giving people permission to do just that. It’s hard to say this word in conjunction with such a sexually unappealing person, but his message is a powerful aphrodisiac. Fuck everything, fuck everyone. Fuck immigrants and fuck their filthy lice-ridden kids. And fuck you if you don’t like me saying so.

My man AJ who reputation as a great teammate and hated adversary didn’t play in Boston was dispatched out of Fenway in typical Red Sox with sports news crowd badmouthing him on his way out. Now Aj is a feisty guy (not a bad trait for a MLB backstop whose long career include stints with the Twins and the World Series champ White Sox and the Rangers. Now since his Red Sox service Aj has been with the Cardinals
when Yadier Molina was hurt ) and the Yankees (when Brian McCann was injured)AJ is currently with the Braves

http://deadspin.com/a-j-pierzynski-tried-to-frame-another-pitch-that-bounc-1726716878

Miscellaneous Miscellany: 14 August 2015

The Baffler (magazine) is in the vanguard of the movement to celebrate public intellectuals as the September 10th celebration for George Scialabba attests September 10. By the way,that date has been designated George Scialabba Day by the Cambridge City Council.

George Sciallabba [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

To be found in Baffler Issue 26, …”Stumble along with George Scialabba through a lifetime of therapy for chronic depression.”

Baffler Issue No 26

Our Man in Boston being in the vanguard of efforts to celebrate public intellectuals, chatted with George [Scialabba]on subjects near and dear and far and wide…

RB: In reading this Baffler article, it is not apparent that you ever give yourself credit for doing good and useful work. Your writing has been recognized by smart people everywhere. Didn’t that make you feel better?

GS: Eventually, it did. Saved my life, really. But it took a long while.

RB: Why?

GS: (long pause) Because there were lots of people my age doing what I was doing, a lot more successfully than me.

RB: Well, what was your criterion of success?

GS: I suppose quantity and visibility. I would see Sven Birkerts)5 or Paul Berman or Ellen Willis appearing in the New Yorker

Go Cubbies —winners of last 10 of 11 games.Another rookie makes an impact

Ann Bardach is a reliable narrator of the unfolding Cuba story.Here she spotlights Brother Raul

Raul Castro[borrowed from Politco]

A smart team of filmmmakers turns Alice Munro’s short story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” into a fine film with Guy Pearce, Kristin Wiig and up-and-comer Hailee Steinfield (True Grit, Begin Again )

Want to see what 96 million black plastic balls look like. Of course you do

The New York Times has fallen on hard times—how else to explain using a photograph from Facebook

96 million waterfilled black plastic balls is a story— Bloomberg asks the important question:

Ed Osann, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council,told Bloomberg that the shade balls probably won’t release any toxic materials into the water supply. (NRDC has not yet responded to a request for comment.)

“Probably?”

UGGIE, star of Academy Award winning ‘The Artist’

RIP Uggie

Young Sport Center anchors Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick

I am not ashamed to admit my admiration for the mercurial and occasionally bombastic Keith Olbermann, especially his “Worst Person in the World” awards. In some ways this plaudit was low hanging fruit as there have always been may candidates. In a bow to Olbermann’s intention, albeit with a positive twist,Our Man in Bostn inaugurates the DIOGENES AWARD, paying homage to a dwindling population of truth tellers.

First up is diogenian police reporter turned film maker David Simon whose The Wire has achieved legendary status and whose newest effort Show Me a Hero*debuts August 16 on HBO. Here Simon and Cory Booker chat about the Future of Cities

I am going to risk overexposing Simon by pointing out his recent interview at the Daily Beast and pointing you to a very smart spot-on take on Simon and Show Me a Hero by Andy Greenwald

Well, we are coming up on the 10th anniversary of the natural disaster known ( like supermodel) as Katrina. There is a striking similarity between this metereological event and the great 1927 Mississippi Flood. both of which proved the federal government unable or uninterested in helping out a drowned delta. Tom Franklin and Beth Fenelly’s novel The Twisted World does an excellent job of making vivid the 1927 debacle.

NYT reporter Gary Rivlin adds to the significant Katrina bibliography** Katrina: After the Flood. Simon and Schuster describe Katrina

This book traces the stories of New Orleanians of all stripes—politicians and business owners, teachers and bus drivers, poor and wealthy, black and white—as they confront the aftermath of one of the great tragedies of our age and reconstruct, change, and in some cases abandon a city that’s the soul of this nation.

* about which I will have more to say…
** about which I will have more to say…

Just Talking: How to Do Things with Words

In the last three decades I have undertaken an open-ended independent post-graduate course of study. Included in my syllabus has been nearly a thousand conversations with people I place under the broad rubric of story tellers. And here I have provided public access to an incomplete list of my notes from my chats, from all across the Internet:

From A (mis) to Z (inn)

Martin Amis [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Martin Amis

Andre Dubus III

Ben Katchor

Tony Earley

W.D.Wetherell

Amy Bloom

Ron Rash

Arthur Bradford

William Giraldi

John Summers

Josh Ritter

Julian Barnes

Adam Gopnik

Ruben Martinez

Chip Kidd

Paul Lussier

Edith Pearlman

Attica Locke

Charles Yu

Jo Nesbo

Alan Gurganus

George Saunders

George Sciallaba

Alan Lightman

Darin Strauss

Manil Suri

Joan Wickersham

Ann Enright

John Sayles

Tony Horwitz

Thisbee Nissen

Jim Harrison

Ben Fountain

Benjamin Anastas

David Shields

Howard Zinn [photo Robert Birnbaum]

Howard Zinn

In Memoriam Rosie (The Dalai Labrador) 1997-2007

Rosie [photo; Robert Birnbaum]

Cosby,Cosby, Cosby ad infinitum

Billy WIlder’s Headstone [photographer unknown]

Personally I’d rather hear news about David Crosby or Bing Crosby or Milton Cosby than this perpetual motion news engine propelled by the Bill Cosby mess. One would hope that with all the opinion-offering and herd bellowing that some original ideas might be bandied about. As I see it the root problem is that the micro view of this episode yields fruitless results (though I would be curious to know what would be considered a just solution under present law). I stand with George Scialabba (expressed in a recent chat)and others in viewing the problem as systemic— with all our lesser angels courted by a corrupt and degraded political and economic system.

Sexual abuse,domestic violence and animal cruelty (out if a long list of abominations) abounds in the greatest country in history. And a quick survey of the preoccupations of the American citizenry beholds some really vile and banal shit— I expect you would have no problem finding things to put under those rubric.

A minor notion but the only thoughts have given to this current cultural imbroglio is to wonder what Camille Cosby must be thinking and feeling.

For those people interested in an original take on the Man/ Woman abyss have a peek at Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me (Haymarket Books). In fact, I would further recommend her Paradise Built iN Hell as an eye opening account of human kindnesses and community.

Me and George. Talking.

In the new issue of the Baffler (Issue #26)writer,editor, critic George Scialabba’s forty year mental health records are presented in an abridged and annotated form with evocative illustrations by Brad Holland. Scialabba has, over the years ,suffered from severe bouts of depression and has searched for relief from this debilitating ‘disease’. Despite this burden George has published a number of essay collections—The Divided Mind, What are Intellectual Good For?, The Modern Predicament and recently For The Republic and countless articles for a wide swath of smart periodicals.

This conversation took place at Mt Auburn Cemetery on a crisp early September Sunday at the promonotory where the Washington Tower is located and that overlooks Boston looking to the east ( the name of person’s gravesite we settled at escapes me).George and I talked about his reason(s) for allowing the Baffler to publish his records and how they were edited and presented and his battle with depression. We also talked about the health care system, DH Lawrence,19th century Utopians, his religious upbringing, the state of American culture, not reading Tolstoy, some of his favorite recent reads, his ambitions and more…

George Scialabba [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

I spent nine years in an insane asylum and never had a thought of suicide, except that every morning after my conversation with the psychiatrist, I wanted either to hang myself or to cut his throat— Antonin Artaud

RB: Say something (testing sound level).

GS: Four score and seven…

RB: The Baffler [Issue # 26] is publishing an edited version of your medical records of over forty years.

GS: My mental health records. There are no mentions of my toenail fungus.

RB: You have toenail fungus?

GS: I’m afraid so.

RB: What moved you to publish and publicize those records?

GS: Not what, who: the editor-in-chief, John Summers. Two years ago I had an episode of major depression. John and I were very good friends by then, so he offered to help—to come with me to doctors when necessary, shop for me, visit, and so on. At one point he thought it might be useful if we got my medical records. So I requested them—nowadays there is no problem getting them. We both only glanced at them back then and put them aside. Earlier this year he came across them, while he was conceiving the next issue of The Baffler, about health and the medical care system. and thought they might make an interesting document. I was … dubious, but he’s a persuasive guy and a very accomplished editor, so I said go ahead, see what you can turn them into. And he produced an excerpt that reads well and has, I think, a certain dramatic interest. He found some excellent art to illustrate it, and with a bit of commentary by me before and after, it fits into the tapestry of the issue. I don’t make great claims for it. I don’t think he does either. But because it’s the most widespread illness in the world, and there’s a lot of secrecy, of furtiveness, about it, it seemed to us that it might be worthwhile to offer this glimpse from another angle into the culture of health and sickness, which the whole issue is meant to represent

Fakes edited by David Shields and Matthew Volmer

RB: My first reaction to this piece was to recall an anthology entitled Fakes [An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts by David Shields], which collects a variety of texts that turn out to also stand as literary items—written items that have narrative resonance. This iteration of your mental health records seems to suggest a new literary genre.

GS: I’ll have to take your word for it.

RB: How much material did John start with?

GS: About 40,000 words.

RB: That doesn’t seem like a lot for forty years, does it?

GS: There’s some stuff from the byways of my therapeutic history that I didn’t collect. But this is most of it.

RB: Is your mental health history cumulative? Does each provider pass on his or her notes upward?

GS: No, they were in three or four places.

RB: At some point, perhaps in the last ten years, did they become part of one file?

GS: No, I asked each of the three or four places where I had been seen for any length of time for their records. As far as I know, they’re still not gathered in any one place.

For the Republic by George
Scialabba

RB: I was thinking that since medical records are being digitalized, eventually there should be one file.

GS: There are intake processes where they ask about your medications and hospitalizations.

RB: The patient is assumed to be a reliable narrator?

GS: If they think they’re looking at a potentially critical or terribly complicated case, then they will ask for the previous records. It took me a while to get mine, but the hospitals have courier service back and forth, so it’s faster for them. None of the institutions I did intake interviews with, seemed to want to see my previous records.

RB: There was a set of notes where the practitioner insisted on using the word ‘deny’—“denies suicidal ideation”, “denies whatever”—

GS: More than one.

RB: Is that standard medical jargon? There are verbs other than ‘deny’.

GS: I guess, as with so many other things in medicine, they’re being self-protective. If they had said, “the patient appears free of suicidal intent,” and then the patient committed suicide, they might be called on the carpet.

RB: That puts the onus on the patient and reveals an attitude by the practitioner toward the patient.

GS: That was my first reaction.

RB: You have denied suicidal ideation in each intake interview. In the commonplace book on your website there is a citation from Artaud:

“I spent nine years in an insane asylum and never had a thought of suicide, except that every morning after my conversation with the psychiatrist, I wanted either to hang myself or to cut his throat.”

Is there more history available to you? There are big gaps.

GS: There are gaps—some of the time I was out of therapy. There is one large episode of therapy for which I couldn’t get the therapist to give up her notes.

RB: Her notes of your treatment are available at her discretion?

GS: No, I’m legally entitled to them. But I didn’t want to fight about it.

RB: Were you tempted to annotate these records more extensively?

GS: John has a notion that the longer transcript can be made into a small book, in which case I’d have to do much more work.

RB: I second that idea. Its seems strange to say this – bordering on crass – but you have Brad Holland providing wonderful illustrations …

GS: I wasn’t truly sold on the whole idea until I saw both his illustrations and the other, smaller ones in the margin. Then I knew it had to be.

RB: I’ve read a number of novels lately – Francine Prose, Amy Bloom, Anthony Doerr – where part of the story is told through letters. Prose even uses excerpts from published books to advance the narrative. So writers are using different devices—

GS: I think there’s something new in the degree to which people are incorporating little shots of non-direct narrative. I’m not sure what it means; maybe it’s just …

RB: … the last gasp. I find I like to write notes —to service providers, my doctor, my son’s guidance counselor – and in so doing I attempt to make the epistles somewhat interesting and attractive to read. Possibly many people are also intent on avoiding cliché.

GS: That may be true, but I suspect you’ll agree it isn’t true of psychotherapists. They seem to have the opposite motive —to make the sessions sound less interesting. You don’t really get a sense, I think, of an individual personality, an individual voice, an individual sensibility, on either end. I mean, there are flashes of idiosyncratic perception on the part of therapists. And there are occasions when my own voice comes through. At one point, one of my therapists says, “He’s concerned about the beginnings of gray hair, or forehead receding” and then in parenthesis (He thinks very highly of his hair).” (laughs). And it’s true, I remember I was bragging about it. But touches like that, individuating touches, there are not many of them throughout the whole record— either in what was included or in what wasn’t. And the reason for that, I have discovered since talking to my current therapist about this project, is that there are very rigorous standard procedures for writing case notes.

George Sciallabba [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

RB: Does anyone read R. D Laing anymore? Did they ever?

GS: Laing is an object lesson…

RB: I am at a loss here— I think so much of psychotherapy and especially psychopharmacology is voodoo, but I have myself benefited from it. I have had therapists who have been useful in navigating the wild world. But I really don’t quite know what the diagnosis of depression means anymore. I have noted that the WHO claims depression is the world’s most widespread disease, but I wonder if people understand what that means.

GS: I wish I could explain it to you.

RB: I understand your symptoms —there are times when I have no energy or very low energy but it’s not sustained for more than a day or two. And there is no correlation to anything I can observe. I find myself taking great joy in a lot of things and being interested, being semi-productive. I would like to be more productive. But I am also trying figure out what to expect of myself at this point in my life.

What Are Intellectuals Good For? by George Sciallabba

GS: Great joy pretty much disqualifies you from a diagnosis of depression.

RB: Exactly. A friend of mine from high school recently visited me and we were chatting and he, seemingly out of nowhere, asked me if we were ever asked whether we were happy when we were kids? It was never an issue.

GS: Yeah, not in my youth, either.

RB: Today, kids are always being asked and are really expected to say. A negative means bring in the psych HAZMAT team. It seems to me to be a phony issue.

GS: Well yeah, the phoniness is the critical part, I guess. Obviously, parents during our youth at least occasionally wondered or worried whether we were happy, and they wanted us to be happy. It just wasn’t thought necessary to be hovering or solicitous. Whereas now it is. Maybe it is for the wrong reasons. Maybe it’s because we have a social work bureaucracy, a medical bureaucracy, which is a level of authority laid over the parents to which the parents are now in a sense accountable. And they tell the parents they ought to regularly diagnose their child’s mental health and ask if they are happy. I am not a parent so I don’t know, but I suspect it has something to do with the general bureaucratization of medicine and family life and intimacy. So yes, it’s good now as it was then to care that your kids are happy, but how you go about manifesting it and seeing to it has changed. D. H. Lawrence, my personal guru, has an essay about child-rearing called “Education of the People”,(1) which would absolutely cause the AMA and the American Psychiatric Association to blow a collective gasket. His three cardinal rules: “1) Leave them [i.e., children] alone. 2) Leave them alone. 3) Leave them alone.”

RB: What was the response when it was published?

GS: It wasn’t published. It was found in his papers.

RB: Has it been published now?

GS: It’s in that two-volume collection, Phoenix.

RB: It’s curious – you admire and are interested in a lot of classical writers, while I rarely read anything written before 1980 and have developed a certain impatience with certain kinds of scholarship, which I respect but can’t get interested in, such as literary theory. I barely know the names of its professors.

GS: Well. I have just a very passing acquaintance with literary theory, and not much interest. It’s a matter of personal history; I guess. I got my moral education from George Eliot, Conrad, Henry James. And to some extent from 17^th-century and Romantic poetry.

RB: Not the Enlightenment?

GS: Pre- and post-Enlightenment. (both laugh)

RB: Where is your Catholicism in this? Did that moral education conflict with your Catholicism?

GS: Yes, it did. And Catholicism lost out.

RB: Had you not gone to college, would you have retained your faith?

GS: Well, it’s possible. I once thought I’d go straight into the seminary after grade school. Then I decided to go to a regular high school but to the seminary after that. I think I would have become a very undistinguished, moderately unhappy Catholic priest. Probably a Franciscan.

RB: Franciscans are monks? Do they wear robes?

GS: Not monks, but they do wear brown robes. They take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

RB: In your notes you said you could no longer reconcile taking seriously something that didn’t allow investigation and questioning. High school didn’t move you to curiosity and skepticism but college did?

GS: Well, it was a decent average high-school education. I had a few good teachers —the whole thing managed to avoid killing any interest in literature, history or philosophy, which often happens to less fortunate kinds.

RB: But it must have stimulated you sufficiently to apply to Harvard…

GS: That wasn’t my idea. This was 1964 – the beginning of affirmative action.

RB: You’re an African-American lesbian?

GS: No, but the Ivy League colleges really were, back then, WASP strongholds. In the early ‘60’s, around 1964 in fact, Kingman Brewster and Yale spearheaded affirmative action and Harvard jumped on the bandwagon. The Ivy Schools decided that they ought to open wide their gates.

RB: What deprived and marginalized category did you represent?

GS: It was just that no one from my high school had ever gone to Harvard. It was a working-class Catholic high school. If there was an affirmative action category I fit in, it was probably grease balls—they didn’t have a lot of grease balls.

RB: Oh, wops and greasers. Dagos. I believe my moral education came from Nelson Algren. [Algren’s “three rules of life”: “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”] I do find it hard to believe, though, that you stressed yourself and worried yourself about religious issues. I understand that millions of people do, but it’s so foreign to me.

GS: Well, after I left I wondered too. And I had hoped that therapy would show me what in my psychic constitution and character that having attached myself to religion so fiercely as a boy stood for—what to make of it in terms or my psychic structure. It didn’t. I never did solve that problem in therapy.

RB: How many therapists have you gone to/through over forty years?

GS: Maybe nine or ten.

RB: What was the duration of the longest therapeutic relationship?

GS: Five or six years

RB: Why did it end?

GS: It was a psychoanalyst and insurance doesn’t pay for psychoanalysis, so I couldn’t afford to see her anymore. I would have somehow found the money if it were clearly useful, but I wasn’t sure that it was.

RB: Karl Krause’s quip on psychoanalysis comes to mind [Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.] I find dealing with medical institutions and bureaucracies depressing and stressful—it’s like dealing with a foreign country. I wonder if all the effort is worth it. I find the intake process off-putting and insensitive

GS: And this in a context that’s supposed to be about empathy and concern for you. It’s a little bit like the grimace I often can’t suppress when I hear about somebody retiring from the Senate after a long career of “public service.” Well, you know, service my ass! (laughs). He’s leaving to become a lobbyist and cash in. I haven’t read this book by the philosopher Harry Frankfort called Bullshit. But if it’s the book I hope it is, it looks at just this kind of thing: the way you can’t say what you actually think, on pain of being sued or being some kind of social outcast. A therapist has to —there has to be this presumption of medical care but it often feels like medical processing.

RB: Finding a simpatico therapist is like playing roulette. That’s an ingredient that plays in a lot of situations and it’s almost a miracle to come across it. I just watched The Constant Gardener again and was impressed by how the diplomat and his activist wife formed a strong bond. And in the book it is quite vivid—two people talking the same language.

GS: I am going to write myself a reminder to look at that book.

[ Irrelevant exchange about Le Carre & Fatwa]

GS: (is looking for a pen)

RB: I don’t have a pen either—should we be embarrassed —two writers without pens?

GS: (chuckles)

RB:I noticed in these therapy notes there are a couple of places where you exclaim, “I am overqualified for this job”—in one place it was in quotation marks, almost as if it was in bold type. Is that something you actually said?

GS: No, it didn’t come across quite like that. I mean I had always assumed I would go to college, go to graduate school, and then teach at a college. Not become a great scholar, but I liked being a student and thought I’d be a good teacher. But instead I had this nervous breakdown in graduate school after leaving Opus Dei. And then what I did was become a cab driver and a welfare department social worker and then a receptionist and building manager. The thought of ever going back to graduate school gave me a swarm of butterflies in my stomach.

RB: Why did you go to New York for graduate school?

GS: Well, I got into Columbia and didn’t get into Harvard.

RB: Did you have any thoughts about how different New York would be from Cambridge? Did being in New York affect you?

GS: It rattled me a bit. I just applied to a few graduate schools and Columbia was the best one I got into.

RB: Did you have friends in New York?

GS: No, but there was an Opus Dei in New York.

RB: Hadn’t you quit Opus Dei?

GS: I had quit the summer before but then for the first month or so [of graduate school] I lived in the residence. It was not only for members—it was a residence for students as well. And thenI moved out. New York’s strangeness and intensity was just a small wrinkle in a very big strange force field that I was entering.

RB: When you wake up every day, what is sense of it—what’s the music playing in the opening scenes? You open your eyes and you sit up and then —what?

GS: Um, from 20 to 45 the first thing most males are conscious of when waking is an erection, usually. When you get to your mid-60’s as I have and you have been taking an SSRI for twenty years or more, you are usually all too conscious of the lack of an erection. (Both chuckle, sheepishly.)

[Brief discussion about full bladders and sleep apnea.]

RB: I have in the past two or three had years a few [minor] medical problems, which just took forever to resolve. Have you experienced the glacial tempo of the medical bureaucracy?

GS: I blame capitalism.

RB: Why is there resistance to universal health care?

GS: Well I have a hobbyhorse theory about it. It’s because there is a generalized and really superstitious distrust of government, earnestly and assiduously and cunningly cultivated by all the people who stand to profit from it. Among others, the insurance industry and the processed food industry. It’s no accident that all those people out there think government can’t do anything good. Remember what one of them said at a political rally, ”Keep your government hands off my Social Security!”

RB: Might it be something more basic that elicits this pretzel logic on all sorts of issues? And there is this real belief that the current right agenda is based on some demonstrable rationale.

GS: I’m from a working-class family, and they really do have these stubborn anti-government attitudes that very few of us enlightened people in the Cambridge-Boston area have.

RB: Reagan Democrats.

GS: Exactly.

RB: Why don’t people just admit they are racist, Judeophobic, homophobic? These seem to be regnant in the USA. We live in a funhouse. I wonder why in a world that seems to have so many problems and crises, there isn’t a greater audience for publications like The Baffler, In These Times, Truthdig, even the New York Review, which can be very insightful. What aren’t people searching for a critique?

GS: That’s the revolutionary question.

RB: Is it Marcuse’s notion that there is a moronizing process?

GS: There’s a lot to that. Life in contemporary capitalist culture is a continuous stream of disconnected stimulants. Distractions.

RB: There is a connection but it’s not apparent to the audience—it’s all about consuming.

GS: It’s not coordinated, but it works together to this one purpose.

RB: We don’t want to say, to make people stupid. Desensitizing them?

GS: Yeah, we must find a good phrase. (Both laugh.) Impoverishing their critical faculties.

RB: Growing up under the old regime of literacy and hard copy [real] books and certain kinds of narrative, you may fall prey to anxieties about new technology. And thus we may be somewhat impaired in assessing new media. Is Facebook snake oil—it seems to work for some people?

GS: Well, I suppose that nothing that either lasts a long time or engages a lot of people—

RB: What’s a long time? What’s the life expectancy of some of this new technology? What is the phrase I noted in The Baffler— “Innovation without progress”?

GS: I was thinking of a line from Durkheim, which explained conservatives to me in a lightening flash when I came across it. “No tradition or institution lasted for hundreds of year can be entirely without merit or substance.”

RB: Meaning?

GS: That the good and the bad are jumbled together. That Facebook, though I think on the whole it is an enormous waste of time and basically an infantilizing influence, nonetheless has its uses and (almost) redeeming features. And the same with television. I don’t read as many books as I used to, and it’s because once when I was badly depressed, my brother gave me a television set—“Maybe this will help take your mind off your troubles.” And it did. But , alas, I couldn’t stop watching it when I got better.

RB: I agree, but then there are shows like The Wire.

GS: TV is such a vast phenomenon that even if a minority of shows are inspired, it’s practically impossible to keep up with them.

RB: As distracting and procrastination-inducing as they are, streaming media (Netflix, Spotify) are amazing things. Access to a very wide [in the case of Spotify almost unlimited] selection of music and film is grand.

GS: There is a well-known media theorist named Clay Shirky, who made a passing remark on his blog to the effect that “nobody I know reads Tolstoy any more. And that makes perfect sense to me: War and Peace is so long and kind of boring.” Shirky’s a decent guy and not himself illiterate, but Jesus, if the young are not reading Tolstoy, then what about 16^th- and 17^th- century English lyric poetry – the marrow, the distillation, the flower of the language. Do they even know it exists?

RB: We do have these, for lack of a better word, controversies in literature. Ian McEwan recently asserted (2) that most long novels today don’t justify their length. Tim Parks in the New York Review also wrote about reading long works.(3)

GS: There are people like Donna Tartt that the argument probably applies to. I suppose Shirky’s point was: “My God, there’s so much. It’s hard just to keep up with good blogs. Who has time for Tolstoy?” You can spend all your time in front of a screen and increasingly that seems like a sensible thing for people to do. Those of us who grew up with in a hard-copy world can see what’s being lost as well as what’s being gained. But the people who are growing up in the new world can’t see what’s being lost. And so it gives an edge of desperation, an edge of Luddism, to those of us who are trying to keep those treasures from being lost. If the young want to choose not to read Tolstoy and Donne and George Herbert, ok. But they have to at least know what they’re giving up.

The Baffler Issue #26
Cover art- Ruth Marten

RB: It can be an amusing pastime to consider what will be read a hundred years hence. Philip Kerr told me he thought John LeCarre would be the guy. Which at the time surprised me. But I have this theory that there is a fixed finite number of readers in the world—like the ever-present twelve honest men. There will always be 400,000 readers who will be reading 17^th-century poetry and the great Russians and the epochal Germans.

GS: (laughs)

RB: So we ought to set aside these declinist and worrisome thoughts about the disappearance of literature, which really is about the disappointment that more people are not making use of the great literary wellspring that is available. There are kids out there reading—they just don’t make much noise.

GS: Maybe that’s true. But there is this dream of a humanist Utopia that the Enlightenment philosophers had—Condorcet, Godwin, later Utopians William Morris and John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, that the best that has been thought and said could become a common property of humankind. Probably there will always be many millions or billions who find enough beauty in growing a garden or swimming—nonverbal things. And that’s fine. But many, many, more than 400,000 people, many more than the elite of their time in 18^th-century France or 19^th-century Britain could have kindled to the books we hold dear.

RB: It would seem that lots of people seem to want to remain ignorant of the pressing issues of our time — climate change, the failure of the Western model of development in the so-called Third World. I think back on novels like Nevil Chute’s On the Beach, which portrayed a nuclear apocalypse, and there was a Ban the Bomb movement. If you read LeCarre, you can get a clear idea of the corrupted and degraded state of Western post-industrial nations. I don’t know that utopian ideals have any place in the thinking of people in the short term —the next twenty or thirty years.

GS: We all have a moral imagination.

RB: You think?

GS: Anybody who does have a moral imagination or a political imagination can’t help occasionally finding inspiration in an ideal that he/she hopes can be achieved.

RB: Do you see any examples of that in life today, around the world? Lives and institutions guided by a basic sense of decency and fairness?

GS: No group examples, but individuals. No, no communities.

RB: Whom do you see aspiring to make the world a better place?

George Scialabba [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

GS: Well, there’s probably 400, 000 people. (Both laugh.)

RB: In reading this Baffler article, it is not apparent that you ever give yourself credit for doing good and useful work. Your writing has been recognized by smart people. Didn’t that make you feel better?

GS: Eventually, it did. Saved my life, really. But it took a long while.

RB: Why?

GS: (long pause) Because there were lots of people my age doing what I was doing, a lot more successfully than me.

RB: Well, what was your criterion of success?

GS: I suppose quantity and visibility. I would see Sven Birkerts $4) or Paul Berman or Ellen Willis appearing in the New Yorker, the New Republic or the NYRB, or publishing a book, and I hadn’t done any of those things and probably never will.

RB: But you were published—how did that happen?

GS: It started with hearing Noam Chomsky on the radio – I felt the scales fall from my eyes. At the end, the interviewer mentioned that Chomsky had a new book coming out in a few months. I thought, “Wow, this is great. This will make the scales fall from everybody’s eyes.”

RB: (laughs)

GS: So I got the new book when it came out and I waited for the reviews and for American politics and culture to be turned upside down. And nothing happened. It was published by small radical press.

RB: As is his latest opus, by Haymarket Books.

GS: I was incredulous and dismayed. I wrote a 3000-word letter in the form of a review to Elliot Fremont-Smith of the Village Voice and said this is a great book and nobody has said a word about it, and this is what it’s about. How about getting some writer to review it? So he called me back and said he would publish me and I should send something else.
RB: How do you think other writers started out?

GS: I may not have been as hopeless a case as I thought I was, but I really was very isolated.

RB: It does seem to be the case that being a good and original writer is not sufficient to launch a career. It takes luck or a real careerist bent. If you are not going to toot your own horn, then you need an agent, yes?

GS: Yes, but an agent looks for writers who are going to sell books.

RB: Some do.

GS: They have to, that’s how they make a living.

RB: There are some that don’t, people like Rachel Cohen (5) who wrote a wonderful book entitled A Chance Meeting or Edward P. Jones,(6) who spent 12 years writing The Known World are represented by super agent. Or Eduardo Galeano’s (7)agent, who also represented Latino women writers. But who am I to give career advice? What are your ambitions at this point in your life?

The Modern Predicament by George Scialabba

GS: (long pause) They mostly involve reading. No, nothing I really feel passionate about. John is trying to interest somebody in a Selected Scialabba book. I’m fairly pessimistic about it.

RB: How far have you gotten into turning the mental health records into a book?

GS: It’s basically John’s project, so I don’t know. I think he has a strong and detailed vision.

RB: So what do you look forward to reading— just more or specific books?

GS: Just big piles of books on the floor that have been accumulating over the last decades. All kind of things—

RB: How does something get drawn out of the piles?

GS: It depends on when the next deadline is.

RB: Deadline for who or what?

GS: I hope to write more for The Baffler.

RB: That’s a three-times-a-year publication.

GS: Well, I’m running out of gas. I like Raritan(8)—I have a good relationship with them. And Commonweal. I also wrote a couple of things for Virginia Quarterly Review

RB: Does reaching out to publications take a large effort for you?

GS: I’m not sure why. I usually have enough on my plate. You were talking before about that little spark of ambition you need. My spark flickers.

RB: Would you like to accomplish more?

GS: I’d like to do less,really.

RB: (laughs)

GS: I wish the world were a much more sensible place

RB: You see your writing as a corrective or an attempt to be…?

GS: Yeah. Yeah. Yes, I don’t make beautiful things with words, at least that’s not my [intention]. I am not a poet or a storyteller. I am kind of a preacher, and I wish there were less to preach about.

George Sciallabba [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

RB: You are frequently expressive about the beauty of language and what that may do.

GS: Yeah, but so do James Wood and Sven Birkerts. And I love being instructed by them. But I don’t feel I can instruct other people about language and literature, whereas inequality, American foreign policy—there’s just so much unnecessary suffering in the world.

RB: You wrote about Chomsky thirty years ago and not much has changed about Chomsky and the issues he focuses on. Americans still don’t pay attention to him. Or he is a buzzword for the evil left wing.

GS: He has been very effectively marginalized in America, but internationally it’s a different story.

RB: Name a book or a movie that has given you a charge. Uplifted you.

GS: A novel from last year by Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. (9)

RB: A wonderful novel, and the title, taken from a Russian medical dictionary as the definition of life, is thought provoking.

GS: Another novel that knocked my socks off was Bob Schacochis’s (10) The Woman Who Lost Her Soul.

RB: Indeed. In the literary beauty contest of the National Book Awards, it lost out to Donna Tartt’s book?

GS: Yes.

RB: Anything else?

GS: A new book by William Deresiewicz [EXCELLENT SHEEP The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life]. It’s not the best written book but it says all the right things and it’s getting a lot of flak

RB: I read a piece by Stephen Pinker in the New Republic, which wasn’t positive. Why the negative response?

GS: Partly because Deresiewicz is an amateur. He’s a literary critic and not a VSP [Very Serious Person]

RB: Doesn’t he teach?

GS: He taught English at Yale.

RB: Doesn’t that give him some qualification?

GS: Sure. But he’s a radical and doesn’t have social-scientific credentials. And there is something preachy about the book, something amateurish. It’s not a Christopher Jencks or Nicholas Lehmann—not one of these carefully hedged, data-heavy books. It’s somewhat impressionistic and a bit sweeping. That appeals to me, but it annoys people like Pinker and Harry Lewis, a Harvard dean. And Deresiewicz traces higher education’s problems to capitalism, another reason why he’s not taken very seriously.

RB: From what I read, it reminds of a John Summers piece (11) for the Chronicle of Higher Education

GS: It’s in that vein.

RB: It seems there is a shortage of intellectual honesty. There’s too much intellectual hucksterism.

GS: Yes. A subject for another interview.

RB: Exactly.

GS: The other two books I’m excited about are Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I just read for the first time …

RB: Wasn’t that written in the 19^th century?

GS: Yes (laughs). And The Return of the Native.

RB: Geez, where do you find these books? (Laughs)

GS: Especially Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

RB: Whatever its literary merit, I suppose it’s a very important book in American history.

GS: I was prepared for a slog. But it’s a really good book. She’s the George Eliot of slavery.

RB: I can’t read those books. I wonder what it says that a reader like me doesn’t read the canon – what it says about their durability? You bemoan the fact that Tolstoy and others are not being read…

GS: Well, I take comfort in the thought of the 400,000.

RB: I see.

GS: A useful remnant.

RB: A useful myth.

GS: Yes, as we enter our Dark Years.

RB: The Dark Years—a good place to end. (Both laugh) Well, George, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you.

Footnotes

1. David Shields- Conversation at Los Angeles Review of Books
2.D H Lawrence citation “The Education of the People” (1919), in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, pp. 659-661. from George Scialabba’s Commonplace Book
3.Ian McEwan from Guardian article
4.Tim Parks from New York Review of Books blog, “Reading The Struggle”
5. Sven Birkets Conversation at The Morning News
6. Rachel Cohen Conversation at The Morning News
7. Edward P Jones Conversation at Identitytheory
8. Eduardo Galeano Conversation at Identitytheory
9. Raritan
10. Anthony Marra Conversation at Our Man in Boston
11.Bob Schaccochis Conversation at The Los Angeles Review of Books
11. John Summers Conversation at Identitytheory

Currently reading Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit (Haymarket books)

12 Postscript

Praise Saps the Strength

West Newton No More 2013
(photo: Robert Birnbaum)

I know some smart guys and some down-to-earth guys and some well-read guys and some politically astute and committed guys, but very few guys who are all of those things, and Robert Birnbaum is: he’s one of those invaluable voices out there fighting the good fight and keeping reading and thinking alive. He’s one of the our most incisive and important interviewers.

Jim Shepard

There’s something drastically wrong with Robert Birnbaum.
He takes literature seriously, but he isn’t self-important about it. He spends his time talking to other writers and asking intelligent questions, and – even worse – he reads their books before he talks to them. He’s no literary theory robot; he encounters books with his own mind and heart, and he thinks this is an important thing to do with his life. I mean, he’s just begging for trouble.

Tom Piazza

Part Malcolm Cowley, part Terry Gross, some Charlie Rose mixed in for good measure, Robert Birnbaum is a gift to literature. He cares about books that matter and conducts conversations that make a mark. This is a rare and beautiful thing. I wish we’d finally master cloning because we could use more of him in the world.

William Giraldi

“I never know quite what book I have written till I talk to Robert Birnbaum about it. Some people do ‘close reading.’ His can be as interior as Vermeer, as sweeping as the Hubble eye. We all count on him. He helps us see.”

Allan Gurganus

I don’t live in Boston, so I am not among the “Our” who get to claim Robert as their own. Yet once every few years, when I am in town whoring for one book or another, he is My Man in Boston, if only for an hour. And it is always the most delicious, cracked-up, dressed-down, battery-charging hour. Robert is a reminder that the deeper, grander pursuits of our culture — art, polemics, fine essay — are all around and ever worth stopping for. May I confess to you? I love him madly.

Mary Roach’

Thank God for Robert Birnbaum.

Arthur Phillips

Whenever I talk with Robert Birnbaum I get the feeling that he sees me more clearly than just about anybody. Astonishingly, he doesn’t appear to blame me for an of it, which is why he’s My Man in Boston. If you love books, he should be yours, too.

Richard Russo

Me personally I think Our Man in Boston is better than a stick in the eye. There’s just no question about this, I feel. I think people who think Our Man in Boston is not as good as a stick in the eye are not reading Our Man in Boston at all, or have what we call in the Catholic world a fecking enormous beam of timber in the old orbital socket. Trust me on this one. I have read a lot of muck in my lifetime – I mean, I read all of Jerzy Kosinsky, before I recovered – and Our Man in Boston is just not, no matter what anyone says, muck. Trust me.

Brian Doyle

An interviewer with personality, curiosity, and no fear — clearly Birnbaum will never make it in the big time. Glad he’s on my radar screen, though.

George Scialabba

George. We knew that. For years. And now the timeless Birnbaum conversations come to roost in a better, at least a more appropriate, place. About time.Read them all. Start anywhere. [This assumes Robert will get on the stick and give us some links…] Doing so will pay big dividends. Literati will be enthralled. Izzy [Robert is merely his nom d’émigré] will feel even more important (and more significantly will get that frisson he so seldom gets, as when he’s accorded respect) because someone paid attention. But most importantly, saying all this will help keep Izzy off my back, and make him continue to owe me big time.There are a lot of conversations, silently (well, I speak figuratively), slowly accreted into a different sort of literary treasure, ready to be re-re-discovered, again and again. You may end up thinking, “Robert Birnbaum spreads himself too thin.” But there’s a lot of him to spread. I speak, of course, literarily and culturally: I’ll withhold judgment on the intellectual, until he shows a little more serious intent with the copy editing. There’s always more of what we love Robert for—never shutting up. Hail to a major repository of the national cultural treasure of his 25+ years worth of conversations with noteworthy authors. As a conversationalist, James Lipton, of a different era and cultural medium, has nothing on Robert—and Robert is younger, cuter, and available.
Go Cubs.

Howard Dinin

Robert Birnbaum is a great guy, an incisive interviewer, and a true dog-lover, whose only defect lies in rooting for the wrong baseball team.

George Saunders

Gorgeous George

For The Republic by George
Scialabba

That the flames of ambition have turned to fading embers did not prevent me from attending what will be (ostensibly) my only book party of the year.That the fete was hosted by the inimitable Katherine Powers (whose tome Suitable Accommodations is forthcoming later this summer)was,of course, an encouraging sign. In my past, larger life I was a diligent and ubiquitous attendent of all manner of festivities: commercial, artistic , personal, cultural, callow networking and so on.Now, recognizing the low value of most of those events and having calmed down significantly, I have a preference for remaining within the confines of my somnambulistic zip code. In this instance trekking over to Cambridge for the celebration of George Scailabba’s latest and 4th opus. For the Republic: Political Essays (Pressed Wafer books) balanced out the ordeal of battling traffic as I crossed the Charles River.

The affair turned out to be attended by a lively and congenial gaggle of George’s admirers. Among the illustrious attendees were John Summers, editor of the Baffler; Susan Faludi, a Baffler contributor and well-known social critic; novelists Russ Reimer, Leslie Lawrence, Monica Hileman, and Jane Unrue; George Kovach and Cat Parnell of Consequence Magazine; Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press; and too many other literary eminences to mention.

For a number of not very good reasons you probably have not heard of George. This is partially explained by Scott McLemee in his 2006 profile:

George Scialabba is an essayist and critic working at Harvard University who has just published a volume of selected pieces under the title Divided Mind, issued by a small press in Boston called Arrowsmith. The publisher does not have a Web site. You cannot, as yet, get Divided Mind through Amazon, though it is said to be available in a few Cambridge bookstores. This may be the future of underground publishing: Small editions, zero publicity, and you have to know the secret password to get a copy. [contact information for Pressed Wafer Press is at the bottom of this page —for anyone inclined to put a check in the mail.*)

When interviewed for his 2009 tome What Are Intellectuals Good For?(Pressed Wafer) George was asked his preference “bad writers who are politically congenial or good writers whose politics he dislikes?”

“

It’s a complex question,” he says, “leading in all sorts of directions. I’m going to offer a simplified and peremptory answer. Better good writers with bad politics than bad writers with good politics. The former teach us how to think (and feel and imagine); the latter merely what to think. Knowing how to think is incomparably more important. Unless most people know how to think, there can’t be genuine democracy.”

In 2012 with the publication of his (then)most recent collection of essays, The Modern Predicament(Pressed Wafer), here’s his answer to the query,” What, in brief, is the modern predicament? Which authors, and what lived experience in history, most shaped your understanding of it?”:

Modernity is the ensemble of changes – intellectual, political, economic, social, cultural, technological, aesthetic – that have altered the world drastically since roughly the 17th century, until which time the world was, in the above respects, far less different from the world of any previous epoch of recorded history than it is from the world of today. The modern predicament is the set of problems these changes have bequeathed us.

One problem is our loss of ontological, social, and psychological embeddedness. Formerly, the meaning and purposes of life were, to a far greater extent, simply given for most people by the religious, family, and societal structures in which they were born and grew up. Very few people, and even those people to a limited extent, were expected or encouraged to become individuals, free to make fundamental choices about love, religion, occupation, political allegiance, even location. Only a tiny elite could aspire to an individual identity and an individual history.

Nowadays everyone, or at least most people in the rich countries – I realize that this still leaves out most of humankind – can be an individual. But that turns out to be difficult. Over millions of years, we evolved characters and psyches that needed to be held in and held up by intense bonds, usually provided by strong families and local communities. For many reasons – economic development, geographical mobility, religious tolerance, the rise of nation-states, the emancipation of women – those bonds have weakened over the last few centuries. The resulting freedom obviously has enormous benefits for the previously unindividuated. But for many people it also has costs: isolation, loneliness, purposelessness, powerlessness, and hyperstimulation.

The modern predicament, then, is the difficulty of finding a sane, harmonious balance among all the vast and various consequences of science, technology, democracy, mass literacy, feminism, and the other forms of modern progress.

My own involvement with these questions began in college, when the devout Catholicism in which I was brought up – I was actually a member of the traditionalist religious order Opus Dei – met and was vanquished by the 18th- and 19th-century secular critique of religion. For some years after that I was not only a passionate anti-clericalist and philosophical materialist (as I still am), but also a fervent believer in progress as a fairly linear process, a smooth upward slope in which all that was necessary was to complete the long march through all the orthodoxies, religious, political, and sexual, which the Enlightenment had begun.

Then, in my thirties, I encountered the two most important (for me) critics of modernity, D.H. Lawrence and Christopher Lasch. Lawrence was a kind of Hebrew prophet, not of righteousness but of the body, and against what he perceived (at least in early-20th-century-England) as a disastrous over-valuing of the mental, the conceptual, the explicit – what used to be called, roughly from Kant to G.E. Moore, the Ideal. He was a pagan, reasserting the importance of all the wisdom that had been forgotten in the course of the (necessary) rejection of traditional religion and metaphysics. He was also the finest prose stylist I had ever encountered, so I was (and still am) blown away. His essays, collected in the two volumes of Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers are one of the great neglected resources of European culture. I try to say why in the essay “Shipwrecked” in The Modern Predicament.

Lawrence was a bit archaic and exotic; Christopher Lasch was as American as apple pie or Walt Whitman. With different materials and a completely different intellectual and verbal style from Lawrence, he made a subtly parallel argument about the forgotten wisdom of pre-modernity, in particular of the producerist, or yeoman, or civic republican tradition. I’ve written about him at length in both What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament, but I’m still coming to terms with him.

Morten Høi Jensen has an accurate, succinct take on George Scialabba

… Scialabba’s eloquent prose and boundless literary-intellectual reserves shrug off these claims to redundancy. He is a natural heir to the critics whose lives, works, and careers he explicated so sympathetically in What Are Intellectuals Good For?: Dwight Macdonald, Nicola Chiaromonte, Lionel Trilling, Randolph Bourne, Irving Howe. He is a counterargument to his own claims about generalists. Reading George Scialabba emphasizes the need for more George Scialabbas.

For the Republic is divided into 4 sections: Theories, Thinkers, Plutocratic Vistas and Rant which include ruminations on a wide array of sages and savants—IF STone, Gore Vidal.the Christophers(Lasch and Hitchens),Tony Judt, Thomas Friedman, Edmund Wilson, George Orwell,Victor Serge and Ed Hirsch.In his Introduction to For the Republic Rutgers History mentor Jackson Lears concludes:

But if the forces of inevitability triumph (as their prophets claim they inevitably will), it will not be George Scialabba’s fault. Through the dark decades of Reaganism and neoliberalism, he helped us sort through the portentous trivia and see (against all odds) what really matters…One is reminded of William James, who (according to John Jay Chapman)always seemed as if “he stepped out this sadness in order to meet you.” Sometimes even everyday acts require a quiet heroism. We can only be grateful that Scialabba, like James, has continued to summon it.

George Scialabba (photo: Robert Birnbaum

*McClemee writes “the publisher seems to be avoiding crass commercialism (not to mention convenience to the reader) by keeping Divided Mind out of the usual online bookselling venues. You can order it from the address below for $13, however. That price includes shipping and handling:Arrowsmith, 11 Chestnut Street, Medford, MA 02155”
And For the Republic can be gotten at Harvard Bookstore or from Pressed Wafer, 375 Parkside Ave, Brooklyn NY 11226. Or from Amazon.

Currently reading Snapper by Brian Kimberling (Pantheon)