Dr. Oppenheimer

I am nearly done with the Oppenheimer biography. I read it over Memorial Day weekend instead of writing, which I had time to do. I found out the following:

--The H-bomb is a "Super" version of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; they tested it and it vaporized an island. Oppenheimer planned the drop on Hiroshima, muttering "those poor people" in the days ahead, but never understood why Nagasaki...and he was against the H-bomb. The H-bomb is more or less the Doomsday device from Dr. Strangelove, and it exists.

--Truman was George W. Bush before George W. Bush was. We have elected mind-blowingly weak and stupid presidents before and made them out to be heroes. I hope history treats Bush more truthfully.

--The McCarthy era was just the same as ours. Just substitute terrorism for communism. Dissent was considered treason. Science was suspect. Power-mad, resentful bullies ruined thoughtful, intelligent people's lives.

--Oppenheimer named names; his brother didn't. His brother Frank founded the Exploratorium.

Krugmaniac

I'm one.

Paul Krugman, today in the NYT:

But can the sort of person who would act on global warming get elected? Are we — by which I mean both the public and the press — ready for political leaders who don't pander, who are willing to talk about complicated issues and call for responsible policies? That's a test of national character. I wonder whether we'll pass.

Writing again

For the first time in about a month, I've worked on my fiction. Twice in the past three days. But I am not back in the groove. It feels strange; it is so easy to get used to not writing, although I think it's been depressing me. Clearly it's impossible to write and work full-time, impossible for me anyway. I haven't had the energy, and it's become a downward spiral in which not writing makes me depressed, giving me less energy, etc.

On the plus side, I've gotten some real distance on a story that I didn't like much when I was working on it regularly. Having reread Olesha's Envy again in order to teach it, I came back to my own writing with an edgier voice. I am more willing to make my main character seem like a lunatic. I am more willing to chop out whole sections, even though they seemed integral to the plot. I think you have to give up the plot--just chop out everything you don't like, regardless of whether it's holding the story together. Then string the good parts together with a few more good parts and you're done. So how to get this distance on work on a regular basis without stopping writing for a month? I have to have several projects going at once, I guess. That doesn't seem like the usual advice, but there's no other option.

Could I read Houllebecq?

After reading John Updike's piece on Michel Houellebecq in the New Yorker (oh, how upper-middlebrow can you be?), I am wondering whether I would be able to read Houellebecq. I have been asking my students over the years whether they think it's possible to write a "good" novel with either a loathesome protagonist or a loathesome moral message. Michiko Kakutani (descending into middle-middlebrow territory) would simply say no; end of discussion. I find that tedious. Updike gives Houellebecq a little more leeway, giving him credit in his latest novel for an interesting concept and vivid if incredibly bleak ending (a man living out his scientifically lengthened lifespan as, essentially, an oyster). Yet from all I read about Houllebecq's writing, the incredible misogyny, racism, and meaningless violence...well, he would be the best test case for the problem of the good novel about bad things. But what if you can't stand reading the book? Isn't some form of pleasure essential to the literary experience? I suppose his work must be pleasurable to some people, since he keeps publishing and being reviewed, and even being invited to speak at real venues. And I don't know that we can assume all the readers who like him are depraved. Perhaps they like the extreme challenge, like people who bungee jump or something. X-Reading. I'm not sure I can do it.

Midwestern alcoholism

Watching American Movie (a documentary about a mulleted independent filmmaker from the Milwaukee suburbs), I was reminded of the phenomenon of Midwestern alcoholism. Supposedly the Midwest is the home of traditional values, but having grown up there, and left, I've realized that a large percentage of these folks are pickled most of the time. Usually it's the sixpack+ of beer after work, but there's also hard liquor, glue, coke, meth, acid, hairspray, whatever. Whatever distracts from the bleakness of forced conformity and the end of youth with thirty more years of crappy jobs and a disintegrating marriage ahead.

I am being hard on the Midwest. But this is just to counter the myth of cleanliness, happiness, and religious piety surrounding the vast center of the country. The heartland is tripping, folks.

In the DVD commentary it sounded like both the main characters in the film had gone straight, so good for them. Maybe seeing themselves on film did the trick. They seemed like intelligent and interesting people, even though the filmmakers made fun of them. Who knows what they could have done in a different place.

The bad novel

"The bad novel aims to please by flattering, whereas the good one is an exigence and an act of faith." (Sartre)

Nafisi strikes out again

Well, it's two for two. This year's students disliked Reading Lolita in Tehran as much as last year's did. Is it something I said? I tried pretty hard not to give away my lukewarmness, though I did suggest the book might somehow let Western readers off the hook. (Isn't Iran bad? Yes, it is. But it is bad, you see, so why should reading that piss us off?) The first discussion was a little sluggish, but I didn't detect universal distate. Today they piled on with glee. They hated her pastries and ice cream. Why is she always talking about her problems over pastries or coffee ice cream? Last year it was the strawberry-covered coffee mug that set people off. Should she have suffered more, we asked? Do we dislike her for not having it "so bad"? For being rich and educated? Or does she just not write very well? No one seemed able to empathize with her (although at least it wasn't like last year, when I suspected that was because she was "middle aged"). The students seemed to conclude that her prose didn't move us; she told us instead of showing that she suffered; we didn't feel anything out of the ordinary. That was the most interesting point for me. It wasn't that she was depicting a fairly ordinary (if privileged) life amid the horrors, but that she didn't make us feel other than ordinary feelings about it. And besides if the road to hell is paved with adverbs, as Stephen King says, then she is knocking on Satan's door.

Dr. Baltar

I have been reading Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's biography of Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus. I somehow love reading books about atom-bomb physicists; I read James Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman at least twice, and I am not a re-reader. Maybe I'm drawn by the fact that I don't understand much about the science, so there's less at stake for me than, say, reading about a famous author. I can still admire the scientist's passion and dedication without feeling inferior. I seem to be able to suspend judgment on what it meant for these guys, often like Oppenheimer politically and socially liberal, to work on the bomb. There's something thrilling about the name Los Alamos (and we've visited this lovely, oddly sterile community), even though what came out of it is appalling.

Trev says Oppenheimer reminds him of Dr. Baltar on Battlestar Galactica--a brilliant, chattery, occasionally crazed, basically good guy who ends up bringing great evil into the world.

Kubrick's Lolita film

I'm teaching Kubrick's film of Lolita (1962) and I must say I'm liking it a great deal. Nabokov didn't like it very much (although he praised the acting) and it's obvious that the filmmakers tamed the story. Sue Lyon does look much older even than her 14 (or 15?) years, and as one of my students pointed out, they really glamorized her. The novel's Lolita is something of a tomboy. Yet Sue Lyon is very childish in her mannerisms and speech, so she presents a sort of puzzle. In some ways she represents the "problem" of Lolita by being a different sort of problem. In the novel Lolita is sexually experienced (as she is in the film) and clearly lusts after Humbert, without realizing quite what she's getting into. The film's Lolita looks like a woman but is actually not much older than the novel's Lolita--so even if viewers thought she was older, she really was something of a kid herself (though there seems to be some sort of dividing line between OK and not at age 14...go figure). James Mason was about 10 years older than the novel's Humbert. Quilty's omnipresence in the film is a sort of visual catch-all for the many literal and existential threats that Humbert faces. I find Humbert more sympathetic in the movie, but many of my students have felt the opposite so far. They think he's too mean to Charlotte (Shelley Winters)--but I thought she was meant to seem unbearable, almost blamed for driving Humbert into Lolita's arms.

How Oprah will save us

I am coming to the conclusion that Oprah Winfrey is the future of literature in the United States. And that's a good thing. We talked in my class yesterday with Josh Landy, our guest speaker who's written about ethical criticism (he's against it). Yet he led us to conclude that it's imperative that people read good literature. We defined "good" as having moral complexity, bringing about surprise and the promise of happiness. Reading literature makes us open to becoming happy in unexpected ways, and this (we decided) is what makes "us" better people over time. As compelling as populist arguments for the equality of genre fiction may be--and when we come to power we wouldn't ban people from reading it--genre fiction does not really create surprise. Yes, on the level of plot it can, but not on the level of surprise about people or life or language.

But how to get people reading the good stuff? Academics can't do it, by definition. As soon as we assign it, it becomes a task, a pill, a leafy green vegetable (at best). It has to be done on TV and be administered by a powerful yet non-threatening and fun person. OK, Oprah was threatening to James Frey, and this is a symptom of her current obsession with memoir, which needs to stop. No surprise in memoir, not the kind we're talking about--only the surprise of being lied to. But as Cecilia Konchar Farr says in Reading Oprah, a very interesting book (and very poorly produced, as if on a Xerox machine, by SUNY Press) , Oprah's self-improvement approach to literature is the key. Oprah tells readers, This is difficult, but you can do it. She alternates--or used to alternate--easy books with more difficult ones, building up readers' stamina and confidence. And she did get tons of people to read Faulkner, though they didn't buy his work in as many truckloads as the others. But it doesn't have to be Faulkner; an emotionally difficult text is good enough. She's developing this capacity for literature, which means a capacity for calm and complex reflection. (I'm grabbing the term from Empson, who uses it in a slightly different way in 7 Types of Ambiguity.) I don't think this is the same thing as the "critical thinking" argument, which means literature teaches you how to seize a pen and start marking as soon as a politician or product pitcher opens his mouth. The capacity, as I see it, is for a kind of stillness. Wonder, maybe.

Sue Lyon

I just did a little research about Sue Lyon, who played Lolita in the 1962 Kubrick film. The most detailed, and also most sleazy, account is on E! online: http://www.eonline.com/Features/Specials/Lyon/
[See update, below.] The E! story is yet another small act in the series of exploitations that began before the movie and exploded after it. Lyon was the youngest of five children in a poor family (her father died when she was a baby), and she was sent out to model as a pre-teen in order to bring in some cash. She won the role of Lolita when she was 13 or 14--the actual age of Lolita--but was, I gather, fifteen when the film was shot. So she was only a tiny bit older than the character, but was cast because she looked more adult than others her age. She had large breasts, unlike Nabokov's Lolita. So much effort went into confounding the audience's prurient/moral expectations about filming this story. How do you film it without doing damage?

Lyon went on to have a fairly terrible life. Divorced several times, she married a man in prison for murder at one point; before that she had married an African-American man and fled with him to Spain due to the uproar. She is now married to someone else and doesn't grant interviews. She's been diagnosed as bipolar but apparently found treatment later in life.

Incarnating Lolita appears to have done her no good. She received much of the lurid attention that the fictional Lolita did, and it should be remembered that the tendency then and even now was to portray Lolita as the seductress of a relatively helpless "middle aged man." E! Online says as much. The entwined artistic and commercial imperatives to film Lolita, combined with Lyon's poverty, the lure of celebrity, and finally the ageless pleasure of condemning girls for arousing sexual desire in others: the same cultural constellation trapped Lyons and Nabokov's Lolita, another fatherless child.

UPDATE 10-1-12: Sorry, folks, looks like E! has taken the story down. If anyone has other links they'd like to share, please do so in the comments.

Harvey Pekar and Josh Kornbluth

Trev and I went with our friend Amy to see Harvey Pekar interviewed by Josh Kornbluth at City Arts and Lectures last night. Last time we went we saw Josh Kornbluth interviewed, and I was wondering if he'd be able to stop talking long enough to let the interviewee speak. In many ways that would have been better. Josh was charming and funny where Harvey was irascible but not charmingly so. The problem is that Harvey *does* have the David Letterman problem; that is, people expect him to perform himself as Harvey, Irascible Cleveland Working Stiff. Which he both is and is not. But one wants to see how he will behave rather than hear what he has to say about comics, literature, etc. And maybe he doesn't want to talk about comics either--he'd rather talk about himself and his still painful memories about his parents, which is what his comics are about, after all. He's had a strange life, a professionally obscure celebrity, celebrated (by Letterman especially) for being obscure. He was very straightforward about how much approval, good reviews, and acclaim mean to him. He answered nearly every question with a reference to money--how much the artists who draw for him get paid, how many books he's selling, how many he needs to sell (which was why he was with us last night). It was not really funny or pathetic or anything, just a flat statement that he wants money. Maybe his shtick is getting old, or he's stuck in the middle of a shtick, no longer an obscure working stiff but a real celebrity now, worried about letting go of the act that got him here.

Giddy

I am strangely giddy today, to the point of being disruptive. I was a jack-in-the-box at a colloquium when I really ought to have kept my mouth shut; it was not for me, but for students, and not my students either. I woke up as I have all week with my stomach in a knot, realizing how far behind I am on editing this divisional newsletter that's coming out in just a couple of months. (It's much, much worse than it sounds--editing text from over 50 faculty members, and that doesn't include *collecting* said text.) Every day I think, "I will set aside the whole afternoon and work on the newsletter," and then I do precisely zero on it because I'm either putting out fires, or...putting out fires. Or blogging. Also I wrote a story for two hours this morning instead of "working," and I did that deliberately. I thought it would calm me down, like meditation, and it did--so I think that's probably the source of the giddiness. The defiant calm in the face of calamity. The insistence on still doing *my thing* despite the strong pressure to just give up writing until summer when everything's over. Or I could just be freaking out.

I talked to a campus newspaper reporter today about the blog I'm doing with my students. I'm obsessed with that blog; it's all I can do to keep from looking at it every fifteen minutes. The reporter seemed to share my enthusiasm, but maybe she was just trying to placate me while looking for an opportunity to edge away.

Synanon

Despite the electromagnetic fascination that cults of the 1970s have always held for me, I somehow missed, entirely, Synanon. But yesterday Trev and I visited the grounds of its former headquarters, now the Marconi Conference Center in Marshall, north of Pt. Reyes. The grounds are actually state parkland with public trails and a spectacular view of Tomales Bay. In 1912 the land was purchased by the Marconi Telegraph Company as a wireless telegraph station, later acquired by RCA and then sold several more times before coming into Synanon's hands.

Synanon started as a rehabilitation program for drug and alchohol addicts, an alternative to Alcoholics/Narcotics Anonymous which emphasized self-reliance as opposed to reliance on a higher power. The Synanon prayer includes lines like "Let me understand rather than be understood," which I rather like. But Synanon itself then became a church; there was the usual partner-swapping and brutally honest encounter groups (known as Games), and then, as always in these stories, the time arrived to amass weapons. They never killed anyone but they did leave a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer who'd sued them. The Point Reyes Light reporters who exposed the operations received Pulitzers.

You can still see the dormant antennas from the Marconi days, and one imagines the Games and halluncinatory "Dissipations" and the paranoia growing on the silent, occult hum of radio waves.

Things take us hard, no question

Things take us hard, no question.
--Adrienne Rich, "Demon Lover"

I will now take this line completely out of context to reflect on a weirdness of mine, which I've discovered could also serve as a principle of sustainable living. I've always thought of things as having feelings. Stuffed animals, it goes without saying, but also computers, cups, plastic bags blowing across the highway, clothes...just about everything. I suppose I attribute feelings to them mostly when they're being treated badly, i.e. thrown away or tossed unthinkingly aside. This has led to some problematic hoarding behavior on my part, and a tendency to apologize to whatever I do throw away. (OK, I don't always apologize to the coffee grounds.) The tendency is also stronger when the thing was a gift, but I don't think my sense of a soul in a thing has only to do with the person who gave it, or the (unknown) person or people who made it. Anyway I read somewhere awhile back that having a sort of animistic belief system like this can lead to conservation--a resistance to disposing of items at the first sign of trouble with them. But at the same time one needs to be less attached to things, less willing to drag home crap because you feel sorry for it.

I'm reading Rich's line to mean that we're hard on things and they feel it. But I don't think that's what she meant. I wonder if cruelty to things extends to misinterpreting words.

Pinnacles: who are these people?

We made our annual pilgrimage to Pinnacles National Monument last Sunday. We only go once a year, usually in March, when the flowers are out and the bat caves are open. I could actually pass on the bat caves, especially when they are filled with several feet of rushing water. Oh, and bats. Not a lot, but at least one clinging to the wall like a sort of husk, where you could put your hand on it. Anyway I notice particularly at Pinnacles that a large number of people show up there who look like they've never been to a national park before. They come in leather jackets and flip flops, carrying cigarettes but no water. And off they go, up the steep hills in the heat, into the caves with several feet of rushing water. And back they come, happy, relaxed, not sweating, not in pain. They don't fall in the caves. They don't get stones in their flip-flops. Whereas I, with my extra-strength hiking books and sunscreen and protective hat and layered clothes--I'm sweating. My feet are hurting. I still manage it all without too much complaining (except in the caves where I refuse to examine the bat at close range because I am balancing on a tiny rock about to topple into darkness). But who are these people with the tattooed legs who aren't having any trouble at all?

It's like you've never written a word

I took a week (maybe more, I forget) off from writing my novel to work on a new short story. Of course I wanted to get away from my novel. But the other perfectly reasonable excuse is that I thought I was going to have to quit writing, pretty much, for three months because I was going to be teaching two courses in addition to working--so the thought was I would do little sporadic projects like short stories, instead of trying to maintain daily contact with the novel. BUT. My Continuing Studies course at Stanford got canceled, which pained me quite a bit more than I expected it would. I was really looking forward to a different kind of teaching and I'd been planning the course for nearly a year. On the other hand it would have been a ton of work and now I'm seeing the upside of not doing it. Mainly, I can keep writing.

I now face the prospect of returning to the novel after, let's say, 10 days. Robert Olen Butler, henceforth to be referred to as R.O.B. (aka G.O.D.) says that if you miss more than two days in a row it's as if you never wrote a word. And the novel does feel quite unfamiliar at the moment. For a few days there the distance was really nice; I was no longer mired in it, so I could float above and see the whole thing. I remembered what I wanted the novel to feel like and took some notes about tone that I thought were important at the time. But that was last week. Now I'm afraid I'll go back and see that the whole thing is a disaster, and slink off to short-story safety again. Must resist.

Bike ride

What is it about the smell of new bike tires that brings back childhood faster than anything? I just went to REI to get a new helmet and had a flashback. There was nothing more magical than picking out a new bike, though I must have had no more than three new bikes in my life. This isn't counting the second-hand bike I got for college which met with a strange fate that still pains me, and of course my newest bike that I got six years ago to go riding with Trev. But we hadn't gone in two years because of my ankle surgery, and then because we never had a decent bike rack. But all that's behind us now and we took our cobwebbed bikes over to Half Moon Bay and rode like the wind! Like a slow wind! But it was such a blast. Bikes must represent freedom to kids, but there was also something about the big wheels and bright colors all lined up in the store, and that new-tire smell. The clean blue sky, the yellow flowers on the dunes, the yellow-green spot that was Trev receding before me, the whitecaps and the clouds...

Conversations, cigarettes, and booze

I picked up Raymond Carver's collection Where I'm Calling From last weekend. I've read a few of his stories before but decided it was time to really study him, since he's still the gold standard for short story writing. I must say that a little of Carver goes a long way. I'd like to read one of these every six months or so instead of all at once. He definitely proves the adage that dialog is something characters do to each other. Most of the stories consist largely of dialog, but it's not conversation. The dialog dredges up events from the past that build to some kind of violence, in a different form, in the present. Cigarettes and especially alcohol give the dialog its pace--people stop talking to smoke or drink--and often its subject matter. Occasionally these "beats" get absurd, with step-by-step descriptions of, say, a man picking up a glass, putting it to his lips, taking a swallow, and setting the glass back on the table. It's all very hard-boiled, with paranoid men and long-suffering women and few words over two syllables. It's true that you can write fairly long and tension-filled stories by stretching out an ordinary moment till you see what's hidden in its cracks.

Shoveling shit

Today was one of those days with my novel. However, my doctor, who says she's a combination of Albert Schweitzer and Mary Baker Eddy, says she only thinks positive thoughts. What would that be like? Anyway my point is to say something positive about shoveling shit, and I think it's this: you must shovel until you discover what the problem is. In the past when I sensed something was wrong with a story I stopped writing. This time I kept going, sinking further and further into the slime until the size and shape of the problem suddenly became clear. You push toward it till it rises up like the swamp thing, whereas if you stay back from it you may never see it. Sadly the swamp thing means some major overhauling in my case, and I'm trying to figure out if I need to go back now and start over, or just move forward and fix later. What I also learned was that I had the right idea in a very early draft and got talked out of it, because I didn't know why I'd put it there. So the larger lesson is never, ever show the first draft to anyone. Second or third draft at the earliest.