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Gary Dourdan of CSI and Chris Cornell:

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My least favorite intellectual trend:

* You read a novel, say about the horrors of slavery, and proceed to write an article on it.

* In this paper your job is to find the subconscious and embarrassing subtext of the novel---the actual attitude of the novelist toward his material that the novelist has unwittingly betrayed but that you, the critic, are on to.

* Example: In the anti-slavery novel, the author, far from being the progressive champion of abolition that he thinks he is, has through the subconsciously transmitted subtext of his novel shown himself to be a repressed and regressive racist.

* You, the critical genius, have successfully "debunked" the author's claim to humanitarianism, not to mention his pretense of literary communication.

This has been the primary critical approach to cultural production for the last 40 years. And there's some merit to this approach. We live in a super-self-conscious culture that's extremely sophisticated about public communication. Everyday people are adept at decoding advertising and political messages. And novelists are not magically exempt from the tendency to hold, hide, and then betray distasteful attitudes.

The problem is that Debunkism has completely colonized the minds of cultural critics, to the point that they can't see that their reading is, 90 percent of the time, an act of imaginative construction. And that they are relying on their own psychoanalysis of the author, despite neither having studied psychoanalysis nor actually knowing the author at all. They are replacing the author's fiction with their own fiction. I know this gets into reader theory, but it's an important distinction---what a story can be MADE to say and what it actually says.

Here are some recent examples that have ticked me off:

* An article that purported to show how Dances with Wolves was anti-Indian

* The critics who think The Lord of the Rings is about keeping classes in their place

* The Atlantic Monthly writer who accused Jonathan Franzen of being a rabid anti-experimentalist, despite his glowing reviews and support of experimental novels

* The NPR music critic who finds that Madonna's latest album smacks of "desperation"

This probably sounds like Harold-Bloom-like conservatism, but I don't really think that way. All I'm saying is, when evaluating a work of art, it helps not to make things up, no matter how avant-garde and appealing the fiction.

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Jay and I went to eat at Noodles Corner last night, an independent restaurant in Columbia. We had been there several times when it first opened and found it to be just okay; not great, not terrible.

Last night I ordered the stir-fried vegetables, which was the usual melange of overcooked broccoli and bok choy in a gooey brown sauce. Jay ordered the pineapple shrimp, which sounded promising. But when it arrived it was the strangest looking dish I have ever laid eyes on. There was some white rice on one side, a little pile of julienned cucumbers on another side, and in the middle a pile of plain, deep-fried, breaded shrimp. There was no sauce, but there was a strange rope of thick white substance draw on top in an abstract curly pattern, with I think three pineapple chunks on top.

Many of you know Jay to be a creamy-white-foodaphobe, so I took the plunge. As Jay predicted, the white rope was plain mayonnaise, apparently squeezed right out of the Hellman's plastic bottle. It was the strangest food idea I've ever seen presented, was as disgusting as it sounds, and I still cannot figure out how the chef (Asian immigrant, I believe) decided upon this dish. Is it somehow based on a real Asian dish? Did he figure that Americans like mayonnaise and so it would be okay to top his plain shrimp with it? Did someone play a practical joke on him and lead him to believe this was an American classic?
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I'm working from home today, currently looking out at the green-gold forest outside my window. Although (or because?) I've been in a state of mild intoxication ever since my day at Sherwood Gardens, my brain is fairly empty. This will be the Goodwill store of blog entries. Random assortment of bits and bobs of dubious value.

1. I'm about halfway through Norman Cantor's The Civilization of the Middle Ages. FANtastic book. Such a good, clear academic writer. I've finished the earliest of the medieval writings (Boethius, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Beowulf), and will start on Abelard and Heloise next, followed by Song of Roland, the Icelandic sagas, and the Niebelungslghskshgfg (<-- code for "I don't know how to spell this").

2. Ryan and Lindsey are spending the night on Friday while their worthy parents go off for a anniversary jaunt to a B&B.

3. On Sunday our gamer friend and co-book-clubber Kim will be introducing the book club to the phenom of Mass Effect. Bagel pizzas will be served.

4. Next Friday is my nephew Keith's graduation from University of Dayton, to which we will be hieing. It used to crush my spirit to think of my nephews having to enter the world of work and full-on adulthood. Why can't they spend the whole of their life at the playground, like they did when they were three? But Jared seems to have weathered the transition just fine, and no doubt Keith will do the same. Resilient, charming young men, they are.
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This came from one of our freelancers today:

17 April 2008

This is National Poem in Your Pocket Day, when we are supposed to carry around and share a favorite poem, so this one will be the Poem in Your Email. It's not one of all my all-time great poems (those would be from Donne or Dickinson, for me), but one worth enjoying for a combination of style, pleasure, and wit, with a bit of edge. It's by Matthew Prior (17th century), and called variously Chloe and Lisetta, or Question to Lisetta, with the Questioner presumably being the poet. The lady gets the last word, of course.

THE QUESTION

What nymph should I admire or trust,
But Chloe beauteous, Chloe just?
What nymph should I desire to see,
But her who leaves the plain for me?
To whom should I compose the lay,
But her who listens when I play?
To whom in song repeat my cares,
But her who in my sorrow shares?
For whom should I the garland make,
But her who joys the gift to take,
And boasts she wears it for my sake?
In love am I not fully blest?
Lisetta, prithee tell the rest.

LISETTA'S REPLY

Sure Chloe just, and Chloe fair,
Deserves to be your only care;
But, when you and she today
Far into the wood did stray,
And I happen'd to pass by,
Which way did you cast your eye?
But, when your cares to her you sing,
You dare not tell her whence they spring:
Does it not more afflict your heart,
That in those cares she bears a part?
When you the flowers for Chloe twine,
Why do you to her garland join
The meanest bud that falls from mine?
Simplest of swains! the world may see
Whom Chloe loves, and who loves me.
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From Stephanie Coontz (author of Marriage: A History) on washingtonpost.com today:

Economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson found that in every state that adopted no-fault divorce, the next 5 years saw a 20 percent decline in the suicide rate of wives, and an even greater decline in domestic violence."
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Here's my favorite line from a novel called An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. The protagonist is a man named Sam who is slowly finding out unwanted secrets about his parents. He discovers, among other things, that his father has had a decades-long affair with a woman named Deirdre, who now in desperation wants Sam's help. As she pressures him, he replies: “’No, no, no,’ I told her, by which I also meant, Revenge, revenge, revenge.”
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Since the raid on the polygamist compound in Texas last week, there have been a lot of former and current polygamists on TV telling their stories. I saw a woman on Larry King the other night who I'd previously seen on Oprah. She's interesting: She's an attractive, modern-looking woman who lives with her husband and his two other wives (one of whom is her sister) in an affluent neighborhood (not a compound). Her kids attend public school, and she is open to her kids going to college and being in monogamous relationships once they grow up.

So Larry King was asking her why she likes this lifestyle, and she said she likes the camaraderie of the other wives, all living together and raising their kids together. And the more I thought about this, the more sense it made. (Stay with me here.) Here and on Oprah, she never said, "I really fell in love with this particular man and wanted to be with him, and he already had another wife." Or "I'm really attracted to the idea of sharing my husband with other women." In fact, when asked what she likes about polygamy, she doesn't mention the man at all. It's specifically the camaraderie of the other wives.

As someone who has lived as part of a community before (not as a full-fledged member, but I was very involved in the Lamb of God Community and their college outreach when I was in college), and known others in such communities, I understand the attraction to communal living. People weren't really made to live in very separate nuclear families the way most of us do now. We thrive with extended family, in villages, in churches (at least those that are more than one-stop-worship on Sundays), even in groups based on demographics, like tight-knit ethnic societies or groups of gay friends. We long to be a part of something bigger, part of a group of people who are both separate from us but also committed to us.

And these women have that. My mom used to tell us about her grandmother, who lived her entire life next to her sister. They married two brothers, and even after they got married, they would always move together. I'm reminded also of how my two best friends and I used to fantasize in college about buying land together and building houses on it, so that we could live right next door and cook meals together, play games at night, have tea in between loads of laundry. This might sound like an adolescent fantasy, but it reflects an authentic longing in us for that kind of "village life" that has mostly disappeared from our world.

Hey, I'd love to live next door to my sisters or my best friends, even in a house with them if it were big enough. But that will never happen. And why not? Because we are married to different MEN. And our husbands don't want to live together. But what if we had only one man between us, one who in turn was happy to support all of us?

Of course, there's one huge downside to all this: I don't want to be married to any of my sisters' or friends' husbands, nor they to mine. What the attractive, suburban polygamist wife has given up in exchange for community is any possibility of a romantic relationship with a man, the idea of a soul mate. I know that many monogamous women don't have that either. But while you MAY not have that if you're monogamous, you definitely CAN'T have it if you're polygamous---the odds of finding a true soul match from the limited pool of polygamous-friendly candidates, the problems of unequal love, the inability of one man to develop a relationship with three woman and twelve or fourteen children, all make it very unlikely.


Romantic intimacy is not a sacrosanct value. It's a relatively modern one, and even today in lots of places marriages are arranged. A peaceful and warm relationship is considered to be enough, and the attractions of a wide family life compensate. I imagine the girls in this modern polygamist household, and the choice they face in their future. If they choose monogamy, will their existence always feel slightly lonely? Maybe---it's a sad thought, going from all that existential bounty to the modesty of nuclear family life. But for anyone who HAS experienced romantic intimacy, who has found someone who feels like a soul mate, it's impossible to think of giving it up.
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Many of you know our wonderful neighbors Bob and Lisa (plus son Brian, plus dog Dude). We're headed to their house for dinner on Saturday, and she knows that we recently became vegetarians and wanted to know if we eat fish. I replied that we do, and that in fact we're not true vegetarians---we will eat non-industrial meat. Her reply: "Non-industrial meat?? You're not suggesting we eat Dude for dinner, are you??"

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Someone on Michael Dirda's chat posted this lovely passage by John Cowper Powys about Homer's Odyssey online yesterday:

"There is no poem in the world in which the dramatic significance of the revolving hours of the day plays so dominant a part. From the earliest rising of 'rosy-fingered dawn' upon her twilit 'dancing lawns,' till the moment when 'all the ways grow dark' we are made aware of the huge ethereal background against which we are fated to yield or endure, to perish or survive."
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I started reading a book called An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, and the narrator is annoying me. He's mentally off-key and he's a liar, and I'm tiring of him. Which is strange, because I usually LOVE the anti-hero narrator. In particular, I like the way the reader has to glimpse the "real story" in between the lines of the narration. Some recent novels in which such a narrator is featured:

The Egyptologist: One of my very favorite recent novels, narrated by a self-deluded archaeologist wanna-be who's just one mountain ridge over from the biggest archaeological find in Egypt.

Half-Broken Things: A psychological mystery/thriller about a disturbed older woman house-sitting for a family and slowly taking over their life.

Notes on a Scandal: The book on which the recent film with Judi Dench was based, it's narrated by an older schoolteacher who befriends a young, inexperienced teacher.

13 Steps Down: My favorite Ruth Rendell mystery, about a disturbed young man living in the 3rd floor of a house owned by a, yes, disturbed elderly woman; they share the narration in alternate chapters.
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We've been having Rocky-containment problems recently. I think because it's spring, it's wet, and ergo the small-animal smells have been particularly strong. He'll be in out in the yard, catch a scent of something just outside the fence, and starting yapping and baying and "alerting" (high-pitched short barks intended to tell the hunter "I found something!") like crazy.

This is followed by trying to get through that fence with all his might. Luckily, the barking draws our attention and we can run out and stop him. But sometimes he beats us. And you know how he gets out? He pulls like a madman on the wires with his teeth until they come out of the ground.
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Confession: I Now Read Romance Novels

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This is weird. Over the course of the last couple of years, I realize I have become a bona fide readers of romance novels. I used to read them when I was a young teenager---11 or 12 years old---when they were true bodice-rippers in the historical vein. But I left them behind after 2 years or so; I don't even remember when or why, just that I can't remember reading any after about 12 or 13. I had not thought about them since then.

Then a few years ago, a relative who works in a bookstore sent out a Christmas letter with some book recommendations, one of which was Faking It by Jennifer Crusie. This was a romance novel, but riding that edge between romance and chick lit. It was smart and funny, and contemporary. Jennifer Crusie led me down the garden path. I read many of her novels, and branched out into other contemporary romance novels (though I've never found another contemporary writer I like as much as her).

Then just a few weeks ago, Michael Dirda of the Washington Post Book World did a feature on the 50 greatest love stories of all time, based on readers' picks. Several of them were classics (Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina) but several were flat-out historical romance novels. I got on Amazon, looked with chagrin at the Thomas-Kinkade-style pastel cover art, closed my eyes, and ordered. And what I've found is that these novels are generally (1) extremely formulaic, (2) slightly embarrassing, and (3) a lot of fun to read. I only got a few, and these are (I suppose) the best of the genre; but I was surprised at how quickly they took me back to my 12-year-old self, reading for fun, for bliss, for STORY. There's a sense of adventure, and these writers are plotting like maniacs.

And not to get all academic about it, but I kind of like that they are the kind of books that only women would like (unlike chick lit, which has broader appeal). I'm pretty sure that men would laugh their heads off if they read even a few pages. But this isn't about them. It's about us. And about how rakish men like the Count of Vaillauron and the Duke of Jervaulx find us absolutely irresistible. Okay, yes, it's also pornography, letters to Hustler with more detailed plots and pretty scenery. But it's ours and we like it.

That's it for now. I've got to run. My workday is over, and somewhere there's a curricle waiting for me.
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