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In the latest New Yorker Angels in the Outfield film

, a double-sized travel-themed issue, James Woods lavishes three pages of praise on Geoff Dyer’s latest book Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

. Woods describes the book as “relentlessly funny,” “savagely funny,” “wonderful,” “pungent and funny,” “very amusing,” “original” “affecting,” and “unexpected” – and those are just the prisable bits from a general slurry of praisesong. Dyer’s work, we’re told, is “familiarly postmodern”:

Grande gestures are futile, and in the place of hard work or exacting thought there is sex and drugs and clubbing, and various kinds of mind-bending music. Everything is unfinishable, belated, and philosophically twilit.

Toward the end of his piece, Wood goes from hyping Dyer specifically to writing a hall-pass for every lazy artist who’s ever lived:

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In the earlier books, Dyer’s characters failed to write not because they were indifferent to writing but because they wanted too much to write. Negative liberty expresses a fear of completion; if you never start a work, then at least there is no chance of your having finished it. To complete something is in some ways to make it disappear; not starting it is a preemptive strike against loss, a way of elegizing what has not yet disappeared.

It’s impossible to say what would prompt somebody with Wood’s sterling work ethic to write such nonsense, and it’s likewise impossible to figure out how a lazy, self-indulgent, and utterly ineffective collage like Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi somehow managed to appeal to a critic of Wood’s usual circumspection – wanderlust, maybe? A little bit of Walter Mitty peeking through?

However his review happened, it’s completely wrong: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

is narcissistic effluvia of the most toxic kind, worthless as a novel, worthless as two connected novellas, worthless in its pages and paragraphs, and worthless in its every line. Many of you (although perhaps not Daniel Green, at least writing here) have a high regard for Wood’s literary criticism, and in my opinion that regard is justified – but not this time.

Still, anybody can lapse now and then. Hell, I declared East Lynne a masterpiece when it first came out. I was wrong then, and Wood is wrong now, but we can both go on to be both right and good – which is more than can be said for Geoff Dyer.

Steve Donoghue

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Cougar Club rip The Last Unicorn movie Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens movie John Wray’s Lowboy The Violent Kind psp has been garnering heaps of praise, and in this week’s New Yorker, James Wood piles on:

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John Wray is less interested in Lowboy’s picaresque circuits than in his mental circuits, whose damaged condition is brilliantly, compassionately evoked in the novel…Great tact is required to pull off this kind of thing in fiction, since hallucination can be as boring as someone recounting a very long dream at breakfast, or it can slide too easily, like any horror story, into a bloody and relentless vitality. Wray is never boring, largely because he has an uncanny talent for ventriloquism, and he seems to know, with unerring authority, how to select and make eloquent the details of Lowboy’s illness.

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Wray has a weakness for bagatelle plotting, but he takes a care with words that borders on the obsessive, and his imagery is surgically precise. He’s a slow, meticulous writer, and it shows in the work…Lowboy is told in a series of impressionistic flashes, most not more than a few paragraphs long, and it moves with extremely confident speed to its heart-wrenching conclusion. The book’s occasional tendencies toward predictable Hollywood formulae…are more than offset by the understated brilliance of its narrative.

For a look at Wood’s view of fiction and criticism in general, check out Daniel Green’s review of How Fiction Works, from our August 2008 issue. And in his review of Lark & Termite, from our February 2009 issue Dragonball: Evolution movie full , Sam Sacks tackles the difficulty of rendering a mentally damaged person’s mind in prose.

Stephanie Meyer’s ludicrously popular Twilight series (over 40 million copies sold) has prompted Joan Acocella of the New Yorker to go back to the origins of vampire myth, on to it’s spread throughout Europe in the seventeenth century, to a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva in the early nineteenth century.

In the summer of 1816, Lord Byron, fleeing marital difficulties, was holed up in a villa on Lake Geneva. With him was his personal physician, John Polidori, and nearby, in another house, his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley; Shelley’s mistress, Mary Godwin; and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who was angling for Byron’s attention (with reason: she was pregnant by him). The weather that summer was cold and rainy. The friends spent hours in Byron’s drawing room, talking. One night, they read one another ghost stories, which were very popular at the time, and Byron suggested that they all write ghost stories of their own. Shelley and Clairmont produced nothing. Byron began a story and then laid it aside. But the remaining members of the summer party went to their desks and created the two most enduring figures of the modern horror genre. Mary Godwin, eighteen years old, began her novel “Frankenstein” (1818), and John Polidori, apparently following a sketch that Byron had written for his abandoned story, wrote “The Vampyre: A Tale” (1819).

Polidori’s book was a huge success, and wasn’t topped for nearly eighty years, when Bram Stoker, a theater manager who wrote thrillers on the side, published Dracula. Acocella guides us through the movies, television shows and books that lead us to the present day, where “enthusiasm for vampires seems to be at a new peak.” Be sure to check out our October 2008 issue, where Sharon Fulton explains:

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Sometimes when I’m tearing into a rare steak or re-watching Fight Club, I understand why everybody wants a little bloodlust from their paramours. And even if you’re a vegan saint, vampire fiction provides a nice, safe release from the least kinky parts of your day….Not only are contemporary authors churning out vampire tales as if they actually believe there’s no tomorrow and someone’s coming to drain them dry, but publishers have started reprinting deluxe editions of older classics.

Her Vampire Fan(g) Guide covers over a dozen of the latest releases, including Meyer’s all-conquering tetralogy.

Steve Coll, perhaps the best-sourced American reporter on foreign affairs, has an excellent primer on the simmering conflict over Kashmir in the New Yorker. The situation in Pakistan is less stable than most in the West realize. In stepping down last year, Pervez Musharraf handed Pakistan’s new civilian President Asif Zardari (widower of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto) not only the sixty-year Kashmiri conflict in the northeast, but internal unrest that threatens to topple the government.

The violent contest for power and legitimacy between Taliban militants and Pakistan’s government is in many ways a struggle over Pakistan’s national identity – and, particularly, over whether the present government is righteously Islamic enough.

Failure here will torpedo gains anywhere else. India and Pakistan have been conducting quiet negotiations over Kashmir for much of the last decade, but “in the midst of such [an internal] contest, any agreement that made concessions to India would be harder to than ever to sell to the Pakistani public.” The Indian leadership likewise faces pressure from more militant factions to act with force. The struggle for peace reflects

a competition between two schools of radical thought: the millenarian terrorism of jihadi groups and their other supporters; and the less well-known search by sections of the Indian and Pakistani elites for a transformational peace. For both groups, Kashmir is symbolically and ideologically important. It is also, still, a territory of grinding, unfinished war.

And it is a conflict tied intimately to America’s presence in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, built up the Taliban in Afghanistan as a bulwark against Indian influence, just as they supported jihadi forces in Kashmir as proxies in their fight for territory. Weaning them off of their reliance on Islamic militants will take a combination of American pressure (the US gives billions every year in military aid to Pakistan) and a workable solution to the question of Kashmir.

For an idea of the precariousness of Pakistan’s government, see this video from the The New York Times, about the fight between the government and the Taliban for the valley of Swat, a mere 100 miles from the nation’s capitol. For more on related subjects, turn to Zac Marconi’s review of The Great Gamble, about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, from our February 2009 issue. On the wider subject of the so-called “war on terror”: Greg Waldmann’s review of Lee Harris’ The Suicide of Reason, from our October 2007 issue and his review of Michael Scheuer’s Marching Toward Hell, from our April 2008 issue.

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Jane Mayer’s reportage on the Bush administration’s detention policies has won her praise in many quarters. Greg Waldmann reviewed The Dark Side The Leon (Professional) download The Magdalene Sisters movie download

, her disturbing book on the subject, back in our December 2008 issue. Her coverage continues into the Obama Administration in the New Yorker Dolls psp .

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri has been held at the U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina since June of 2003, when he was on the brink of standing trial for “credit-card fraud, bank fraud, identity theft, and lying to a federal agent.” The charges stemmed from al-Marri’s 2001 arrest as a material witness in an investigation of the September 11th attacks. Al-Marri intended to plead innocent, and the F.B.I couldn’t coax any information out of him, so the Bush Administration put him in the care of the Department of Defense, hoping they would have more luck. Before agreeing to release him to the government,

the presiding judge in the case ruled that the White House would be barred from charging Marri again with the same crimes. In legal jargon, the original charges were “dismissed with prejudice,” to protect Marri’s right not to be place in “double jeopardy.” As a result, if the Obama Administration decides to charge him in the criminal system now, it has to bring a different set of charges, unless Marri’s lawyers offer a deal.

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Years of wrangling later, Al-Marri’s lawyers, hoping to secure a trial, have brought the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Obama Administration must file a response by March 23rd. This response will have to address the folly of eight years of George Bush’s detention policy as much as it does the particulars of the case. Aside from wasting what federal prosecutors thought would be an easy conviction, Bush held Al-Marri without trial partly on the basis of statements made by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – statements made under torture. And al-Marri seems to have been abused during his stay there:

For the first six months, Marri was kept in an eight-foot-by-ten-foot cell with one blacked-out window, no social interaction, and nothing to do or to read…the Department of Defense ordered the removal of the mattress, pillow, and Koran…He was denied hot food, and consistently felt cold…At other points, Marri started feeling “tingles” all over, and began hallucinating…

After months of non-compliance, interrogators “chained [him] in a fetal position… [wrapped] duct tape around his mouth…tried to gag him. But as they started to tape a sock in his mouth he began to choke, causing the agents to panic and stop.” These facts are not in dispute; all of this is on tape somewhere. After a few years, the efforts of al-Marri’s lawyers secured him better treatment.

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Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrel told Mayer that “The Department of Defense treats all detainees humanely, and this is particularly true in the case of al-Marri, for whom we have taken extraordinary measures to insure his physical and mental well-being.” The first assertion is a blatant lie, the second a probable one, but what’s important is that it’s the first instance of such duplicity under Barack Obama’s Presidency. The incongruity in Morrel’s statement pertained to the policies of the last President. The upcoming Supreme Court case will show what the current President plans to do with them.

“I am quite seriously discussing the propriety of omitting it,” James Garfield wrote of his inaugural address, just two months before he had to give it. Well, he didn’t really have to give it. There’s no provision for it in the Constitution, but George Washington thought he ought to give a speech after he was sworn in and every President since has done the same. So we learn in Jill Lepore’s wonderful New Yorker piece on the evolution (or devolution) of the quadrennial speech.

Washington started it but addressed only the Congress; Jefferson addressed the American people, but only in the presence of Congress. James Monroe moved it outdoors but didn’t specifically address anyone. Finally, Andrew “The Lion” Jackson addressed the American people while outdoors. And that’s been the paradigm.

Garfield was plagued by his impending address, and he studied up by reading his predecessors. Most of what he found was uninspiring, and Lepore argues convincingly that they’ve actually gotten worse. Of course Lincoln’s addresses loom over the others. Jefferson had the most elegant zinger: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” John Adams had the longest sentence (700 words). Harding beat all comers for sheer monotony. And “George H. W. Bush compared freedom to a kite.”

Nineteenth-century Presidents pledged themselves to the Constitution; twentieth-century Presidents courted the American people. We now not only accept that our Presidents will speak to us, directly, and ask for our support…we expect it, even though the founders not only didn’t expect it, they feared it.

Lepore traces the recent pandering, anti-intellectual trend to Richard Nixon, who established the Writing and Research Department, an office of official speechwriters. Words got smaller and rhetoric became more supplicating. Prior to that, when President’s had help they usually got it from friends or advisors. Ted Sorenson was Kennedy’s primary speechwriter, but he also did much more than that.

With all this in mind, and with Barack Obama’s inaugural looming in the near future, Lepore hones in on the moment

The problem doesn’t lie in the length of their sentences or the number of their syllables. It lies in the absence of precision, the paucity of ideas, and the evasion of every species of argument. Presidential rhetoric is worth keeping an eye on. But the anti-intellectual Presidency is fast expiring. And a rhetorical Presidency begins to look a lot better, after some years of a dumbfounded one.

She also reminds us that these inaugurals have traditionally been meant to be read as much as they were meant to be heard. Penguin, even in the age of YouTube, is already betting on it: they’ll be publishing Obama’s speech in Februrary – coupled with Lincoln’s two inaugurals, his Gettysburg address, and Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” Obama is a gifted orator, among other things, but stay tuned to Open Letters to see if he can keep pace with this sort of company.

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The Winter Fiction Issue of The New Yorker

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offers a small chunk from the late Roberto Bolano’s literary offerings, a story-fragment or novella-fragment or novel-fragment the editors have chosen to title “Meeting with Enrique Lihn.” The piece is three pages long, has no paragraph-breaks, features no dialog, has no dramatic resolution of any kind, and is presented without any editorial comment as to, well, what the Hell it is. Is this a discreet story by Bolano that the magazine is choosing now to publish? Did Bolano intend it to look the way it does, or is it a draft-portion of something else (much like the undigested item by Mark Twain, in the same issue)? These matters, like so much associated with Bolano, remain shrouded in mystery.

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In our December issue, Open Letters Fiction Editor Sam Sacks writes about what is likely to be the single largest accumulation of the Bolano mystery we’ll ever see, his 50-volume 900,000-page posthumous opus, 2666. Sacks is a seasoned trekker through recondite prose, but this one gave him more than its share of frustration. Click on over to the whole piece

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A treasure trove for the politically-inclined in the latest New Yorker. It begins with their grave, methodical and very well-written endorsement of Barack Obama. Of course, we here at Open Letters don’t make endorsements, and those are, of course, literary compliments. But we don’t have our heads entirely stuck in the sand, so turn to Politics Editor Greg Waldmann’s deconstruction of the two candidates: the compromises of Barack Obama and the lies of John McCain

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Elsewhere in the issue is George Packer’s excellent reporting on the working-class white vote in Ohio, James Wood on Republicans and words, George W’s falling out with his Crawford neighbors, an excellent history of voting procedure in America (seriously!), and a look at the foreign policy teams of Obama and McCain.

Last is a wonderful look at the mythology that has shrouded the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. His memorial was dedicated in 1922, and the celebration honored not Lincoln the emancipator, but Lincoln the unifier. It ends fittingly:

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In 1909 the Revered L.H. Magee, the pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Springfield, Illinois, voiced his disgust at the exclusion of blacks from the town’s centennial dinner, but he imagined by the time of the bicentennial, in 2009, racial prejudice would be “relegated to the dark days of ‘Salem witchcraft.’” [At] Next year’s Lincoln commemorations in Washington…Congress will convene in a joint session on February 12^th, and on May 30^th the still new President will rededicate the Lincoln Memorial. The look and emphasis of the occasion will have changed – measurably for certain; astoundingly, perhaps – in the fourscore and seven years since 1922.

 

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James Wood reviews Home, Marilynne Robinson’s third novel in the September 8 New Yorker. There he admires “the obdurateness with which she describes the difficult joys of [her] faith” and her “fight to use the best words,” though he’s ambivalent about her Puritan “ecstasies.” But turn first to Sam Sacks’ elegant and formidable look at her career in our December 2007 issue, where he explores in depth the themes Wood – still limited by space in his new environs – can only touch upon.   Before that, turn back to our third issue, where Sam assesses the state of Christianity in literature today. From the heights of St. Augustine we’ve been reduced to “Christian Inspiration,” where

extreme reductive simplicity has been promulgated at the expense of complexity and artfulness; the molding of sentences and the cultivation of an individual style have been abandoned for a kind of facile bantering that differs only to the degree that it’s dumbed down; rigorous scholarship has become an anachronism; serious study—of texts, of history, of the Bible, of the natural world, of ageless paradoxes of existence, even of the self—has been stinted for self-absorbed autobiography and self-satisfied declarations of faith; and passion has been replaced with cheerful congeniality.

It’s a sad state of affairs. Fortunately Robinson is not one of those writers. Aside from showing us why, our fiction editor also homes in on the importance of her essays – what her non-fiction jeremiads can tell us about the worlds she creates in her fiction.

Also in the New Yorker, Alex Ross scolds classical music audiences today for their “clockwork routine:”

The music usually begins a few minutes after eight…The evening falls into two halves, each lasting around forty-five or fifty minutes…The audience is expected to remain quiet for the duration of each work, and those who applaud between movements may face embarrassment. Around ten o’clock, the audience claps for two or three minutes, the performers bow two or three times, and all go home.

Of course that sounds boring, but Ross can’t avoid the thing that makes all those people sit and stand and clap, mannequin-like, for two hours: love of music and respect for the craft of those who make it. He realizes that the dining-hall atmosphere of centuries past won’t fly nowadays, but a part of him nonetheless pines for the Lisztian circus that was nineteenth century concert-going. Ross himself has no solutions. We’ve all been to our share of boring concerts, and the by-rote routine of audience behavior can only serve to make the evening seem even more tedious. But when the music is of the highest quality, and the performance sublime? Little can compare. For an impression of such and experience, the final concert of a great pianist in Carnegie Hall, examine Greg Waldmann’s account of Alfred Brendel’s goodbye to New York.