Joshua Malbin

I found Scott’s article interesting and informative. I do not think he will care but just in case he is the type of person who does believe in lifelong learning and collegiality, I thought I would share my thought about why I was offended. I would think a historian would understand the concept of trigger words that offend groups of people and indicate prejudice. Such as when he wrote, “gun nuts.”

–from the 11:30am  Steve Parscale comment on “Amazing Disgrace”, Scott McLemee’s review of Michael Bellesiles’s latest move.

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Say you have a character you want to invest with mystery. You might start by having another character mention him ominously:

But she had made a previous stoppage on the second floor, and had silently pointed at a dark door there.

“The only other lodger,” she now whispered, in explanation; “a law-writer. The children in the lanes here, say he has sold himself to the devil. I don’t know what he can have done with the money. Hush!”

We can learn his name indirectly too, through mail left lying around:

…announcing that a respectable man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr. Krook within.

Then forget about him for eighty or so pages. When he comes back, have yet a third character remark that “Nemo” is Latin for “no one,” and try to go see the mysterious copyist against more stern warnings:

“You know what they say of my lodger?” whispers Krook, going up a step or two.

“What do they say of him?”

“They say he has sold himself to the Enemy, but you and I know better—he don’t buy. I’ll tell you what, though; my lodger is so black-humoured and gloomy that I believe he’d as soon make that bargain as any other. Don’t put him out sir. That’s my advice!”

Then apply the atmospherics with a trowel.

Mr. Tulkinghorn with a nod goes on his way. He comes to the dark door on the second floor. He knocks, receives no answer, opens it, and accidentally extinguishes his candle in doing so.

Naturally. Time for the pathetic fallacy.

The air of the room is almost bad enough to have extinguished it, if he had not. It is a small room, nearly black with soot, and grease, and dirt. In the rusty skeleton of a grate, pinched at the middle as if Poverty had gripped it, a red coke fire burns low. In the corner by the chimney, stand a deal table and a broken desk: a wilderness marked with a rain of ink. In another corner, a ragged old portmanteau on one of the two chairs, serves for cabinet and wardrobe; no larger one is needed, for it collapses like the cheeks of a starved man. The floor is bare; except that one old mat, trodden to shreds of rope-yarn, lies perishing upon the hearth. No curtain veils the darkness of the night, but the discolored shutters are drawn together; and through the two gaunt holes pierced in them, famine might be staring in—the Banshee of the man upon the bed.

The stage is set. The mystery man revealed at last.

For, on a low bed opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork, lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer, hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there, dressed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look, in the spectral darkness of a candle that has guttered down, until the whole length of its wick (still burning) has doubled over, and left a tower of winding-sheet above it. His hair is ragged, mingling with his whiskers and his beard—the latter, ragged too, and grown, like the scum and mist around him, in neglect. Foul and filthy as the room is, foul and filthy as the air, it is not easy to perceive what fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through the general sickliness and faintness, and the odor of stale tobacco, there comes into the lawyer’s mouth the vapid taste of opium.

“Hallo, my friend!” he cries, and strikes his iron candlestick against the door.

He thinks he has awakened his friend. He lies a little turned away, but his eyes are surely open.

“Hallo, my friend!” he cries again. “Hallo! Hallo!”

As he rattles on the door, the candle which has drooped so long, goes out, and leaves him in the dark; with the gaunt eyes in the shutters staring down upon the bed.

Are these tricks crude? You betcha. But they work.

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Iris Murdoch demonstrates how to write about rationalization:

Another elderly lady, struggling through the crush, reached the door of Dora’s carriage and addressed her neighbour. ‘Ah, there you are, dear, I thought you were nearer the front.’ They looked at each other rather gloomily, the standing lady leaning at an angle through the doorway, her feet trapped in a heap of luggage. They began a conversation about how they had never seen the train so full.

Dora stopped listening because a dreadful thought had struck her. She ought to give up her seat. She rejected the thought, but it came back. There was no doubt about it. The elderly lady who was standing looked very frail indeed, and it was only proper tat Dora, who was young and healthy should give her seat to the lady who could then sit next to her friend. Dora felt the blood rushing to her face. She sat still and considered the matter. There was no point in being hasty. It was possible of course that while clearly admitting that she ought to give up her seat she might nevertheless simply not do so out of pure selfishness. This would in some ways be a better situation than what would have been the case if it had simply not occurred to her at all that she ought to give up her seat. On the other side of the seated lady a man was sitting. He was reading his newspaper and did not seem to be thinking about his duty. Perhaps if Dora waited it would occur to the man to give his seat to the other lady? Unlikely. Dora examined the other inhabitants of the carriage. None of them looked in the least uneasy. Their faces, if not already buried in books, reflected the selfish glee which had probably been on her own a moment since as she watched the crowd in the corridor. There was another aspect to the matter. She had taken the trouble to arrive early, and surely ought to be rewarded for this. Though perhaps the two ladies had arrived as early as they could? There was no knowing. But in any case there was an elementary justice in the first comers having the seats. The old lady would be perfectly all right in the corridor. The corridor was full of old ladies anyway, and no one else seemed bothered by this, least of all the old ladies themselves! Dora hated pointless sacrifices. She was tired after her recent emotions and deserved a rest. Besides, it would never do to arrive at her destination exhausted. She regarded her state of distress as completely neurotic. She decided not to give up her seat.

She got up and said to the standing lady ‘Do sit down here, please. I’m not going very far, and I’d much rather stand anyway.’

Show, don’t tell, can even apply to thought processes.

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The Millions proposes that Dave Eggers take over the editorship of the Paris Review from Phillip Gourevitch. My first thought was “what’s in it for Dave?” My guess, uninformed (McSweeney’s “doesn’t do numbers”) is that Eggers’s current gig has to have a wider circulation than the Review. The Millions has an answer, although it’s a kind a spinach prescription: they think that the editorship would force Eggers to finally get past his experiments in cute and forever side with the kinds of empathetic ventriloquism that runs through books like What is the What and Zeitoun.

This reportorial interest in the wider world is one that The Paris Review could nourish, even as it exposed Eggers to an even wider audience – one that might be less satisfied with his tics, and more demanding of writing in proportion with his enormous gifts.

I agree that this would be good spinach. A longer version of my abbreviated post Great Daves of the 90s would have had a similar hope for him.

Eggers’s innovation was a seemingly paradoxical blend of self-consciousness with generosity. At its best it uses a kind of non-corrosive irony to create a space for empathy. At its worst it becomes twee narcissism. N+1’s first Intellectual Situation called out the “Eggersards” for forming a “regressive avant-garde,” one which valued childhood above all other values. When Eggers’s valorization of children informs his literary good-citizen side, you get magic like 826 Valencia, a tutoring program that has spread from San Francisco across the country and trades on the cultish adoration for Eggers among the urban literate to produce an army of volunteers helping underprivileged youth with their writing homework and encouraging their creativity.

Helping actual children is a less exhaustible project than adopting childhood as an intellectual stance. An Eggers editorship of The Paris Review might reconcile the imagination and experimentation of the McSweeney’s empire with adulthood.

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Late in Book Two Günther Grass builds one of his novel’s main climaxes. World War II is ending and Oskar Matzerath, the narrator and protagonist, attends his father’s funeral. There he plays horseshoes with a metal wreath and a cast-iron cross until he finally rings the post and makes a momentous decision: he will put down the tin drum he’s been beating since he was three years old and allow himself to grow for the first time since then.

Two small lessons here. The first is, don’t worry too much about making your symbolism heavy-handed. Oskar’s father literally chokes to death on his Nazi Party pin when the Russians arrive in Danzig, and as a result Oskar stops his incessant toy drumbeat and begins to emerge from an infantile state.  (Though we soon learn he doesn’t make it all the way to normal adulthood but only to a slightly larger but now somewhat deformed midgethood. Presumably so too did Germany.) Not subtle, still satisfying.

The second is, the impact of a climax is heightened if you let the reader relax for a few pages afterward and absorb it. The climactic chapter “Should I or Shouldn’t I?” which ends with “Leo proclaiming to all the world: ‘He’s growing, he’s growing, he’s growing…’” is followed by this flash-forward to the mental institution from which Oskar narrates his life story:

Last night I was beset by hasty dreams. They were like friends on visiting days. One dream after another; one by one they came and went after telling me what dreams find worth telling; preposterous stories full of repetitions, monologues which could not be ignored, because they were declaimed in a voice that demanded attention and with the gestures of incompetent actors. When I tried to tell Bruno the stories at breakfast, I couldn’t get rid of them, because I had forgotten everything; Oskar has no talent for dreaming.

While Bruno cleared away the breakfast, I asked him as though in passing: “My dear Bruno, how tall am I exactly?”

Bruno set the little dish of jam on my coffee cup and said in tones of concern: “Why, Mr. Matzerath, you haven’t touched your jam.”

This goes on for three more pages, in the course of which we learn one or two more things (Oskar’s height at the time of telling the story, for example). For the most part, though, this is dialogue and description meant to be forgotten. Look at how that first paragraph says exactly nothing. It is filler, meant to register as filler and give the reader time to digest what came before it.

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In a gesture towards a clean slate, a fresh start, and a healthy digestive reaction to the upcoming bowl of black-eyed peas, here are four quick sketches for blog posts that I started to draft but never completed. Fly free, little half-born angels.

• Great Daves of the 90’s. I read Infinite Jest as part of the Infinite Summer challenge, and David Foster Wallace’s twisting, reflexive, ouroborean self-consciousness took me back to the early 90’s. The middle year of my college career was marked by emerging consciousness of the fictions involved in pronouncements about Generation X, and the same kinds of impossibility around newness and protest that Kurt Cobain seemed to reel from in his final famous years. When Dave Eggers (whose Might magazine I had enjoyed) published A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, its hysterically self-aware style felt immediately familiar, and I put off reading it until a few years ago, when I devoured it quickly, enjoyably, and without surprise. Wallace, however, resonates with the maddening headaches of that young consciousness that everything you think is already always being said, programmed by a machine you may operate but never master. But by approaching these struggles through the character of Don Gately, a recovering alcoholic, and showing us his experience grappling with the seemingly empty but vitally true dogma of Alcoholics Anonymous, Wallace validated this familiar and vertiginous self-reflexivity while challenging and expanding it, using a feature of my upper-middle-class overeducated habits of mind to create sympathy for a broken, giant ex-con. Also noted: while I was obsessing over the meanings and traps of “Generation X” I bought a Malcolm X hat (purple X on white baseball cap) and Sharpied “Gen-” in front of the X, and added “Generation Next” to the back, a gesture which in retrospect was a bizarre fashion error.
• Where The Wild Things Are. Where The Fantastic Mr. Fox presented a fetishization of material goods behind its trumpeted wildness, the Jonzes’ Eggers’s Sendak’s wild things are figurines in staging a Oedipal passage to adulthood. Lauren Ambrose’s monster KJ is a cool babysitter, providing a mother-figure who is also a safe object for the early stirrings of sexual desire (she swallows Max whole to protect him at one point, keeping him safe in a sticky cavernous interior). The movie’s exploration of childhood sets sail from the therapist’s couch, turning Max’s inchoate childhood rages (very well represented) into figures with names before the journey home — and into healthy adulthood — can start. A delightful adaptation of a childhood story to a therapy generation, Where The Wild Things Are was good but both HJ and I wished it wasn’t the definitive take. We wanted the magnificent sets and costumes put in the hands of two or three more writers, so they could play out their own versions of WTWTA against their own idiosyncracies.
• Interzone. At the time, the Los Angeles City Council was considering the prohibition of medical marijuana dispensaries within 1,000 feet of any residence. More typically, restricted uses will be prohibited close to schools, churches, parks and playgrounds–y’know, because the children are the future– but someone went and threw residences in there as well, leaving about two or three industrial districts where dispensaries could fill prescriptions. My proposal was for the creation of an L.A. Interzone, a la the portrayal of Tunis (?) in Naked Lunch, where head shops, dispensaries, sex offenders and strip clubs could all profitably locate.
• Road Not Taken. I noticed that the people running to replace Paul Krekorian in the special election for California’s 43rd assembly district were all people that I knew and had come up with in L.A. politics. When I started working in City Hall I toyed with the idea of one day running for office, and if I had, it would be that election today. I made the choice not to seek elective office a long time before I got out of local politics entirely, but if I hadn’t, I could be out there today. Mutatis mutandis, I would have stacked up well. They’re a talented and friendly lot, and it should be an interesting race, but the Assembly today is no place for someone who wants to make a difference in California politics, sadly.

There. No more ideas! I’ll have to go see a movie or something. Big Josh, you back yet?

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I like that people put books they don’t want anymore on their stoops for other people to take for free. I wasn’t even out looking for them today and here’s all the ones I picked up going to and from the farmer’s market.

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If there are lessons for writers in Infinite Jest, this must be among them:

If you put into your work everything you know in your head, you’d best also put into it everything you know in your heart.

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Consider a book that is preoccupied with simulacra (copies without originals), with the relation of maps to territories, a book which uses “map” as a synonym for self. Consider that this book imagines an entertainment complex dominated by on-demand entertainment cartridges and the fuson of television and computing. Consider that one of the  strands of this book that most resembles a plot hinges on the terroristic dissemination of one of these cartridges.

Now consider that in the book, published in 1996, this plan is slowed down by the discovery of a “read-only” copy when only a master copy can be used to make additional copies. The fuck is a read-only copy?

Infinite Jest gets a surprising number of predictions right. But it missed Napster.

(Caveat: I’m around p. 760. Perhaps I’ll revise this.)

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“Canalized” is a useful synonym for “channeled.”

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