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The Tears of J.K. Rowling

"I really don't want to cry," came the impassioned plea from J.K. Rowling. "Because I'm British." J.K. Rowling testified Monday in the copyright case Rowling vs. RDR Books. RDR Books wants to publish the Harry Potter Lexicon, the work of American librarian Steve Vander Ark (who claims to have read the series more than 50 times). The Lexicon, originally a website that once received a fansite award from Rowling herself, organizes and alphabetizes any nugget of information contained in the world of Harry Potter. Rowling calls the book "wholesale theft of seventeen years of hard work." RDR Books and their counsel, Anthony Falzone of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, call it fair use.

Rowling's testimony is curious. One wonders why she needs testify in a copyright case at all; she had certainly never done it before, even in defending against plagiarism charges levied at her. But what strikes me most about her testimony is the emotional, personal tenor of her testimony.

Those characters meant so much to me over such a long period of time. It's very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand what it means to create something. It's the closest thing to having a child. Those characters saved me. Not just in a material sense - though they did do that. There was a time when they saved my sanity.

As Ed Pilkington wonders in the Guardian article linked to above, why has a copyright case testimony turned into a treatise on a writer's relationship to her art? Why the threatened tears, the appeal to pathos?

As mentioned above, Rowling and Warner Bros. had no complaint when the Lexicon existed only as a website. It was only after Vander Ark wanted to make a profit off his work that the plaintiffs pursued legal action. If these characters "meant so much" to Rowling, why didn't she protect them earlier instead of rewarding the site for its dedication and utility? (Incidentally, according to Falzone, Rowling employed the site as a a fact-checking aid while writing later volumes in the series.) Could it be because as long as the Lexicon was offered free, it simply expanded her fanbase and burrowed the roots of Hogwarts deeper into the public consciousness?

Make no mistake: the lines Rowling is trying to buttress are financial ones, not boundaries of artistic integrity. According to Tim Wu (a former assistant of Judge Richard Posner), "Rowling is overstepping her bounds. She has confused the adaptations of a work, which she does own, with discussion of her work, which she doesn't." Rowling is shoring up her ability to profit at the expense of artistic integrity, not to preserve it. Or, as Lawrence Lessig puts it, copyright protection "was meant to foster creativity, not to stifle it."

Perhaps, in her tearful reminiscing of her impoverished writer days, Rowling should consider letting Harry grow up. After seven barnburner novels and seven more blockbuster movies, perhaps it's time for Harry to saddle his Quiddich broom and make his own way in the world.

Free Tibet?

Uri Averney wrote an excellent article for Counterpunch.org that wonderfully articulates the difficulty I have with the global "Free Tibet!" campaign.

[W]hat is really bugging me is the hypocrisy of the world media. They storm and thunder about Tibet. In thousands of editorials and talk-shows they heap curses and invective on the evil China. It seems as if the Tibetans are the only people on earth whose right to independence is being denied by brutal force, that if only Beijing would take its dirty hands off the saffron-robed monks, everything would be alright in this, the best of all possible worlds.

Tibet offers an attractive combination of exoticism, morality and the plucky status of an underdog sparkplug to the world media. It's a narrative almost tailor-made for Western bourgeois liberalism: we convince ourselves that they want what we have, and it's our moral obligation to help them achieve it. Free Tibet! Free World!

Forget the fact that there are threatened peoples in our own country that want what we have. Hell, they'd settle for clean water. As Canadians, our first duty should be to ensure that we do not oppress people at home or abroad. Any pretension otherwise is moral blindness. As progressives and anti-imperialists, we should question any attempt to render China's sin bigger than our own. Or, failing that, why the mote of Tibet is bigger than the beam of East Congo or Chechnya.

With that in mind, it seems to me that what's really going on here is not that Tibet wants what we have, but that they have what we wish we had. Or rather, the Tibetan myth Western media has constructed—one based on peace, non-violence, abstinence and asceticism—purchases our largesse. As long as Tibet eschews consumerism and consumption, our destructive lifestyle can proceed apace. The irony is of course, that as we "free" such ethical impossibilities from themselves as reward for affirming our pretense, we threaten to eradicate the myths on which we rely. It's a dilemma Jack Gladney discovered almost a quarter century ago:

"You don't believe in heaven? A nun?"
"If you don't, why should I?"
"If you did, maybe I would."
"If I did, you would not have to."
"All the old muddles and quirks," I said. "Faith, religion, life everlasting. The great old human gullibilities. Are you saying you don't take them seriously? Your dedication is a pretense?"
"Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe bu they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life."
"You've had long life. Maybe it works."
She rattled out a laugh, showing teeth so old they were nearly transparent.
"Soon no more. You will lose your believers."

—Don Delillo, White Noise (1985)

h/t to unionist at babble

Despising Deconstruction

Stanley Fish, as you may know, maintains a blog at the New York Times. This week, his blog takes on "French Theory in America" in a book review of Francois Cusset's survey of deconstruction and its ilk, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States.

Professor Fish is remarkably clear in his explication of he much-maligned, oft-misunderstood deconstruction. Presumably since Fish was a major player in this debate himself, he bases his discussion in the 1960s conflict between the so-called rationalist and post-structural schools:

Certainly mainstream or centrist intellectuals thought there was a lot to worry about. They agreed with Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, who complained that the ideas coming out of France amounted to a “rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment” even to the point of regarding “science as nothing more than a ‘narration’ or a ‘myth’ or a social construction among many others.”

This is not quite right; what was involved was less the rejection of the rationalist tradition than an interrogation of its key components: an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the “I” facing an independent, free-standing world. The problem was how to get the “I” and the world together, how to bridge the gap that separated them ever since the older picture of a universe everywhere filled with the meanings God originates and guarantees had ceased to be compelling to many.

It's a good trick. What is so often missed in attacks on deconstruction is that it is a direct response to the problems inherent to the Enlightenment project. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer famously addressed this issue from a Marxist standpoint in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). While Fish levies a less severe critique at the Enlightenment/Rationalist tradition (Adorno and Horkheimer believed fascism and Nazi Germany were direct descendants of the Enlightenment) he equally demonstrates its futility.

The Cartesian trick of starting from the beginning and thinking things down to the ground can’t be managed because the engine of thought, consciousness itself, is inscribed (written) by discursive forms which “it” (in quotation marks because consciousness absent inscription is empty and therefore non-existent) did not originate and cannot step to the side of no matter how minimalist it goes. In short (and this is the kind of formulation that drives the enemies of French theory crazy), what we think with thinks us.

It also thinks the world. This is not say that the world apart from the devices of human conception and perception doesn’t exist “out there”; just that what we know of that world follows from what we can say about it rather than from any unmediated encounter with it in and of itself. This is what Thomas Kuhn meant in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when he said that after a paradigm shift — after one scientific vocabulary, with its attendant experimental and evidentiary apparatus, has replaced another — scientists are living in a different world; which again is not to say (what it would be silly to say) that the world has been altered by our descriptions of it; just that only through our descriptive machineries do we have access to something called the world.

As with most discussions about deconstruction, gleeful derision picks up in the comments following Professor Fish's article immediately and doesn't stop for 400-or-so entries. A sample of the vitriolic responses:

This is drivel about drivel — “metadrivel” as some stucturalist, post-structuralist or deconstructionist might say. Literary theory (not to be confused with literature) is more worthless and deluded than alchemy or astrology ever were. It should be banished from our educational system. Failing that, any student who takes a course in literary theory should be required to take three in mathematics, a discipline which has actually manages to cogently connect words and names with perceptions and actions.

and

Dr. Fish says that “If deconstruction was something that an American male icon performed, there was no reason to fear it….” But we know not only American icons performed deconstruction. One of its most infamous practitioners, Paul de Man, was a Nazi collaborator, raising the spectre that even a devil could quote the supposed holy scripture of deconstruction.

Hard to argue against charges of "metadrivel' and Nazism, especially for a text that contains evidence of neither. I don't personally accord with some of Fish's views, particularly his assertion that deconstruction "doesn't have any" political implications. Derrida himself spent the second half of his career arguing the exact opposite. In fact, if the 400+ responses, the majority of whom can scarcely keep their spittle in their mouths, are any indication, deconstruction can assert a very palpable political force.

The Myth of Public Cyberspace

Make no mistake, the Internet is not public space. Bell Canada and Rogers Telecommunications are making this as evident as they can.




Hat-tip to M. Spector on babble.

Selling Environmentalism: Earth Hour

"Turn off the light," sings Nelly Furtado. It's Earth Hour. Promoted heavily by the World Wildlife Fund, Earth Hour is an action in which the world can "take a stand against climate change" by refusing to use electricity from 8:00 pm to 9:00 today, March 29, 2008. Well, that's nice.

What's better are the hundreds of Canadian businesses supporting Earth Hour. From Bell Canada to Cadillac Fairview, Imperial Oil to Starbucks, they're all getting in on the action. At the end of Earth Hour, do you think Imperial Oil will shut down Syncrude, the consortium that governs its site in the Athabasca tar sands? Will Starbucks stop selling disposable paper cups and start selling fair-trade coffee? Even Google is getting in on the act. Crafty. They can tune in to Earth Hour without actually turning out the lights. Turning off virtually seems to suffice. The message is clear: buy into Earth Hour and you won't have to do any heavy lifting. Ecology is a commodity and everything is on sale.

When Dubai announced that it would be the first Arab city to participate in Earth Hour, you had to know something was up. The transnational capitalist city par excellence, Dubai, earlier this year, announced it would turn its massive oil wealth into the world's first zero-carbon, environmentally sustainable city. It's difficult, however, to view the effort as anything more than a showpiece. Masdar, Arabic for "the source" will house 50 000 people and 1500 businesses in a car-free colony while Dubai, population 2 000 000 and headquarters of countless crude companies around the Middle East, sees its economic growth and massive expansion proceed apace.

Dubai is the emblem of twenty-first-century capitalism, a microcosm of globalization. Deborah Campbell wrote a wonderful article on the phenomenon that is Dubai in the September 2007 issue of The Walrus.

"The Earth Has A New Centre," announces a massive billboard for a new mall on Sheikh Zayed Road, an eight-lane expressway in Dubai — a city that was, not so long ago, a patch of sand. As a yellow Ferrari driven by a local in a white dishdasha and baseball cap roars up behind my rental car, and Hummers with black-tinted windows pass busloads of labourers who stare out, saucer-eyed, at this strange new planet, I find myself thinking that the billboard refers not only to the Dubai Mall, soon to be the largest in the world, but to Dubai itself.

The world’s largest mall. The world’s tallest hotel. The world’s tallest building. The first underwater hotel. The largest waterfront development. The fastest-growing tourist market. The Earth has a new centre and it is a tiny desert kingdom gone mad.

Behind the spectacular gratuitousness of this capitalist Disneyland, lies the criminally exploited working class the powers this expansion, its savage environmental cost.

There, a familiar sight: a swarm of workers in overalls gather at a new construction project. They earn as little as $4 a day. It’s more than they would get in the factories of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, making jeans and shower curtains for Western consumption, but in the lavish light of Dubai it isn’t even a decent tip. I have visited the camps where they live, smelled the open sewage outside their dormitories, know that many of them can’t read the contracts they have signed. They send money home and visit their families once every few years. Past the billboards, past the cranes, if one squints, one can see on the surface of every construction site tiny human forms. Nothing in Dubai could exist without this labour.

This obfuscation, the sleight-of-hand that Dubai enacts when it displays its "commitment" to sustainability while brutally abusing its workforce and the environment is the crime of Earth Hour. For an hour, urban electricity use will decrease by 10%, maybe 15% (if you can bear turning off the Habs-Leafs game during Hockey Night in Canada) while the cities and corporations that pledge "support" for Earth Hour change their corroding practices not one whit.

We've turned environmentalism into a brand. Buy it, and you can sport it, and still have a good time at a Nelly Furtado concert. Turn off the light. Save the world.

Hat-tip to Bread and Roses

King James, Undercover

LeBron James, who is often pipped as the best-dressed man in the NBA, recently became only the third man to grace the cover of Vogue Magazine. What's more, James is the first African-American man to ever feature on the most-prized spot in fashion. The image is certainly forceful: the powerful, 6'8" James with the graceful Gisele Bündchen hanging off his arm. But magazine analyst Samir Husni is quoted by the Associated Press saying that the image "screams King Kong...[the cover] brings those stereotypes to the front, black man wanting white woman."


Such statements will doubtless attract criticisms of oversensitivity, even of actively searching out racism in an otherwise innocuous work. But, when juxtaposed with the other two men who were lucky enough to find their way on to Vogue, Richard Gere and George Clooney, the choice of dress, colour scheme and pose remains significantly different. In fact, Clooney, in the June 2000 issue, also poses with Bündchen in a very different arrangement. Where is his animalistic energy? Richard Gere, with his then-girlfriend-cum-supermodel Cindy Crawford on the November 1992 cover, expresses a refined, vulnerable air. The three covers maintain the same red lettering, the same pairing with the world's most powerful model (let the irony of that one slip by for now, please). So why, we are compelled to ask, did Vogue opt to put the sartorially slick James in a tanktop and shorts, mid-scream?


Of course, it is difficult to rebuke a magazine built on tapping into cultural codes and assumptions and reproducing them on a quarterly basis. A casual glance through their cover archives is enough to recognize every cultural stereotype around: the pale waif, the sultry minx, the savage amazon, etc. So what's the story here?

Cover images from fashionologie.com

The Dawkins Delusion and the Spirit of Capitalism

Atheistic and skeptical political philosopher John Gray has published a wonderful essay in The Guardian on the extensive recent polemic against religion.

An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world's worst evils. As a result, there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism. A few years ago, it was difficult to persuade commercial publishers even to think of bringing out books on religion. Today, tracts against religion can be enormous money-spinners, with Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great selling in the hundreds of thousands. For the first time in generations, scientists and philosophers, high-profile novelists and journalists are debating whether religion has a future.

Gray's main strategy is to historicize this debate–an act he performs skillfully in rhetoric if not entirely convincingly in substance. Essentially, he argues that the debate between religious fundamentalism and secular liberalism is the precipitate of political conflicts and a descendant of Christian progressivism.

The 9/11 hijackers saw themselves as martyrs in a religious tradition, and western opinion has accepted their self-image.

Gray puts his finger on something here that has always bothered me about the way writers like Dawkins forward the unscientific assumption that much of the conflict present in the world today would disappear if religion did first. Aside from the fact that entrenched in this theory is a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature, it takes for granted that the 9/11 attacks were a religious act. There is, I believe, something terrifyingly secular about religious fundamentalism.

Religion is a language for speaking about the unspeakable. For parsing truth and creating meaning. Marx called it, not unsympathetically, "the sigh of an oppressed people." Where is the sigh in the suicide bomb? Is the fundamentalism that inspires this kind of sacrifice not, rather, drained of any transcendence? The body is reduced to a secular image that may carry political symbolism in this world, but carries none in the next. Fundamentalism does not trade in the truth religion and metaphysics seek to uncover, it trades only in the brutal, irreducible and secular image.

Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it. This is what Nietzsche did when he developed his critique of Christianity in the late 19th century, but almost none of today's secular missionaries have followed his example. One need not be a great fan of Nietzsche to wonder why this is so. The reason, no doubt, is that he did not assume any connection between atheism and liberal values - on the contrary, he viewed liberal values as an offspring of Christianity and condemned them partly for that reason.

Here is Gray's best attempt to persuade atheists to abandon their faith. The only alternative to religion is metaphysics, it is not 'science.' The common 'secular fundamentalist' strategy is not to historicize religion, to demystify it, but to show that it is based on nothing, that it is all nonsense, that it is entirely useless. This, of course, requires a larger leap of faith that would make a rapturous Baptist shiver. If the object is truly to demystify religion, to show that it is part and parcel of a larger, oppressive, ideology, one needs to demonstrate the purpose and origin of religion. As Gray points out, religion is part and parcel with dominant political ideologies – progressivism, capitalism, etc. As such, it natively carries the foibles and the advantages of these systems. Why is it so hard for Dawkins et al. to admit as much?

Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism provides a sombre warning to those who forget that religious belief remains firmly rooted in political desire.

The Puritan wanted to work in calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism – whether finally, who knows? – has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfillment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all.

Hat-tip to contrarianna at babble

Turn Down Patriarchy

Your true task, as a son, is to reproduce every one of the enormities [committed by your father], but in attentuated form. You must become your father, but a paler, weaker version of him. The enormities go with the job, but close study will allow you to perform the job less well than it has previously been done, thus moving toward a golden age of decency, quiet, and calmed fevers. Your contribution will not be a small one, but "small" is one of the concepts you should shoot for. . . .Begin by whispering, in front of a mirror, for thirty minutes a day. Then tie your hands behind your back for thirty minutes a day, or get someone else to do this for you. Then, choose one of your most deeply held beliefs, such as the belief that your honors and awards have something to do with you, and abjure it. Friends will help you abjure it, and can be telephoned if you begin to backslide. You see the pattern, put it into practice. Fatherhood can be, if not conquered, at least "turned down" in this generation—by the combined efforts of all of us together. Rejoice.

"Manual for Sons." Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father (1975). 270-271

The Avenir of Education and Cyberspace

By now you should have heard the story of Ryerson University, facebook, and Chris Avenir. While many would prefer to boil the story down to the question did he or didn't he, most people realize that more is at stake than a single instance of academic dishonesty.

The first issue that springs to mind is one of policing: policing, surveillance and coercion. The administration at Ryerson University believes that because they can access facebook and the Internet, they should be permitted to use whatever evidence they find there in cases of student discipline. The internet, as far as the University is concerned, is public space. One hundred and forty-seven students question that assumption.

I sympathize with Avenir's professor, whose generous gesture to the students to offer a take-home assignment in lieu of an exam backfired. But her anger should not signify betrayal by the students, but rather her own failure as an educator to predict the students' response. If she did not want the students to collaborate she enjoys access to a simple solution: hold an in-class exam. The students simply outmaneuvered her attempt to randomize each assignment with a unique selection of questions from a list of problems. It is as unfortunate as it was inevitable.

The University responded by charging Avenir with one count of academic misconduct and 146 counts—one for each group member—of "enabling." This response is reactionary and panicked. It signals an administration clueless as to what the Internet portends and a heavy-handed attempt to claim cyberspace for itself. They are attempting to foreclose any future student forays into facebook and stamp-out any dissenters. It is, in short, a land grab.

Society has designated, arbitrarily, certain aspects of our life public and certain aspects private. As new technologies appear and as social conventions develop, these arbitrary boundaries become redrawn. The mass-produced automobile, for example, turned individual travel from a public into a private affair for the masses. When the telephone first entered public use, users were reluctant to use it, citing stage fright. Historically, those with power control how this redesignation occurs.

In his study Becoming Modern in Toronto: The Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late Victorian Culture (U of Toronto P, 1997), Keith Walden outlines a similar disconnect in cultural and technological expectations:

On 2 September 1892 Hannah Heron was struck by one of Toronto's new electric trolleys in a downtown residential neighbourhood...Shortly before 3 p.m. she was being escorted to the Church Street car by her host's companion, who saw the trolley approaching. As they stood on the northeast corner of the intersection, Heron was told she had to board at the southwest. She raced across the street, intending to cross diagonally. Recognizing the danger she was in, the driver rang a warning bell, but the noise disoriented her. She stopped in the middle of the street. Too late to brake now, the motorman started to shout, increasing her bewilderment. Finally, she darted in front of the car, which knocked her down and passed over both her legs below the knee. She was carried back to her aunt's house, where she died five hours later.

[...]

When Hannah Heron stepped into the middle of Church Street, she was articulating a particular understanding of what a Toronto roadway meant—of the nature of the vehicles likely to be encountered there, of the dangers that needed to be considered, of appropriate ways of moving through that space, of the status of a human body relative to all these things. Unfortunately, her understanding, based on past experience, was contested by the street railway company, a much more powerful entity, which wanted to run cars at speeds faster than had been possible with horse-drawn wagons. By changing just one element in the situation, the entire web of signification had to be reknit...such questions, which went to the heart of the meaning of the street, bodies, machines, and citizenship, all had to be renegotiated because hierarchies of speed and power had changed. (3-6)

Like the fate of Ms. Heron, at stake is a question and dispute over reading—over signification. We can accept uncritically the University's insistence that it has a right to police the Internet and affirm their dismissal of 147 students as "naive," or, we can respect that the students oppositional worldview may hold merit. Significantly, the students of Ryerson—a great number more now than Avenir's 146 co-conspirators—have come out in force behind Avenir and in contradistinction to the administration. Consider too that younger generations tend to understand the cultural implications of new technologies far earlier than the older, and in fact, facebook was originally created exclusively for students'—not administrators'—use. Unlike Ms. Heron's ill-fated clash with the Toronto street railway company, the debate on how we read cyberspace is not yet closed, nor is it as starkly drawn.

If, like me, you find the increasingly popular state practice of universal surveillance odious, you should resist the University's appropriation of cyberspace. In fact, I hold the University to a higher standard than I would the government, so I would expect such an institution to resist such practices actively rather to capitulate to them. Free Avenir.

Why Toronto is not a World-Class City™

"Glasgow is a magnificent city," said McAlpin. "Why do we hardly ever notice that?" "Because nobody imagines living here," said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, "If you want to explain that I'll certainly listen."

"Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That's all. No, I'm wrong, there's also the cinema and the library. And when our imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Ceasars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels. That's all we've given to the world outside. It's all we've given to ourselves."

Alasdair Gray, Lanark (1981).

Literary Hoaxes: I'm Not Buying

Two more literary hoaxes surfaced last week, turning a two-year trend into a full-on rout. The latest culprit, Marget B. Jones née Seltzer, author of the faux-memoir Love and Consequences, issued a "tearful" apology in the New York Times. The story, hot on the heels of Misha Defonseca's fictional Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, wrought instant comparisons to James Frey's admission that A Million Little Pieces exaggerated details of his drug addiction and recovery. Oprah Winfrey demanded—demanded—that Frey apologize to the American public for his lies. And the American public was mollified.

Why the outrage? Why, in a book we ostensibly read for pleasure, does it matter so much that what is given as truth is truth? Would it matter, as Mark Leyner suggests for example, if we found out that Kafka's Metamorphosis was "based on a true story"? Well, maybe. But does the fact that the protagonists in these literary hoaxes are less than honest eliminate the reality of drug addiction, gang violence or Holocaust survival? "This book is a story, it's my story," says Minique de Wael, the non-Jewish author of Misha: Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. "It is not my true story but it is my reality, my way of surviving."

Any narrative, whether based on fact or fiction, constitutes an imaginative reconstruction of reality. Readers remain well aware of this interpretive act even as they purchase their latest memoir. Even if the backstory is true, historical veracity intersects with formal modes, narrative order and stylistic voice. In fact, non-fiction novels depend upon the discourse of fiction: as these hoaxes move effortlessly across genres, they demonstrate how blurred the distinction between these boundaries become. One could even say that the thrill of a priori betrayal counts towards the overall enjoyment of the fraudulent work. After all, can protests against forged objectivity really be taken at face value from a culture who prefers remake films and Club Med Carnival to the real thing?

I am tempted to suggest that an American public unable to demand that their government repent and abjure their uncountable lies is forced to displace their anger and betrayal onto the pulp (non-)fiction they read before they go to bed. When you cannot count on your media, whose currency should be truth and objectivity, to punish a government that goes to war under false pretenses, you turn to an afternoon talk show that will deliver the repudiation you desire.

Dangerous Drawings: Teddy Bears, Cartoons and Cats

Anti-cartoon Afghans are at it again. Thousands of Afghan students staged protests over a Dutch film that characterizes the Qur'an as fascist and over the recently reprinted famous Danish cartoon that depicted the Prophet Mohammed in a "bomb-shaped turban." The incident also recalls the case of Gillian Gibbons who spent fifteen days in a Sudanese jail for naming a "teddy bear" Mohammed after her preschool class agreed on the name. Cue the usual questions of "What can't be named Mohammed?" and warnings against this latest assault on the Western liberal enlightenment values of free speech and freedom of the press. Incidentally, Britain, Denmark and Holland all have troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. This fact alone should suggest that such questions are altogether the wrong ones.

In Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin historian Robert Darnton addresses a similar situation. Just prior to the French Revolution, a stable of printers on the Rue Saint-Severin suffered abject poverty and frequent beatings from their wealthy, bourgeois master and his wife.

They slept in a filthy, freezing room, rose before dawn, ran errands all day while dodging insults from the journeymen and abuse from the master, and received nothing but slops to eat. They found the food especially galling. Instead of dining at the master's table, they had to eat scraps from his plate in the kitchen. Worse still, the cook secretly sold the leftovers and gave the boys cat food,old, rotten bits of meat that they could not stomach and so passed on to the cats, who refused it.

The cats came to symbolize the oppression and humiliation borne daily by the workers. One day, unable to suffer the cats any longer, the workers staged a mock trial for the felines, complete with evidence, testimony, guards, a confessor and a public execution. The cats were "publicly" hanged with special punishment reserved for the puss most favoured by the master's wife. The great cat massacre was termed "the most hilarious experience in [the workers'] entire career," a bloody, irrational, even hysterical revolt. "Yet," Darnton adds,

it strikes the modern reader as unfunny, if not downright repulsive. Where is the humor in a group of grown men bleating like goats and banging with their tools while an adolescent re enacts the ritual slaughter of a defenseless animal? Our own inability to get the joke is an indication of the distance that separates us from the workers of pre-industrial Europe. The perception of that distance may serve as the starting point of an investigation, for anthropologists have found that the best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize that you are not getting something—a joke, a proverb, a ceremony—that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it. By getting the joke of the great cat massacre, it may be possible to "get" a basic ingredient of artisan culture under the Old Regime.

His argument, essentially, is that the cats acted as a symbolic stand-in for the bourgeois, and that the whole elaborate arrangement was an dramatic rehearsal for the French Revolution fifteen or so years later. The servants hanged the cats because they couldn't hang the bourgeoisie. Moreover, the fact that the workers' ritual remains impenetrable to us signals its massive cultural implications.

Our governments enact ceaseless and explicit violence on the people of the Middle East in our names. The men and women of Afghanistan are subject to humiliation through daily expressions of our wealth in our mass, pulp media, while their poverty rings as a constant tonic to it. Icons of Western society like our newspapers and editorial cartoons are so loaded with symbolic baggage because of the fact that they are so rare in places like the Sudan and Afghanistan. When a culture emasculated weekly is given the opportunity to assert some measure of revenge, some measure of authority over a culture that constantly humiliates them, even on this small, symbolic scale, of course they are going to take it. Of course they are. That's the tragedy of human nature.

Then we look at such an incident, out of context, and wonder why these men and women act so irrationally, when rationality has got nothing to do with it. Our egos are served by proxy through our governments, so we have the privilege of boiling it down to rationality. Even our analogies are absurd, and barely scratch the surface, even as we strain to understand. Can't we see Christ or Yahweh mocked in the editorial pages? Isn't naming a stuffed bear Mohammed the same as naming a pet Jesus? These analogies are the closest we can get, to be sure. Why do you think the children, who surely know more about Islam than the teacher, than most of us too, saw no problem with naming a doll Mohammed? Because it wasn't for this crime, for this blasphemy, that the teacher was tried.

Incidents like the Dutch film are not about blasphemy laws, or corporal punishment, or a flawed justice system. Until our governments stop their murderous campaign against nations of Islam, crimes like this will continue to take place, because war, always, does sick things to people, on scales large and small. But this dynamic always reproduces itself too--since these incidents allow us to reflect on the barbarity of Islamic cultures and the enlightenment of our own, and provide more fuel to the war machine that brokered the crime in the first place. It is an impulse consonant with the perverse, grotesque argument that justifies foreign occupation under the auspices of "liberating" Muslim women and delivering democracy to the savages who need it.

The Thin Edge of the Wedge

As the entire world already knows, Apple Inc. revealed the MacBook Air last month at the 2008 Macworld conference. The "world's thinnest notebook" retails from $1799 to $3098 USD. It's "ultrathin, ultraportable and ultra unlike anything else" according to the Apple website. It "rethinks conventions." "Innovation" is thrown about like it's going out of style. In short, the MacBook Air promises revolution. I'm not interested in discussing whether or not the Air constitutes a "smart" buy, or if it performs better than other lightweight laptops, but rather, to examine this "ultra" computer as the fulfillment of the bizarre technological fantasy of the thin. What's the skinny in technology?

Curiously, while the MacBook Air is the thinnest notebook currently on the market, it is not the lightest; despite the fact that the Toshiba Portege R500 underweighs the Air by more than a pound, unsexy featherweights remain far behind Apple in pursuit of the cool. It is no accident that Apple eschewed a lighter computer, a model doubtless better suited to the commuter crowd ostensibly targeted by the Air, in favour of a slender one. Bypassing the unsettling tendency to label most of Apple's products indiscriminately "sexy" (a label adopted by the Apple website) it seems to me that the slimness of iPods, iPhones and now the MacBook Air, have much greater cultural implications.

Not only does technoculture exhibit a fanatical obsession in its flight toward the ultimate (or "ultra") in slim, it does so at the expense of function. In fact, Apple's counterintuitive choice to build a thinner, rather than lighter product indicates that it is not really interested in function at all. We don't want to see the guts of a computer (begone Cray-2! You are banished from our memories!) we just want an image of one. The image of a computer sliding out of a manila envelope is much more engaging to contemporary society than a computer that does stuff.

In Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Fredric Jameson posits a theory of "depthlessness" in which a logic of depth--say, interior psychology to exterior expression, or meaning to word--has been replaced by a logic of surfaces. There is little doubt that Apple masterfully converts its products into desperately desired commodities and excels at promotion of the image. But what's more, as Jameson argues, "this depthlessness [is not] merely metaphorical: it can be experienced physically and 'literally' (12). The MacBook Air, which seems to insist that it is less a computer than a conception, not a box of chipsets and wires but a simulation of one, represents the embodiment of this logic of superficiality. It's called the "Air," after all: it's not even there! Indeed, the Air seems to enact a kind of technological physical closure: it lacks a removable-media drive, Ethernet and multiple USB slots. The body of the Air is as inviolate as its perfect, slender image.

What does this say, then, about technoculture in general--besides, that is, that they like their gadgets svelte? As our desktops, redolent with speaker and monitor cables that cheap IKEA and Office Depot desks ceaselessly attempt to conceal (without success), silently retreat into PDAs and two-dimensional laptops, computer commodification dispels the myth that technology increases the opportunity and potential for social change. Instead, it would appear, technology is complicit in capitalism's ongoing project in perfecting the image, the spectacle. Of course, it's not as if Apple ever pretended it was pursuing anything else, but it's nice to know what kind of revolution we're talking about.

Detection Defection

Alain Robbe-Grillet died last week. While his macho media posturing and depictions of sadism, pedophilia and sexual perversion render him a much more public figure (and hence, more controversial) in France, his influence on English literature in the the late-twentieth century remains emphatic and undeniable. In Pour un nouveau roman (1963), Robbe-Grillet outlined a theory of the novel (while steadfastly refusing the label) and called for a departure from the holistic realism of Balzac and Tolstoy. The novel, as we know it, is dead. This would not be a problem, Robbe-Grillet argues, except that we continue, literature continues, as if the novel were still alive:

A "good" novel...has remained the study of a passion—or of a conflict of passions, or of the absence of passion—in a given milieu. Most of our contemporary novelists of the traditional sort—those, that is, who manage to earn the approval of their readers—could insert long passages from [Madame de Lafayette's] The Princess of Clèves or [Balzac's] Père goirot into their own books without awakening the suspicions of the enormous public with whatever they turn out. (15-16)

It was not enough to tinker with the psychological threads of a novel through tired conceits like character, story and theme. Championed by the likes of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, Robbe-Grillet's manifesto cleared the way for an interrogation of the "raw material" of language with which the writer constructs the novel:

What is so surprising about this, after all? The raw material—the French language—has undergone only very slight modifications for three hundred years; and if society has been gradually transformed, if industrial techniques have made considerable progress, our intellectual civilization has remained much the same. (16)

If we are to find out more about what it means to be human, then, we must discard these stale ways of looking at the world, of writing about it, and see in different ways.

It is no accident, then, that Robbe-Grillet's first published novel, Les Gommes (1953), took advantage the detective fiction genre in its existentialist examination of the self. We have been trying to "detect" the "human heart" (which, Robbe-Grillet wryly observes, "as everyone knows is eternal") but hitherto writers have only succeeded in repeating the same stories of "passion" in slightly altered duds. Detection, it turns out, is not about solving crimes based on evidence, but on signifying them. That is, detection is as much about coercing the available facts as it is about interpreting them.

Samuel Beckett's Molloy (1951, English 1955) similarly employed the genre in its exploration of authorship, identity and agency. In the second half of Beckett's novel, Moran, the private detective charged with locating Molloy, descends into a world where "evidence: and "clues" hardly function as such, and his scientific, schematic interpretation of the world violently breaks down. Moran murders a strange man that appears to him in his state of poverty and despair, and submits a "report" that shares the same opening sentence with the first half of Molloy: the section narrated by the eponymous character Moran is meant to be tracking. Robbe-Grillet's Les Gommes is remarkably close to Beckett's text: in a surreal landscape redolent with allusions to Oedipus Rex, Wallas, the police inspector of Les Gommes investigates a murder only to end up murdering the victim himself. For Robbe-Grillet, the failure of language to signify a recognizable reality echoes the failure of evidence to reveal the criminal.

The evidence gathered by the inspectors [in any detective story]--an object left at the scene of the crime, a movement captured in a photograph, a sentence overheard by a witness--seem chiefly, at first, to require an explanation, to exist only in relation to their role in a context which overpowers them. And already the theories begin to take shape: the presiding magistrate attempts to establish a logical and necessary link between things...

But the story begins to proliferate in a disturbing way: the witnesses contradict one another, the defendant offers several alibis, new evidence appears that had not been taken into account....And we keep going back to the recorded evidence: the exact position of apiece of furniture, the shape and frequency of a fingerprint, the word scribbled in a message. We have the mounting sense that nothing else is true. Though they may conceal a mystery, or betray it, these elements which make a mockery of systems have only one serious, obvious quality, which is to be there.

The same is true of the world around us. (22-3)

Robbe-Grillet's nouveau roman reveals traditional detection for the illusion it is. Solving a crime based on a crime scene is nothing less than imposing a narrative upon it—colonizing it with prefabricated notions of order, interpretation and routine. We can only make use of detection with the self-awareness that it is treacherous—insidious. American writers like Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Paul Auster in City of Glass (1987) borrow Robbe-Grillet's usage of the detection conceit for their own conception of the loss of interpretive certainty. While Robbe-Grillet's impact on contemporary literature may be more polemical than critical, the economy and strength of his demands for the nouveau roman ensure his legacy.

*All citations are taken from: Alain Robbe-Grillet. For a New Novel [Pour un nouveau roman]. Trans. Richard Howard. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1989.

James Tait Black Memorial Literary Prize

I volunteered to read for the 2008 James Tait Black Memorial Literary Prize for fiction. It is a prize organized by the University of Edinburgh and will be awarded this August during the Edinburgh International Book Festival. I received a stack of nine novels, and I decided that a fitting debut blog entry would be the reviews I submitted to the panel of judges to help them compile their short list. Beware: the quality of the submissions is unwieldy.

Ronan Bennett, Zugzwang. Bloomsbury, 2007

Zugzwang is a term used in chess commentary where a player remains obliged to move although all possible options weaken the current position. Bennett, chess commentator to The Guardian, writes a taut political thriller set during a 1914 chess tournament in St. Petersburg. Despite some onerous love scenes between the middle-aged protagonist and his lithe, young Baltic-beauty love interest, Bennett’s prose is energetic and lean while he builds and sustains suspense throughout the narrative. One of the most skilled writers of my stable, Bennett was a pleasure to read, and almost made my short list. Unfortunately, he falls short of the medal round because while Zugzwang excels in the thriller genre, it fails to transcend it. Tight, fun and exciting, but not really prize material.

Tom Harper, Lost Temple. Century, 2007.

What could the publisher have possibly been thinking when they submitted this book for a literary award? Harper’s novel, the first book I read in my set, was awful. Awful. The words “high-octane!” and “non-stop action!” come to mind, along with any hackneyed chestnuts you might see flashed wildly across the trailer of the latest Vin Diesel offering. Sam Grant kills Nazis, Soviets and Palestinian terrorists in a plot so confused, it’s not sure if it’s stealing from The Da Vinci Code, Indiana Jones or The Illiad. About halfway through, I decided to start looking for a sentence that exemplified the horribly trite prose, when eventually realized that every page offered a new and wonderful candidate. How bad is Lost Temple? I think that Tom Harper answers it best on the website, replete with YouTube teaser, that he concocted to promote this book. YouTube? Cripes.

Moshin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Hamish Hamilton, 2007.

A wonderful addition to my pile, this late entry redeemed a particularly poor stack of books. Hamid concocts an allegory of America’s relationship to its historical legacy, its national myths, global capitalism and the distasteful conflicts the intersection of those social forces have wrought. A suspenseful itch begins harmlessly and almost unnoticeably with the title and the unnamed Pakistani narrator that has sat down beside an American tourist to cheerfully tell him about his life in the United States. The itch spreads with ghostly insistence, as the narrative subtly unwinds the social netting that form the Western conception of the East-West divide. The beast of fundamentalist terrorism that frenzies Western thinking bursts into an expertly derived conclusion even as it lingers on a hopeful reconciliation. My only criticism of the book touches the difficult form of the oral allegory employed by the novel. The narrator’s love interest, remains bizarre, one-dimensional and unconvincing—and her allegorical name, (Am)Erica, is perhaps a bit too precious. Overall, an excellent book, and deserving of progression to the next round.

Edward Docx, Self Help. Picador, 2007.

Edward Docx is a witty, inventive writer and Self Help provides an energetic stage for him to flex his artistic muscles. The book examines the lives of an estranged bicultural family, Russian and English, fast upon the death of their loving though brooding (Marxist!) matriarch. Various narrative strands following twin brother and sister, separated bisexual dandy father, and unknown orphan from a previous affair intertwine along the lines of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth or Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Unfortunately, Docx staggers under the weight of his ambition, and 500-page text never really gets off the ground. Moreover, while Smith’s effort revels in its breadth of vision and diversity, Self Help remains firmly planted in white, middle-class navel gazing. Docx’s strong writing and occasional wit rescues the novel somewhat, but his stretch for clever metaphor sometimes shows the strain. Ambitious, but ultimately uninteresting.

Mary Gaitskill, Veronica. Pantheon, 2005.

Gaitskill’s evident talent distinguished her and her novel from the also-rans in my list. Veronica investigates the complex, lurid friendship of the dead title-character and our narrator, Alison, an ex-glamour model now full of self-loathing, regret, and Hepatitis B. Gaitskill beautifully illustrates the weaknesses and hopes that invite debasement, pettiness and failure. As we follow Alison as she revisits her past in an assortment of vignettes about her teenage flight from home, humiliation and success in the modeling industry, and a homecoming to a life of unrewarding temp work—a world where she meets the theatrical Veronica, full of affectation and chutzpah, who both confronts and reassures the illusions around which Alison has structured her life. Veronica’s death by AIDS equally offers hope and hopelessness, meaning and rage to Alison’s own terminal illness. Gaitskill allegedly dreamed up Alison and Veronica over a decade ago; and therein dwells my only criticism of this otherwise provocative and insightful novel. The novel’s preoccupation with the emotional vacuity of the 1980s and generation-specific attention to AIDS and STDs are notably behind the times. Veronica’s datedness—and the fact that the book was originally published in 2005—could disqualify it from the Tait Black 2007 prize, but these issues do not eclipse its force and pleasure.

Susanna Jones, The Missing Person’s Guide to Love. Picador, 2007.

I don’t really have much to say about this novel, even though it was less disagreeable than Harper’s Lost Temple. It was rather like an American soap opera, especially if the soap opera likes to draw on colonialist, orientalist assumptions of exotic Turkey. The writing is strong and fluid, if forgettable, the characterization plastic, and the plot was derivative, although a bit punchier than most homecoming thrillers that seek to uncover a horrible, far-reaching secret. But, like the soap, you find yourself on the couch at three o’clock in the afternoon and the remote is just sitting there, almost within reach. Why not read another page? Pap.

Stephen Thompson, Meet Me Under the Westway. CHROMA, 2007.

Thompson’s cleverness sometimes gives the impression of someone who laughs too hard at jokes about David Mamet. Westway is funny, surely, and a confident, satirical romp through the British theatre scene and Notting Hill, but his eye is too focused on the approving nod after a successful name drop or literary allusion than the actual comedy of his quips. Indeed, this strategy proceeds apace in the trendy, West London setting, where every Portobello restaurant, bar, pottery and piggery is referenced with barely concealed self-satisfaction, even as he smugly eschews their falsity and superficiality. Thompson operates too much in lockstep with Nick Hornby’s less-talented cousin, and occasionally confuses pomp and profundity like a drunk swaggering on moonshine he mistook for Macallan. A decent effort, but certainly not prize-worthy.

Amanda Eyre Ward, Forgive Me. Harper, 2007.

Forgive Me depicts a young hardnosed, no-nonsense journalist struggling with an unfulfilling home life in Nantucket and her desire to uncover truth and meaning that apparently manifests itself through African apartheid. It’s exactly the kind of reductionist move you would expect from such a simplistic, moralizing fable that represents Western women as universally cowed and ignorant and black South African women as determined warriors. Apartheid South Africa essentially stands in for white existential angst. Nevertheless, Ward’s prose is excellent, and is appropriately economical considering the protagonist’s vocation. There is real emotional conflict in the book, even if it sometimes belittles the real trauma of apartheid. Most disappointingly, Ward chooses to wrap up the conflict and the novel by becoming a mother and moving home to Massachusetts. In the world of Forgive Me, having a baby can erase the pain of racism, poverty, war and heartbreak. Unfortunate.

Gee Williams, Salvage. Alcemi, 2007.

The jewel. A masterful stylist, Williams is constantly inventive and inspiring in her craft, and boasts a knack for stunning images and observations. Where has Wales been hiding this woman? Well, in Wales, presumably, but that is besides the point. Salvage masquerades as a murder mystery while exploring the murky, aphotic character of the Welsh seaside and of the human soul. Dominant and daring in her prose, Williams relishes the act of writing and constructs five distinct characters with genres particular to each, including a wonderful Cosmo send-up for the gorgeous gold-digging nurse as well as a provocative intervention of the author herself. Clichés and generic conventions only provide more writerly ammunition, as Williams constantly shifts her literary goalposts from crime to romance to a metafictional crisis while never losing the immediacy of the characters or the suspense of the crime. If Gee Williams was a more celebrated author she could win this competition. Brilliant.