We do it enthusiastically, breathlessly, when we’re young, with no worries about whether or not the friend to whom we recommend a book will find anything at all meaningful in it. Have you read this? You must read it. I don’t recommend books very often any more, and I try to discipline myself in conversation: Never ask someone if he has read something or not. It makes you look pretentious and many people interpret the question as a challenge, or a taunt.
As you grow older learning contributes to isolation, which you feel all the more keenly if you’re inclined to look back nostalgically at early adulthood. Young minds happily take direction from anyone, as if any imprint from the outside world is a step in the right direction, like kneading is an improvement to dough no matter shape it must ultimately take. When I was young, when all too many books simply baffled me, I admired anyone who was passionate about a book. That was all the recommendation necessary. I still have a collection of books I keep only because close friends were insistent that they would change my life.
Now, much older, that seems a very inefficient way of getting what one needs from reading. But it’s sad every so often when a book moves you in the way books moved you as a youth. The instinct to recommend them is powerful, but checked by the sad reality that most people are too busy, too deep into their own idiosyncratic habits of reading, to put down what they must read in favor of a superfluous book. I was just reading…well, it doesn’t matter… but as soon as the vestigial thought fluttered up (“You must read this…”) came the more pragmatic realization: It appeals to me for reasons so private and particular to what has happened in the past few weeks and years that my enthusiasm can’t be trusted as an endorsement.
Book reviews sometimes tell us that we ought to read a particular book. But they are too much bound up with the commerce of books to be entirely trusted. A book gets reviewed when it’s new, when there’s some chance that you might see it on the shelves of a bookstore (bookstore: noun: A place of business where books are the main item for sale, also called bookshop), or in the hands of someone on the Metro, or hear about it on radio or television. The premise of every book review, however, is that the book is new and therefore necessarily under consideration. A very different thing from the passionate recommendation of book we have just discovered.
One imagines a post-professional paradise, where everyone reads again entirely for pleasure and disinterested learning. And recommendations are happily received and given, with no worry that one might be violating some nicety of etiquette. A community of learning rather than a hermitage.
Category Archives: Feuilleton
On recommending books
Filed under Culture, Feuilleton, Uncategorized
A minor Hitch anecdote having nothing to do with salami
Everyone is offering his Christopher Hitchens memories today. I had only one face-to-face encounter, after he gave a lecture at the Greek embassy about the Elgin Marbles (he argued passionately for their return to Greece). Some of us retired to a restaurant afterward, and the proprietors must have known him well because an enormous tumbler of Scotch, filled to the brim, arrived as if by magic, before the menus, water and the bread basket. It disappeared almost as quickly and was replaced at least once more and probably twice (I don’t remember very well). He spoke of the novels of Mary Renault, which I said I loved, and he said deserved a better reputation and wider audience. At one point he was trying to remember the name of a critical battle between Ancient Greece and Persia and I tentatively offered an answer, Salamis, which unfortunately I pronounced a bit too much like the Italian meat product. He raised his hand, and said impatiently, “No, no, no.” He thought for a moment, and then said, “sal-uh-MEES.” He was right, of course.
Filed under Culture, Feuilleton, Uncategorized
Gingrich the Entrepreneur
Republicans may be refining the idea of what business competence means. The party has long cherished expertise gathered in the marketplace over mere political skill or experience. But there was an interesting nuance introduced in a Washington Post article about Newt Gingrich, published today, which suggests that the ideal of the man of commerce may not be monolithic.
In an article exploring concerns about Gingrich’s leadership during his years a Speaker of the House, former Congressman Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) praised the fast-rising presidential contender for getting “a plane that hadn’t flown in 40 years to fly.” But he went on to say that the plane then flew erratically, up, down, left, right, raising questions about Gingrich’s leadership skills.
“Newt is an entrepreneur more than he’s a manager,” says Shays.
Interesting. Is there a distinction forming between the self-made man (entrepreneurial skill) and the technocratic leader (managerial expertise)? The former implies risk taking, vision and a willingness to fail; the latter suggests steadiness, competence and professionalism.
Genuine success in business no doubt requires both skill sets, and there are many cases in which the entrepreneurial founder of a corporation eventually finds himself sidelined by business-school types after the start up grows bigger than the founder’s ability to manage it.
Both skill sets are idealized by the political parties that dominate U.S. politics, but the Democratic Party, of late, has stressed managerial competence while the Republican Party idealizes the self-made man. The rise of candidates such as Herman Cain (which skill set was primary on his résumé?) and Gingrich may require more subtle thinking about just exactly what the Republican Party wants to valorize in the commercial sector. And that will give importance clues about how it conceives of the presidency.
Filed under Culture, Feuilleton
LEGOs: Love’em
Of course I played with LEGO blocks when I was a kid, and not so long ago I went out and bought a large tub of basic pieces, purportedly for use by the children of my friends, but in fact for my own therapeutic needs. Last Sunday I wrote about a LEGO master, Adam Reed Tucker, whose works are on display at the National Building Museum. And I also wrote a column about the proposed National Museum of the American Latino, which raises the following concerns:
Indeed, the entire concept of a Latino American Museum seems almost retro. Sometime between 2040 and 2050, according to a study done by the Center for the Future of Museums, today’s minority groups will make up a majority of the American population. Americans will be “hybridized,” with multiple ethnic strands to their identity.
Or, as Gregory Rodriguez of the New America Foundation put it at a lecture at the Canadian Embassy in February, “We have no idea what it means to be Latino in 2050. None.”
That’s a strange world in which to start building a museum to celebrate Latinos, especially given how problematic ethnically focused museums are. There’s resistance to them among people who don’t identify as minorities, and while much of that resistance is based in racial and ethnic animus, some of it represents legitimate concern that history won’t be well served by an infinite fracturing into sub-narratives, each under the control of a different cultural group.
It seems likely that within a generation, the Mall could have a large collection of very quiet and not terribly relevant museums. Not because the stories they have to tell are irrelevant or uninteresting, but because the game changed. The appetite for history will be for complicated master narratives that cross lines between ethnic groups, that dip into technology and economics and art, and can’t easily be told in an old-fashioned, balkanized museum of ethnic identity.
Filed under Architecture, Culture, Feuilleton, Museums, Uncategorized, urban design
Nancy and the Gavel
I wrote a quick piece about a striking image that came out of Sunday’s health care reform vote. Around noon, Nancy Pelosi and top Democratic leaders walked from the Cannon Office Building to the House, with Pelosi carrying a rather over sized gavel. It was an impromptu gesture, by all accounts, but it sent a strong signal. She meant business.
Since Democrats retook control of the House in January 2007, the gavel hasn’t been just a symbol of the speaker’s power. It has been a particularly volatile image from the moment she was photographed receiving it from John Boehner. The outgoing Republican majority leader wasn’t just yielding power after an electoral thumping, he was yielding it to a woman, the first woman to sit only two heartbeats from the presidency. Right-wing blogs frequently use that image, often without explanation, as if it is manifestly obvious that the world is upside down if a woman from San Francisco in a tailored cabernet-colored suit is brandishing the implement.
How will this image affect public perception of the reform bill, and the politicians who worked to pass it? I touched on those questions in a Tuesday story for The Washington Post. The Note, a political links blog hosted by ABC, called it a must read. The Atlantic Wire called it a screed and mocked it unmercifully. You decide.
Filed under Culture, Feuilleton, Photography
Where do we find the time for opera?
Opera News editor Brian Kellow approached me a few months ago with that question, which inspired a short riff in the April issue. Here’s a sample:
What is the elevator pitch for Wagner’s Parsifal? Is there any opera today that could survive the rigorous condensation of modern life? Opera, it seems, requires a slower world. It hides vast amounts of time in its form — not just the duration of the music but the astonishing hours of preparation, the rehearsals and the private study (years, decades, whole lives) upon which every scintilla of music is predicated. When the public balks at the high price of tickets, we often explain the problem in terms of money — the millions of dollars it may cost to put a production onstage. Even more impressive, though impossible to quantify, is the sheer accumulation of time — and history — in every finished work.
And here’s a link to the rest of the essay.
Filed under Culture, Feuilleton, Music, Opera
Bulging Books, Fancy Letters
The art of extra-illustration is one of those little side channels of scholarship which the Folger Shakespeare Library pursues without apology. Shakespeare is both a huge subject, as large as the Elizabethan world, which was large indeed, and yet a specialty too. Mounting several exhibitions on subjects related to Shakespeare or his time can’t be easy. But curiosity of the Folger’s curators and guest curators is inexhaustible, and some of their best exhibits are also some of their most arcane.
The current exhibition on extra-illustration—the passion for inserting images and other visual material into old books—covers a small but fascinating chapter in the history of bibliophilia and Shakespeare scholarship. That’s why I enjoyed it so much.
It also fit well with another exhibition, about handcrafted letters sent to Radio Azadi in Afghanistan. This may be even more arcane. But when I visited Afghanistan in 2004, I wrote about a small radio station that also received some of these astonishing homemade works of art. I still have a letter, the back of which is covered in perfectly aligned plastic flowers and the front of which has been carefully decorated along its borders with golden stickers. For the authors of these letters, it’s part of the appeal as they reach out with a tangible written letter to touch the voices that cut through the electronic ether and lessen the isolation of life in a poor and scattered country.
I wrote about both of these exhibitions in today’s The Washington Post.
Illustration: In 1903, Percy Fitzgerald’s Life of David Garrick was expanded by an extra-illustrator from two volumes to 17 volumes. The expanded 1868 biography is on display at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Image courtesy the FSL.
Filed under Art, Culture, Feuilleton, Museums
The American Saturnalia
The first shopping day of the Christmas season is upon us, with the usual crowds, the frantic sales and the inevitable parking nightmare. Even the name—Black Friday—suggests that Americans are deeply ambivalent about this strange shopping holiday. But is it, perhaps, the most American day of the year? A spectacle of commerce and crowds, consumerism and credit cards, a day structured like a poll (vote with your pocketbook) on the state of the American economy? Is Black Friday the perfect and most fabulously self-reflective, narcissistic American holiday we’ve invented?
Every December, we regret the increasing commercialization of Christmas, as if we’re slipping further and further from some ideal understanding of the holiday (last seen in a Dickens story or film by Frank Capra?). But let’s be hardheaded and pragmatic about the facts. Christmas isn’t devolving from some Christian fantasy of love and regeneration. That ship has left the harbor. No, it’s evolving into the perfect, five-week spectacle of Americana, with all our best American gadgets and gizmos on display, with all of our basic habits of the heart—desire, acquisitiveness, competition—perfectly exercised. Black Friday is the first day of the American Saturnalia, a festival of capitalism and technology and American self-love all rolled into one.
Filed under Culture, Feuilleton
Create Christmas Memories, Now!
I dropped i
nto a place called National Harbor this afternoon. It is a large convention center, entertainment and hotel district created ex nihilo just a few years ago on the banks of the Potomac River south of Washington, DC. They were putting up the Christmas decorations, including a large Christmas tree made of a conical metal frame onto which patches of greenery were being attached rather like thatching a roof. The tree wasn’t even half finished, so you could see plainly that the whole thing is hollow.
Inside the main convention center hotel a sign announced upcoming Christmas events, with this odd bit of advertising text: “Create your family holiday memories today.”
“Create your memories” is an odd locution. We tend to think our memories are made automatically, that they follow as inevitably on experience as echoes follow noise. To be sure, at some level, we “create” our own memories, both by choosing which experiences we have, and through whatever process in our brains memories are physically forged. But the expression “create your memories” seems too active a way of putting it, and it seems to leave out a step, as if we forge our memories directly, without actually having the experiences upon which memories are based.
The phrase suggests that we create memories rather like we take snapshots, and I think this is why the phrase troubles me. Taking snapshots is a very good way of not having experiences, of sending the data of what we see directly to the digital memory bank without any particular engagement with the reality in which we’re present.
There’s one very big advantage to conceiving of memory this way. It cuts memory free from experience, which is often disappointing, and sometimes downright sad or miserable. If we can create our memories directly, without much reference to the actual experience, then perhaps we can move directly from anticipation of pleasure to the memory of pleasure. The middle, the pleasure or experience itself, is quietly moved out of the picture. And that’s a good thing if what was actually experienced wasn’t, in fact, very pleasurable.
This is what “experience”-based places such as National Harbor are meant to do. They are not actually places to experience much at all, but they are filled with mildly pleasurable stimuli that look good in snapshots and sound great when you “remember” them to people at home (the fountains, the beach, the wharf!). They are places to create memories, not places to be, or dwell, or think, or have adventures and take risks. Christmas is to holidays what National Harbor is to architecture. It is not a meaningful event in itself, but a time to “create memories,” take pictures, file away burnished narratives and tales of Christmas past.
Filed under Architecture, Culture, Feuilleton
Afro-Mexican History
I have a special fondness for the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, a small outpost of the big brand located a short drive from where I live. The museum used to have a running loop of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as part of their main display, and it was there that I was first impressed by the remarkably capitalist rhetoric of that text:
In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
I visited the museum during the inauguration week festivities for Barack Obama and listened to the speech once more in the midst of the growing financial crisis with new ears. I wondered, at the time, if King really thought in the terms of this metaphor, or if he chose it because it rationalized his cause in the eyes of a pragmatic, essentially conservative society.
I also love the museum because you can almost always have it pretty much to yourself, it’s so far removed from the main paths of the Washington tourist circuit. But they now have an exhibition that should change that. “The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present” is a traveling show, first seen at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago in 2006, but it’s not to be missed. It documents, methodically and with historical detail, the presence and absence of people of African descent in Mexico over the past 500 years. The disappearance of Africans as a “third root” of Mexican identity was a complicated and ambiguous project, which the exhibition explains with nuance and precision. I wrote about the show for the Post, and I recommend it to anyone within striking distance of Washington, DC. And don’t forget to pay a visit to Frederick Douglass’s house, nearby, which at this time of year, with the leaves down, has one of the best views of the city.
Filed under Culture, Feuilleton, Museums
