A podcast about books & life — not necessarily in that order
I’ve been a little busy procrastinating lately, so here’s an entry from Sirk, one of my devoted readers:
My iPodMini passed away this morning at the ripe old age of 5 days. In those 5 days it played 2 complete songs and 20 minutes of an audiobook, twice completed syncs with no songs present on the hard drive and had to be restored once. It is survived by an iRiver iFP-395T. Requiscat in pace and may God have mercy on Steve Jobs’ soul.
Record traffic for Virtual Memories this month (and there’s still a few days left, plus it’s a short month)!
Now if only more of you would buy The Immensity of the Here and Now, that novel about 9.11 by Paul West that I published last fall.
Last week, I mentioned that I needed a translation from the Swedish for this review of Immensity. Well, Ken Schubert took care of it for me, and did a bang-up job. Here’s his translation:
“I’ve become an anxious person”
The art, film and music worlds responded quickly to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Literature was slower. Dan Jonsson has read three novels about two airplanes that changed the world.
Caption: Why did the world change? Was it all the suffering, the dead people? Or was it the resemblance between the events and a media production?
For once, it appears to have actually happened.
The events in New York on September 11, 2001 literally changed the world.
Maybe the question we should be asking ourselves is what really caused that change. Was it all the human suffering, the dead people? Or was it the resemblance between the events and a media production — images of the planes crashing into the buildings, the soundlessly collapsing towers, the ash-strewn surroundings and the austere romanticism of Ground Zero? The symbolic, clinical sharpness of the images painstakingly concealed the essence of the attack — the death of its victims.
Literary portrayals of major historical traumas are normally long in coming, but September 11 has provoked prompt counterattacks on all fronts. Last fall marked the release of Paul West’s The Immensity of the Here and Now, a painful excavation of the psychological devastation that the attacks left in their wake. Around the same time, Frenchman Frederic Beigbeder published Windows on the World, a controversial bestseller that attempts to recount the episode from the vantage point of the famed tower restaurants.
Common to the two novels is their focus on inner processes rather than the all-too-familiar course of events. As Beigbeder comments dryly at the beginning of his book, “You all know how it ends: everyone dies.” That foreknowledge also casts a dramatic shadow over Else Buschheuer’s diary novel www.elsebuschheuer.de, presumably the first piece of September 11 fiction when it came out in February 2002. Much of it was written, and even published, before the attacks in the form of a running Internet diary of what was to be an extended visit to New York.
The first two months are a long, tumultuous tour de force of the city’s merchandise fetishism and media mirages, executed with great linguistic zest and ironic distance.
Reading the book is like sitting with your seat belt clasped in one of those planes, more and more terrifying the closer you come. The September 8 entry is about a “cozy evening at home in front of the TV” and the heading for September 9 is “Tidbits.” Triviality waxes prophetic when she expresses her “great relief” on September 5 that the New York sky “could never fall down on my head. The buildings are so high. They hold everything up, I thought, and grew calm.”
The attacks appear midway through the book like a classic peripeteia, turning everything into its opposite. For a moment, the writing becomes agitated, emotional, confused, vulnerable. The people around her — parents, boyfriend, a daughter not previously mentioned — are unexpectedly visible. “I have become an anxious person,” she writes on September 13. “Before this I wasn’tafraid of anything, except that someone would get too close to me. Now I’m afraid of everything.” The fear is accompanied by a vague sense of guilt about the flippancy of her previous life, uncertainty as to whether what she has just gone through is reality or mere images on a TV screen, and the fact that the victims are somebody else.
Similar issues plague Beigbeder in Windows on the World. But while Buschheuer’s talents are in the realm of the documentary, Beigbeder’s are closer to the essay. His book interweaves the tale of a Texas real-estate broker and his two sons with autobiographical reflections. Although the terrorist attacks are the kernel of the book, the narrative branches out both thematically and psychologically.
Beigbeder writes with a mixture of gusto and earnestness that can be explosive. The protagonist tries to console his sons by describing the world as a carnival attraction with special effects by George Lucas. Beigbeder points out that the lapse between collision and collapse is about as long “as a normal Hollywood movie.” He immediately follows that up with a well-aimed dig at his own “dandyism” — in other words, the author as perpetrator, fiction as a sinister moral vacuum. While aware of the risk that he will be regarded as speculative, Beigbeder argues that even a traumatic event of this magnitude deserves retelling in fictional form: “You have to write that which is forbidden” — i.e., what can’t be written. If that’s true, The Immensity of the Here and Now is the closest you can get to such a novel.
Three years after the terrorist attacks, Shrop and Quent, who have been friends since the Second World War, struggle with their phantom pains. Shrop is suffering from extensive memory loss, which Quent — a psychoanalyst — tries to cure.
Memory loss — West avails himself of a popular contemporary metaphor — becomes a composite symbol for innumerable smaller deprivations: a sense of reality, courage to live, trust among human beings, connectedness, comprehensibility, historical understanding and existential meaning.
With its Joycean flow of words, The Immensity of the Here and Now can either intoxicate you or make you give up in exhaustion. Given the abruptly shifting associations between the trivial and the momentous, the book often resembles a kind of collective psychoanalysis. Other times it is more like a melancholy dream, absurd and linguistically absorbed — a Finnegans Wake for a fragmented era. Shrop sees himself as fumbling for a pillar to lean on in a world that has spun out of control — as if the terrorist attacks were intentionally carried out “to devastate consciousness.”
His conclusion is that “something had happened that was nothing.” To encounter that “nothing” is to be at the juncture where language stops functioning. And to write in and around that juncture is — if I understand West and Beigbeder correctly — the author’s sole responsibility.
Dan Jonsson, kultur@dn.se
My pseudonymous buddy in Iran now has a blog! Check out the Brooding Persian!
(Here’s the From the Editor page of my magazine this month)
A recent New York Times article, “Fraud Kicks in Months Ahead of Medicare Drug Discount Card,” discussed the practice of con artists going door-to-door selling ‘Medicare-approved’ drug discount cards, despite the fact that the drug discount program has yet to be instituted and enrollment doesn’t begin for a few more months. This con preys on the fears and vulnerabilities of the elderly and the infirm, for whom prescription drugs are an utter necessity. People who perpetrate this scam are base, venal liars who should go to jail.
Who on earth can wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say, “I’m going to go out today and defraud desperate, uninformed people’? I mean, besides Congress and the White House. After all, what should be done to the people who pushed the Medicare prescription plan through Congress while lying about its projected cost? There’s fraud, and then there’s $134 billion dollars in costs that were conveniently ignored till the bill was passed.
President Bush, who’s already run budget deficits beyond the wildest dreams of any supply-side economist (please note that I’m referring to massive growth in domestic, discretionary spending, not military spending, which I believe is warranted), contended that he would only promote a plan with a total cost of $400 billion. So the plan was shoe-horned to fit that number and gain approval, but “revised estimates” now show it will reach an estimated $534 billion.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me how much I think the Medicare prescription drug benefit plan would ultimately cost. I facetiously replied, “All the money in Moneyville.” It’s my belief that the plan will never actually come to fruition and has been pushed through Congress as a means to win the votes of senior citizens. To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t always been this cynical, but this level of mendacity is maddening, regardless of which political party perpetrates it.
The vote to approve the plan largely fell on partisan lines. I write ‘largely’ because some Republicans did fail to vote for the White House’s program. One of those Representatives, Nick Smith (R-MI), claimed he was offered $100,000 toward his son’s Congressional campaign in exchange for a vote in favor of the plan. As Robert Novak, a right-wing political columnist, wrote last November:
“On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father’s vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, [Rep.] Duke Cunningham [R-CA] and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat.”
Why did Rep. Smith stick to his guns and vote against the plan? Because he feared the White House was underestimating (not necessarily lying about) the cost of the plan!
As Bob Dylan once ‘sang,’ “Steal a little and they throw you in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king.”
–Gil Roth
P.S.: In a similar vein, I’m happy that ImClone’s Erbitux received FDA approval for treating advanced metastatic colon cancer, and I hope that the drug helps extend the lives (and the quality of life) for cancer patients and shows effectiveness in treating other types of cancer. The former chief executive officer of ImClone, Samuel Waksal, was also pretty happy about the approval. In a recent statement, he wrote, “My drug is everything I said it was and it would not be here were it not for me.”
The only problem I can find with this remark is this: Dr. Waksal wrote it from jail, where he will spend seven years of his life for trying to illegally dump every last share he owned of ImClone, because he knew the FDA was going to reject the drug’s initial NDA.
Don’t get me wrong; we’re all delusional in our own way, but when your words disconnect that much from your actions, you belong in one of two places: jail or Washington, D.C.
Ian Frazier writes about Route 3 in the new issue of the New Yorker:
On long walks through suburbs whose names I sometimes can’t keep straight — Glen Ridge, Bloomfield, Brookside, Nutley, Passaic, Garfield, Lodi, Hasbrouck Heights, Hackensack, Teaneck, Leonia — I’ve encountered the New Jersey miscellany up close. Giant oil tanks cluster below expensive houses surrounded by hedges not far from abandoned factories with high brick smokestacks; a Spanish-speaking store that sells live chickens is near a Polish night club off a teeming eight-lane highway; a Greek church on a festival day roasts goats in fifty-five-gallon drums in its parking lot down the road from tall white Presbyterian churches that were built when everything around was countryside. Neighborhoods go from fancy to industrial to shabby without apparent reason, and you can’t predict what the next corner will be.
Funny thing is, I had the same sensation of unpredictability when I was wandering Paris in October 2002.
. . . I probably shouldn’t read this magazine.
(I swear: sometimes, this blog just writes itself . . .)
I love my town. It may not be NYC, but it’s still got some funny shit going on.
Alexandra Wolfe on the deleterious effects of TMPR (Too Much Positive Reinforcement):
We’ve become so inured to the idea that a person’s self-assessment need not be changed by a little thing like repeated and utter failure that no one was the least surprised when Joe Lieberman took so long to throw in the towel. Before New Hampshire, he said, “The people of New Hampshire put me in the ring, and that’s where we’re going to stay.” Jon Stewart on The Daily Show put it best: “When did our elections become the Special Olympics? You’re not all winners. Not everybody gets a hug. You guys got crushed.”
Sorry I haven’t posted anything in 10 days. I’ve been busy at work, traveling for a conference, and doing a lot of formulating for longer essayistic VM entries (pop music, foreign policy, translations of love, and the white whale I call Gold/Stopwatch).
Also, I’ve been battling a mini-depression, but I like to pretend I’ve overcome it (of course, if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this sort of thing at 12:30am on Sunday/Monday, but hey).
I want to write about writing today. Today marks the one-year anniversary of Virtual Memories, a mark I’m proud of. The very first entry was just a silly note to see how this whole Blogger-setup worked. Since then, I’ve written about a ton of subjects, and sometimes I’ve done written pretty well.
I want to thank everyone who’s read my entries, even those of you who only ended up here because of the vagaries of search engines. (Who knew that there are only nine pages in the Internet that Google will refer you to if you enter “Michael Imperioli goatee,” and that VM is one of them?)
Neat article at BusinessWeek about how Dean’s collapse mirrors the dot-com bubble. Compare and contrast with this Washington Post article about how Dean’s campaign sidestepped the traditional organizational structure of the Democratic party. I guess you could substitute “sidestepped the traditional bricks-and-mortar retail structure” for that part, if you want to feel like it’s 1999 all over again.