What's Worth Reading Today:

Michael Kimmage addresses Adam Kirsch's new book, Why Trilling Matters, in Thursday's New York Times book section and explains the importance of 1950s critic Lionel Trilling:

For literary criticism to have any kind of political application today, literature must first have cultural currency. Here optimists are in the minority. Kirsch’s originality lies in a refusal to equate the existing crisis — literature is “on the verge of default,” he readily admits — with a permanent condition. Contemplating “our unmistakably fragmented literary culture,” Kirsch posits a virtuous circle derived from Trilling’s example. Trilling was “always less concerned with writers than with readers,” he points out, and “less interested in the way novels work than in the way we put them to work in our own lives.” Entertainment is peripheral, if not antithetical, to the true experience of literature, and it is surely less exciting than “the drama of individuals shaping their ideals and morals in reaction to texts.” The critic lives the drama, creating heroic readers in the process, and it is these readers who unite author, text and audience in a prospering literary culture.

Just for the fun of it, I've been watching the 1950s TV western Have Gun, Will Travel recently, and the quoted comments above rang particularly relevant.

Irish Eyes Are Smiling:

Thomas Cahill points out the contribution to literacy that our Irish forefathers made in today's New York Times. The Irish, it seems, provided the shining emerald light that kept western literature from destruction, and they added their sense of humor into the mix while doing so.

Book Review:

Raymond Carver's brand of story telling is alive and well in Wells Tower's book of stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Sure, you can quibble about minimalism and metaphor, but I was reminded of no one so much as Carver in reading Tower's stories.

The characters are everyday sorts of folks who find themselves in everyday sorts of problems, even when they run away from home and join the circus ("On the Show") or they join a band of marauding Vikings to sack a monastery ("Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned"). These are folks who are rundown and weary with their lot in life and desperately seeking answers in all the wrong places because these places are the only ones they know to seek answers in.

Maybe my favorite among the nine stories contained in the book is "Retreat," a story about two brothers, one of whom, Matthew, is doomed like Sisyphus to fail after every success. He is our story teller in this piece, and at the end, he manages to make a magnificent shot on a hunting trip with his brother of an moose. The animal will provide him with enough meat for a year. He and his brother and one other character work all afternoon to muscle the animal back to their hunting cabin, where they begin to butcher it, but while Matthew is cooking the three of them some steaks carved from the animal, the other two realize the meat has been spoiled, probably due to it being diseased.

All of that work for nothing, and how does Matthew respond to that. Like a good many other people I've known. But you'll have to read the story to find out.

This review focuses on plot and character, but the real magic in story telling comes from the voice of the narrator. The opening story, "The Brown Coast," beings with

Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discmfort in his underpants. He'd come in late, his spine throbbing from the bus ride down, and he had stretched out on the floor with a late dinner of two bricks of saltines. Now cracker bits were all over him—under his bare chest, stuck in the sweaty creases of his elbows and his neck, and the biggest and worst of them he could feel lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot in there.

Now who wouldn't want to read on after that opening?

Book Review:

Placing a CD of a poet reading his work in the back of a book of poems isn't a brand new idea, but it's still one worth noting. Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems by Juan Felipe Herrera, from The University of Arizona Press (2008), contains such a CD, and it adds much to the pleasure of reading the book.

Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings

Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without bounderies

—Juan Felipe Herrera

One of the challenges to reading any book of poems is trying to determine how the poems should sound. Regardless of what any poet in the past might have said about poetry being the news of the day, poetry does not read like a newspaper column. Voice is paramount.

Of course, not all poets read their work well. Anyone who has heard the recordings of T. S. Eliot reading The Waste Land should recognize this. (I frankly prefer Garrison Keilor's reading myself.) But Herrera, while he may be no Eliot, knows how to read his own work and does a fine job of it. And after listening to the CD, I found the book even more accessible than it already was.

Herrera is the son of migrant workers and was born in California in 1948. He's been publish poetry for nearly forty years in both Spanish and English. As one reviewer notes, a remarkable and important voice in American poetry. (Google for other links to the man and his work.)

Special thanks to The University of Arizona Press for including the CD.

Amazon Wants You To Read on the Kindle:

Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos announced the latest version of its eBook reader, the Kindle 2, to much fanfare in New York. Now the battle royal begins among it, Sony, and Google to deliver the content you are desperate to read.

NOTE: The devise costs $359.

NOTE: You can buy one of the new mini/9-inch computers for less than this, and its screen will be in color.

NOTE: Text books are still not available.

NOTE: Book lovers still prefer paper by a ratio of 99 to 1.

NOTE: Book sales continue to drop.

NOTE: The number of people who choose to read for entertainment or personal enrichment has been in steady decline for half a century. (Do you really think non readers have just been waiting for a killer electronic device?)

Full disclosure: I own thousands of books. I frequently use the library and have half a dozen books checked out at this time. I sometimes buy books from Amazon. And I've been involved in the eBook business for a dozen years.

(Read The New York Times' story here. The page provides a link to an interview with Bezos too, and you can listen to him talk about how he wants the device to disappear.)

In Other Important News:

Darren Gladstone reports in PC World that "game playing" may be a good way to enhance your résumé. It appears that The World of Warcraft, also known as WoW, might provide the best skills currently. The problem might be with who reads the résumé.

You might be able to organize fifty online players into a team that will follow you and adhere to your plan in accomplishing a specific goal, but will your employer buy what you've been able to accomplish within the framework of the computer gaming world as a skill that he or she can exploit in the workplace?

Or will this prospective employer simply conclude that you can only have achieved this by not doing the work you should have been doing, like what ever it was you were being paid to do or the school work your instructors expected of you. (Phew! That was wordy, but I'll bet you know what I mean, right? Hate those rhetorical questions, don't you? Don't bother to answer that.)

In the Really, Really Important News:

Obama took his show on the road today, dragging along part of the congress, into the hinterlands of … Indiana! The results might be available tomorrow.

Hey! I've been to Indiana, or as we like to say where I'm from, I've been through Indiana. It's a lot like Illinois and Ohio. Or for that matter Kentucky, just a bit further north.

China v. India:

Gurcharan Das entitles his op-ed piece in today's New York Times "The Next World Order," but the interesting part of it is the comparison between how the two nations function. China's economy is tightly controlled by the state, while India's economy works, according to Das, in spite of the government.

Das describes a Chinese friend and business associate befuddled by the Indian attitudes about the recent terrorist attack in Mumbai. The Indian people were angrier at their own government than they were at the terrorists. For Indians, terrorism seems an unfortunate but "futile sideshow."

Notable essays online:

Michael Lewis's "The End," in Porfolio.

Christopher Caldwell's "The Unwisdom of Crowds," in The Weekly Standard.

"Professor X's" "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," in The Atlantic.

John B. Judis's "American Adam," in The New Republic.

The last of these is about America's and American's ability to re-invent themselves. In the essay, Judis compares Barak Obama with Ronald Reagan, something that has become popular to do among pundits. Judis describes Obama's ability to draw massive, admiring crowds, but this was never something that Reagan was able to do. True, "The Great Communicator" won two elections by huge margins, but even at his most well known speech, the Berlin Wall speech, his crowd was relatively small, perhaps only one-third the size that JFK spoke to, and Reagan's crowd was specially screened and appeared as a carefully orchastrated event by the German government.

In terms of popularity at the beginning of an administration, LBJ seems a more appropriate person to compare Obama with. But in terms of re-invention, maybe Reagan works. He certainly re-invented himself. Obama, on the other hand, hasn't so much re-invented himself as he seems to be a rebirth of an ideal that may never have existed.

On the state of literature:

William Boyd in writing a review of William Trevor's Cheating at Canasta has this to say:

The essence of the Chekhovian story, and of the Chekhovian worldview, is that, as he himself once wrote to a friend: “It is time writers, especially those who are artists, recognized that there is no making out anything in this world.” Chekhov refuses to judge, refuses to explain, refuses to celebrate, refuses to “make out” anything — he simply depicts life as he sees it in all its banality and tragicomedy.

Boyd explains that "Trevor is frequently cited as a type of Irish Chekhov: the dark, worldly, bleak nature of his stories is believed to be akin to the dark, worldly, bleak nature of Chekhov’s short fiction."

Chekhov, Boyd points out, is the preeminent influence on letters over the past 100 years, and he is probably correct. Joyce may have captivated the critics, but it is Chekhov to whom young writers inevitably turn if they are serious in pursuing literature as art.

And this may explain why the reading of literature has fallen to an all time low. Reading is a habit that must be developed in youth, and it is rare that a young person will be captivated by a vision of the world that is Chekhovian.