(dave e)

again with the books

even though the unclear line between so-called leisure reading and "professional" reading has long since become a tiresome note, we can't help but summon it back up.

i've finished some recreational reading, lately. stuff outside the limited survey of my dissertation, and it feels nice to have recently picked up a good pace again. for a while i worried i'd never finish a book again. i've been spending months on books that a younger me would've knocked out in a couple of days. a friend and i recently chalked that up to the curse of the critical reader. reasonable enough, but it's also the fault of my apparently diminished attention span. it seems as if that lack of discipline may be on its way out. this is the year of the job search, a compelling motivator.

so, a few thoughts on a few books.

herman charles bosman's my life and opinions. i first read bosman because our hosts for a trip to south africa gave me a copy of his old transvaal stories. that collection stayed with me because bosman's sentences convey quiet so well. same goes for the autobiographical anthology just finished. i want to call those sentences both rugged (my too-easy nostalgia for the south african bush) and vaporous. extra bonus: a nice platform of humanist dogma for all those aspiring literatti:

"a thing you produce cannot be a work of art - no matter how sincerely you feel about it - if you are concerned with anything else than the delineation of the fundamental realities of what goes on inside human beings as human beings and not as puppets. if people who wish to produce art would realize this simple truth they would save themselves a great deal of heartbreak. no matter how noble this vision is that is eating up your soul, unless it is a vision that is sprung legitimately from the naked material of the art itself that you are seeking to practice, you can end up only by deceiving yourself. even if it is as noble an ideal as democracy" (124-125).

ok. got it.

then there was shibley telhami's the stakes: america in the middle east: the consequences of power and the choice for peace. the university of maryland selects an annual "first year book," some text that a committee agrees would edify incoming students. in past years, the fyb program has selected moises kaufman's the laramie project, sister helen prejean's dead man walking, and alan lightman's einstein's dreams (the latter remains underrated, i think). telhami's is my first taste of what i suppose could be fairly called popular political thought, though it's more like an introduction to international relations than an analysis of the same. for that reason, it will probably perform well in undergraduate courses. at the very least, it will almost certainly stimulate the sort of conversations telhami wants to encourage. the author is, by the way, on the facutly at maryland, and expressed some surprise when he learned his book would be given to all first-year students and introduced in many classrooms. the stakes' best work, i think, is its historical narrative of western intervention in the persian, arab, and muslim worlds. every american who holds any opinion whatsoever of bush's foreign policy ought to have that context. of course, we don't. more might be said of telhami's rhetorical position (something on the order of a plea for informed reflection before international power is exercized), but these are supposed to be brief comments.

i'm not sure if i've ever read an entire anthology of anything before. the art of fact: a historical anthology of literary journalism was a good place to begin. too many selections to stimulate a coherent response, but a few lodged themselves in my thoughts on the book. walt whitman's second-hand report on the battle of chancellorsville and a civil war wounded camp serves as a great prose predecessor to the leaves of grass whitman, that american everythingness-in-a-sentence is already there. stephen crane's "an experiment in misery" and an excerpt from jack london's the people ofthe abyss are clearly paradigm-shifting instances of nonfiction literature.

argh. too much. short pieces from gay talese (on dimaggio), piers paul read (from alive), hunter s. thompson (a portait of nixon from "the scum also rises"), john simpson (on tiananmen square), dennis covington (on holy snake handling in alabama), martha gellhorn (on war in spain), george orwell (on morocco), and john steinbeck (his selection from once there was a war frames the role of the engaged war journalist so well). of course, there's didion's "los angeles notebook" and herr's "breathing in," from dispatches, both of which always leave me stunned.

yeah. good anthology.

i read john edwards' four trials for two reasons. first, its co-author (who is actually credited on the cover) is john auchard, a professor in my department, whose american literature course was very much worth my time a few years ago, when i was lucky enough to take it. second, my father-in-law subcribes to the collective loathing of trial lawyers, and i'd like to have a story to tell if we ever have that conversation. here are a few of those stories: the alcholic patient whose life was ruined by reckless over-prescription of antabuse, the family whose daughter suffers because a rear-guard doctor refused to perform a c-section (that's not how he thought they ought to deliver babies in his community, after all), the boy who lost his parents because a trucking company encouraged perilous habits among its drivers (more loads + less time = more pay = fatal crashes), and - my favorite - the girl whose intestines were eviscerated when a pool pump's plastic cover came off too easily. each leaves room for interrogation on the merits (these are trials, after all), but even as a critical reader, i closed the last page feeling unsure about why edwards' lawyering was such a bad thing.

ok. that's all. i'll respond to g. thomas couser's thoughtful book, vulnerable subjects: ethics and life writing, in the pages of some upcoming issue of prose studies. yes. it's about time to write that review.

started azar nafisi's reading lolita in tehran: a memoir in books on this morning's train ride. so far, i'm taken with it.

Posted by dave at September 7, 2004 7:28 PM | TrackBack