The Weblog of Julien Noah Devereux
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The Millions tells us of interesting books to be published this upcoming year. It’s a good list, and contains many titles I hope to read. At my current rate, however, I feel I won’t get to many of them until the next decade. This week I started reading a book (The Verificationist, by Donald Antrim) that I bought in 2001 but have only now gotten around to reading.
(It’s good, by the way. Not sure why I waited so long to read it.)
An acquaintance of mine, Margo Rabb, recently wrote a piece for the New York Times on which books are most often stolen from book stores. The Bible, along with books by Martin Amis, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo and Jack Kerouac, are at the top of the list. As Rabb points out, the most stolen books tend to be written by men, and this is probably because the shoplifters tend to be a certain kind of young man. That young man was identified in an article Ron Rosenbaum wrote years ago on a similar theme for the New York Observer. He is “Bukowski Man”:
Bukowski Man, sort of like our anthropological forebears Peking Man or Piltdown Man, almost a special subspecies of human. You’ve probably run into Bukowski Man in one form or another. He’s like, you know, a rebel, he’s not into conventional literature, man. Because it doesn’t tell the truth. The man can’t handle The Truth, which of course is all about (and only about) getting drunk and pissing and shitting and puking and fucking and passing out, not necessarily in that order, sometimes virtually simultaneously. What else do we know about Bukowski Man? He’s probably a suburban white boy who’s never been more down and out than a collect call to his parents. Usually there’s a surfboard or a skateboard or a Frisbee involved. His dog wears a red bandanna around its neck. Oh, and yes, he’s likely to be a shoplifter.
Anyway, I find the topic of most stolen books (and cars and records and other things) fascinating, and wish papers would run a “most stolen” list next to the bestsellers.
Asra Q. Nomani relates a dispiriting story in the Wall Street Journal about Random House’s decision to cancel the publication of The Jewel of Medina, Sherry Jones’s “racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet [sic] Muhammad.” The reason for the decision is depressingly familiar:
Thomas Perry, deputy publisher at Random House Publishing Group, said that it “disturbs us that we feel we cannot publish it right now.” He said that after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received “from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”
Well, considering the mayhem that followed the publication of Sir Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons in Denmark, I’m sure the publication of a book describing Muhammad and Aisha’s wedding night might “incite” acts of violence (by people, it must be remembered, who are perfectly capable of deciding not to be violent in response to such “incitement”). But it’s not as if Random House’s decision not to publish will be free of nasty consequences. It will embolden that small, radical segment to threaten other publishers with violence the next time something it finds offensive is published. Perry’s statement might more accurately be rendered as, “If we’re about to publish something you don’t like, threaten us with violence and we won’t publish it.”
It’s especially shameful that this has happened at Random House, whose co-founder, Bennett Cerf, faced an obscenity trial for trying to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses. (Cerf and Random House won the case, of course, and began typesetting copies of Ulysses within ten minutes of the decision.) It’s hard to think of a more dismal way to traduce Cerf’s legacy than to cave in to the demands of religious fanatics.
It’s shameful, too, that the University of Texas, alma mater of my parents and my paternal grandfather, has a part in this. Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of history at UT, was asked to review Jones’s book by Random House and after doing so took it upon herself to mobilize Muslim opposition to the publication of The Jewel of Medina. According to Nomani’s article, Spellberg said, “I don’t have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can’t play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography.”
You can’t? Why not? It’s a novel, that is, a work of the imagination, not a history book. And anyway, offending religious sensibilities and titillating readers with soft-core pornography are an important part of the novelistic tradition and have been since the very beginning, as anyone who’s ever read François Rabelais or Laurence Sterne, to name only two early novelists, can tell you. I hope there is a publisher out there with a spine and an understanding of the fundamental importance of defending freedom of speech against thugs, bullies, and perpetually offended humanities professors (someone in other words more like Bennett Cerf than Thomas Perry), who will publish this book.
When I first read the introduction to James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times some fifteen years ago, I laughed out loud at the mixture of menace, melancholy, and absurdity in its concluding sentence: “As F. Hopkinson Smith long ago pointed out, the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.” “The claw of the sea-puss” is pretty unbeatable as a simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying metaphor for the ravages of time and death. I imagined the sea-puss as a cute but murderous deep-sea monster, some fell hybrid of crab and Hello Kitty, perhaps betentacled and squid-beaked as well. I meant to look up “sea-puss,” and F. Hopkinson Smith, of course, at the time, but I was living a careless, profligate existence when I was in my early twenties, and I became distracted by other things (not least by laughing at other things in Thurber’s book, like the “Get Ready Man”) and I simply forgot about them.
I recently reread My Life and Hard Times, however, and I’m happy to say that the World Wide Web has the sea-puss answers I seek. According to Webster’s online dictionary, “sea puss” is an alteration of an Algonquian word for river, and means “a swirling or along shore undertow.” According to a number of sites I could find, F. Hopkinson Smith was for most of his life a marine engineer, and designed the foundations for the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. In short, Smith was a man intimately familiar with the powers of the sea-puss. Smith didn’t begin to write until later in his life, apparently egged on by friends because he was such an engaging “after-dinner raconteur.” I found one of Smith’s novels, The Tides of Barnegat, on Google Books. Chapter XXII is entitled, “The Claw of the Sea-Puss.” The flavor of Smith’s prose, and the terrible destructive power of the sea-puss, can be found in an earlier passage, describing the weather at a beach in the fall:
The cruel north wind now wakes, and with a loud roar joins hands with the savage easter; the startled surf falls upon the beach like a scourge. Under their double lash the outer bar cowers and sinks; the frightened sand flees hither and thither. Soon the frenzied breakers throw themselves headlong, tearing with teeth and claws, burrowing deep into the hidden graves. Now the forgotten wrecks, like long-buried sins, rise and stand naked, showing every scar and stain. This is the work of the sea-puss—the revolving maniac born of close-wed wind and tide; a beast so terrible that in a single night, with its auger-like snout, it bites huge inlets out of farm lands—mouthfuls deep enough for ships to sail where but yesterday the corn grew.
If that has whetted your appetite, you can read Smith’s entire novel online at its page on Google Books. And may you avoid the sea-puss’s awful claw for as long as you can.
George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman series of historical novels, died Wednesday. I only discovered the Flashman books last year, but after reading the first, Flashman, I liked it so much I read the next eight without stopping. There are three more.
The books are presented as the memoirs of Harry Flashman, a drunken bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, after he was expelled from Rugby School. “Flashy” joins the army soon after and ends up being involved in many of the significant battles of the nineteenth century, including Little Big Horn, the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the Indian Mutiny, among others. In all of them, he steadfastly refrains from doing anything heroic, trying instead only to save his own skin and make it with the ladies. He’s a coward, a cad, a bully, disloyal, untrustworthy, and self-centered, and yet, since he is completely honest about it all, ends up being an oddly endearing, ridiculous, and occasionally even sympathetic character.
Fraser’s Flashman books may be the best, and almost certainly are the funniest, historical fiction ever written. The historical information in the books is meticulously researched, so even as you are entertained by a bawdy boy’s adventure story, you end up learning a great deal about the British Empire, knowledge which provides a deeper background for much of the news that comes out of today’s troublesome hotspots.
If you’ve never read them, I enthusiastically recommend them. His creator is dead, but Flashman will live for a very long time, I think.
Rest in peace, Mr. Fraser.
Now that I’m (long) out of college, I choose what books to read in three ways: friends’ recommendations, books I need to read for my writing and editing jobs, and books referred to or recommended in books and articles I’m already reading. The first and third method send me down certain paths and subject areas, all related to each other in some way, and thus necessarily excluding other paths, other authors. It occurred to me when Norman Mailer died recently that I have never read anything he wrote, and that’s primarily because nobody I know has ever recommended him to me and the writers I read hardly ever refer to him, and when they do it’s usually unfavorably. The only exception I remember is George Orwell writing that The Naked and the Dead was a good book, so if I read anything by Mailer, it will be that one first. It’s the same thing with John Updike and William T. Vollmann, two other writers whose books I always see in the bookstore but have never read, and there is certainly a vast constellation of others I have never read, and may never read. If I had the time, it would be interesting to draw a chart of these recommendation connections, to see what my own reading’s constellation looks like, and to see just how far away across the galaxy it might lay from those of other people.
Here are some recommended reading lists I’ve found on the Internet recently from writers or bloggers I like:
I’m working on my own list, which I hope to post to the site soon.
I apologize for not posting much lately. I was working two jobs for nearly a month, and then I went camping at Lost Maples State Natural Area. Now I’m on a much more humane work schedule and have a sleeping arrangement that doesn’t involve being bitten by ants, so I think I’ll start posting more.
It was a shock to come back to this site and find hundreds—yes, hundreds!—of spam comments. They were obviously a punishment for my neglect of the site (as if the ant bites weren’t punishment enough!).
I’ve added a plug-in to the site, reCAPTCHA, which should keep the comment spam down. It requires commenters to enter text, which is always a bit tedious, but if you follow the link you’ll learn that by entering the little distorted words, you’ll be helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. It’s quite an ingenious way of turning an annoying task into something worthwhile.
In the new Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens recounts his experiences touring the U.S. to promote his book, God Is Not Great. It’s an amusing article, and there’s an especially good paragraph on Austin’s own Marvin Olasky, the man who invented the term “compassionate conservativism.” Olasky apparently claimed that the Americans won the Revolutionary War because George Washington enforced Christian morality among the troops:
Olasky’s book on presidential morality (which sadly was written before this president took office) says that George Washington won the Revolutionary War because he forbade drinking and swearing in the ranks of his army, whereas the British forces were awash in immorality. I argue that the war was won largely by the French, who were not strangers to wine or oaths, and that the American troops at Valley Forge were much inspired by Thomas Paine, who may not have cursed all that much but who never left the brandy bottle alone and who thought that Christianity was a joke. Moreover, the Brits—indicted by Olasky for their indulgence in adultery and even buggery—did manage to hold on to Canada, India, much of the Caribbean, and much of Africa in spite of divine disapproval. “God on Our Side” is one of the oldest and weakest arguments in human history.
I’ve been reading Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. It’s a gratifying book to read when you live, as I do, in a state where politicians routinely try to outdo each other with public displays of piety, for it shows that the idea entertained by religious conservatives that the U.S. was a nation of God-fearing Christians until the 1960s came along is pure, uncut buncombe. It’s also a bit depressing to read, as it seems clear that current politicians with the religious views of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln (who never joined a church) might not be able to be elected.
In addition to writing about Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll, and Susan B. Anthony, Jacoby mentions a Missouri-based freethinking cartoonist named Watson Heston, whose “Bible Comically Illustrated” sold 10,000 copies in 1900 and probably sent the Baptists of his day into paroxysms of wounded outrage (though Jacoby doesn’t mention any Baptists carrying “Behead Those Who Insult Christianity” placards). The drawings are somewhat crude, but there’s an appealing absurdist sense of humor behind them.
You can see a few of his illustrations here, and can order a CD-ROM of his work, along with other freethinker writings on the Bible here.
Christopher Hitchens has written an article in Slate on the semi-pro members of the “Muslim street” who keep Karachi’s flag shops in business with their regular protests against any and all perceived insults to Islam from the West. Anger over Salman Rushdie’s knighthood is only the latest casus jihadi. Hitchens once again rightly chastises Western media producers for setting up people like “Rage Boy” as the true representatives of the Muslim world:
But our media regularly make the assumption that the book burners and fanatics really do represent the majority, and that assumption has by no means been tested. (If it is ever tested, and it turns out to be true, then can we hear a bit less about how one of the world’s largest religions mustn’t be confused with its lunatic fringe?)