A Slight Delay

Another favorite simple pleasure: the smell of old books, and old bookstores. It’s that peculiar bouquet of dust, mildew, and whatever else the books have picked up in their travels. It turns the book into a sensory experience, and makes it something more than just its content.

I’d be perfectly happy if someone–whoever makes Febreze, or Lysol even–would bottle that scent. I could think of worse things than the smell of an old library (though I may be in the minority there). And if someone ever managed to bottle “Eau de Benchley Roundup“… I could practically swoon just thinking of it.

One thing life should teach everyone, sooner rather than later, is never to say, “Now I’ve seen everything.” I was reminded of this when I made the mistake of answering a question posed to me during an everyday conversation. I was asked if I’d ever read Rhonda Byrne’s insipid and insidious The Secret (the insipid and insidious part wasn’t part of my interrogator’s question, merely my own editorializing).

I answered that I hadn’t, but that I’d once been subjected to the movie, because someone at my last place of employment apparently thought it was so deep and insightful, we should all be subjected to it. Normally, I would never take the movie over the book; this is one time I gladly made an exception. Hell, it’s bad enough I’ll never get those 90 minutes of my life back.

You would think that I’d just told Billy Graham that I thought the Bible was crap. (more…)

Whenever an artist dies, someone’s always tempted to raid their notebooks, letters, hard drives, and anything else they can find in order to put out still more product to add to the canon. The results are highly varied, since for every unfinished masterpiece and every piece that hints at the greatness that could’ve been, from sources as varied as Douglas Adams, Jeff Buckley, or Charles Dickens, there’s a slew of stuff that was probably best left to the cutting room floor, and that’s of interest only to completists (think, for instance, of the flood of Tupac Shakur marginalia that began just as the body was cooling, and that continues unabated to this day).

Flying to America: 45 More Stories, by Donald Barthelme, lands with a meaty thump between those extremes. While it’s not the best of his output by any means–and I’ll leave the debate over the merits of specific works to others who are more inclined than myself to take it up–it’s still a worthy addition to the artist’s body of work. (more…)

 Kurt Vonnegut’s career–at least the most visible part of it–has been  bookended by Dresden. After being captured during the Battle of the Bulge, the author spent time in a POW camp in that city, watching it transformed literally overnight from a lively and lovely European city to a smoldering wasteland, incinerated by American bombs. He would return to Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five, the novel that made him a household name, and its streets and ghosts would return periodically to haunt his writing.

War and peace similarly stalk the pages of Armageddon in Retrospect. At its most effective–as in the photostat of a letter that Vonnegut wrote to his family at war’s end–it’s a snapshot of the fury and futility of war. (more…)

Douglas Adams famously referred to himself as a “militant Atheist,” mostly so that people would know he did not, in fact, believe God existed; he didn’t want to be confused with a garden-variety agnostic. However, the last few years have given rise–or at least a lot more attention–to an atheism that is militant in the more traditional understanding. These atheists have raised their profile considerably, collectively publishing thousands of pages on their belief system, and spending a good amount of time on the bestseller lists as a result. To wit: Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great; Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion; Sam Harris’s The End of Belief and Letter To A Christian Nation; and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

More on them later; for now, let’s have a look at one of the products of a pendulum shift in the other direction, courtesy of Chris Hedges. Previously the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists, Hedges trained early on as a seminarian, and later cut his teeth as a journalist for the New York Times. With I Don’t Believe in Atheists, Hedges concerns himself with—to borrow a phrase from Tariq Ali—the clash of fundamentalisms. In doing this, he’s delivered not only a good read, but also something that will hopefully start a lively (not to mention probably heated) debate. (more…)

An  essay worth reading in this week’s New York Times Book Review by Rachel Donadio. In brief, she writes about how people’s literary tastes can be a deal-breaker when it comes to romance. She writes:

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. 

It reminded me of something I’d read a long time ago in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity: A Novel (okay, not that long ago… I read the book about once a year. It’s just one of those things). Rob Fleming, the book’s main character, says at one point: “[T]he truth was that these things matter, and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.” (more…)

Nicholson Baker’s latest offering, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization traces the devolution of humanity and human nature as weaponry and tactics evolve. War has never been civilized business, but Baker shows the dizzying speed at which it took on ever more barbaric aspects in the first half of the last century.

There is the same attention to detail in evidence that’s characterized such earlier works as Vox, A Box of Matches, and The Size of Thoughts. Individuals are captured at very specific moments in time, their words and actions rendered in miniature, the better to illuminate the larger picture. Just as important, Baker is not content to simply rehash the same arguments, or perpetuate the same myths, that now pass for received wisdom. Much of the book’s impact derives from the fact that it thrusts generally ignored or forgotten figures like Stefan Zweig or Henry Fosdick into the spotlight, while also not shirking the faults of the narrative’s traditional “heroes,” like FDR and Winston Churchill.

The protagonists and antagonists here are as likely to be ideas as people. Pacifism is presented, more or less unquestioningly, as an a priori good, as are its proponents, among them Zweig, Charles Lindbergh, A.J. Muste, Jeanette Rankin (who has the distinction of being the only person to cast a dissenting vote against both World Wars), Christopher Isherwood, Muriel Lester, and Gandhi. (more…)