Conversational Reading

David Mamet: Closet Conservative

Scott Esposito — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:59:01 +0000

All this explains why David Mamet, America’s most famous and successful playwright, caused widespread consternation two years ago when he published an essay in the Village Voice called “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’” in which he announced that he had “changed my mind” about the ideology to which he had previously subscribed. Having studied the works of “a host of conservative writers,” among them Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, Thomas Sowell (whom he called “our greatest contemporary philosopher”), and Shelby Steele, Mamet came to the conclusion that “a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.”

On balance, I suppose that if you’re more interested in describing your world as you find it than in wanting to aspire to make it better, liberalism probably isn’t for you.

The Humbling Lionel Trilling

Scott Esposito — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:15:25 +0000

Perhaps one day I’ll open an essay with a sentence this perfect.

Between The Fifth Column, the play which makes the occasion for this large volume, and The First Forty-Nine Stories, which make its bulk and its virtue, there is a difference of essence.

So many things that these few words do. On a purely functional level they define the difference between two bodies of work and and render judgment on them, while still intriguing the reader to know more despite the fact that judgment has been rendered (and thus the ostensible purpose of the review fulfilled). But then on a less superficial level they communicate–Hemingway! He is over the hill now, and I’m about to tell you why, while still demonstrating that I grasp the virtues of his youth and maybe even can tell you how he lost his way.

You can read the rest in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent.

Latest Review

Scott Esposito — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:08:22 +0000

The National has published my review of Urdu-language author Qurratulian Hyder’s Fireflies in the Mist. Hyder, who penned a book many have called Urdu’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, has clear talent, but Fireflies is perhaps not the best book to show it off.

And here’s a quote from the review:

Though the majority of the action occurs over the course of just one decade, the book has an expansive sweep. Its cast of characters is huge, and a list of its many threads offers a distillation of 20th-century Indian history: the interaction of societal strata ranging from British colonials to Indian peasants; the story of Partition; conflicts among the region’s Hindus, Christians, and Muslims; and the domestic dramas of three young women growing up in a modernising nation. These elements are subsumed into what is essentially a story of young idealists trading their political struggles for middle-class families. For all the weighty ideas wrestled with in Fireflies, Hyder makes a valiant attempt to ground the story in the lives of its three young female leads: Deepali, the bourgeois daughter turned young communist; the feudal heiress Jehan Ara; and Rosie, the daughter of a Christian reverend converted from Hinduism. There is much to like here, but Hyder’s at times lively narrative is too often blanched by laborious prose that strains to serve its political subtext.

Don’t Really Care About Touch Screens or Color

Scott Esposito — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:08:54 +0000

So Amazon has unveiled a new Kindle that goes as low as $139. (Not exactly sure where the $139 one is on the site, but I’m sure if you want it you’ll find it.)

One thing to note is that, so far, Amazon is sticking to its guns vis a vis color and touch-screen:

That kind of price point could make Kindle attractive to the mass market consumer. But anyone hoping for a color display or touch screen will have to wait. Amazon said those features — which are central to the popular iPad — aren’t part of the new Kindle.

“Most books are black and white,” said Amazon vice president for Kindle Ian Freed, in an interview at Amazon’s new headquarters in Seattle’s South Lake Union. “What we’re focused on is making the reading experience better.”

I wonder how many readers out there are like me and don’t have much interest in a color/touch screen Kindle. The books I read are pretty much black and white, and those with color elements that I do purchase (e.g. art books) are of the type that are fairly pointless to buy as ebooks. As to the touch screen, I don’t see a whole lot of use for it beyond being able to swish your fingers over the screen and attempt to believe that you’re recreating the mechanical experience of turning the pages of a book.

At any rate, I’m one of those people who likes the idea of a dedicated ereader. Multitasking is overrated, and just because we can build a device that can play music and display books and wash your car all at once doesn’t mean we should.

Obviously this is a much different conversation if we’re talking magazines, in which case the iPad is clearly superior. But were not talking about magazines, and in any case the iPad price seems to be prohibitive if you are thinking of it as a magazine-reading platform. ($500 could buy me a whole lot of magazine subscriptions (I think that would keep me in Harper’s magazines more or less through the rest of my natural life), and I can already read those on my laptop, or even print them out or wait for the post office pony to bring me the print edition.)

One think I’ve noticed is that as I’ve made my way through the Kindle version of Our Mutual Friend I’ve actually found myself longing for the printed book. This seems to be directly related to my enjoyment of the book–the more I like something I’m reading, the more I want to interact with it as a book object while I read, and the more I’d like to place it on my shelves once I’ve finished it. There’s also a vague sort of collector angle . . . a writer such as Dickens, with a huge amount of prestige and an unassailable place in the literary canon, is someone I want to have on my bookshelves, to look at and for future reference. Having the electronic book just doesn’t give the same sensation of ownership.

Your Moment of Dickens

Scott Esposito — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:42:59 +0000

From Our Mutual Friend, which can be had for free if you’re Kindled up, or simply Googled.

Assuredly, this stall of Silas Wegg’s was the hardest little stall of all the sterile little stalls in London. It gave you the face-ache to look at his apples, the stomach-ache to look at his oranges, the tooth-ache to look at his nuts. Of the latter commodity he had always a grim little heap, on which lay a little wooden measure which had no discernible inside, and was considered to represent the penn’orth appointed by Magna Charta. Whether from too much east wind or no—it was an easterly corner—the stall, the stock, and the keeper, were all as dry as the Desert. Wegg was a knotty man, and a closegrained, with a face carved out of very hard material, that had just as much play of expression as a watchman’s rattle. When he laughed, certain jerks occurred in it, and the rattle sprung. Sooth to say, he was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer, that he might be expected—if his development received no untimely check—to be completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months.

Miguel Syjuco in Canada

Scott Esposito — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:17:38 +0000

Canada’s Walrus magazine has a summer fiction issue, with some noteworthy offerings. There is Ilustrado author Miguel Syjuco here, and recently Booker nominated Lisa Moore (for February) here.

On the Transnational Postmodern

Scott Esposito — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:03:20 +0000

Dan Green:

Although I enjoyed all three of these novels, most recently Natural Novel, their accessibility “between countries and translations” ultimately leaves me feeling ambivalent about them and about the “globalization” of fiction more generally. On the one hand, their metafictional strategies are appealing to me, as a reader sympathetic to this postmodern variant, but on the other hand I also find the thinness of detail and texture vaguely unsastisfying. One of the arguments often made on behalf of translated fiction is precisely that it provides us an avenue of increased acquaintance with “foreign” cultures, but a book like Natural Novel often seems to reflect our own culture back to American readers, both in literal references to American culture (“Remember how in Pulp Fiction Bruce Willis goes back to get his watch and decides to toast Pop Tarts, while Travolta is reading in the john?” one man asks another in a conversation about toilets) and in its fragmented and self-conscious narrative devices, most of which seem to me to derive primarily from American postmodernism–indeed, while writers like Calvino and Borges are among the original inspirations of literary postmodernism, that inspiration was initially and most fully expressed in postmodern American fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Natural Novel finally reads to me most like a synthesis of the narrative manner and techniques of writers such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Gilbert Sorrentino.

New Critical Flame

Scott Esposito — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:10:05 +0000

Issue 8 of The Critical Flame is online now, including a review of Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou:

This passage is indicative of the novel’s irreverent style and reveals Mabanckou as the rare kind of writer who can incorporate high literary allusions as well as bawdy humor. Mabanckou draws heavily on his predecessors as he pursues this project, and it is perhaps one of the most notable characteristics of Broken Glass that it is absolutely littered with literary allusions. French writers from Rimbaud to Chateaubriand find good representation in the pages of Broken Glass. These references, which also encompass a full range of world literature, are rarely more than passing allusions, as demonstrated in a particularly loaded passage that brings to light the sheer diversity of writers referenced in Mabanckou’s work:

Title Kind of Says It All

Scott Esposito — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:50:48 +0000

At The Constant Conversation, Soo Jin Oh has penned Amazon Partners Up with Possibly the Most Hated Man on the Literary Scene. She delves into why Andrew Wylie has decided to try and be a “publisher”:

One of the facets of this story that is much to be wondered at is that Random House is continuing to stick to its old story from the Rosetta trial, that its existing contracts cover digital rights. To me, this signals that Random House, along with many publishers, persisted in believing that electronic books would never come to be. Certainly, some of the earliest attempts at e-books that date back to the late 1990s collapsed dismally. However, it would have behooved a company with such important holdings to protect its assets in a clear legal manner. Yet, I am fairly certain that what is true for Random House is true for many houses, that too many of them waited too long to recognize the potential reality of e-books and that a sly agent beat them.

Jeanette Winterson at The Quarterly Conversation

Scott Esposito — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:32:45 +0000

Our latest piece at The Quarterly Conversation is Lauren Elkin’s essay on Jeanette Winterson. It’s all about how Winterson’s books trace out an interesting relationship to reality, and how that reality is transmuted into her work:

Winterson has always told and retold the same fictions: of parents and children; of origins, and adoptions; of differences, of margins; of love; of passion; she has always manipulated rhythm and language as an excavation of sources. Much of her fiction mirrors what we know of Winterson’s own story, but she agitates against the idea that her work has to be considered as fiction or autobiography, laying claim to both. In Art Objects she writes: “The question put to the writer ‘How much of this is based on your own experience?’ is meaningless. All or nothing may be the answer. The fiction, the poem, is not a version of the facts, it is an entirely different way of seeing”; a “separate reality.” At every turn she eludes the critic, the interviewer, the reader; she offers truth, but not the truth. “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”