Book Brawl, the First: Martin Amis’s The Second Plane

Posted 31 July, 2008 in Book Reviews, Guest Blogger, Book Brawl | 2 comments

Few modern authors are more polarizing than Martin Amis. His advocates are passionate about his stylistic pyrotechnics and subtle, argumentative mind; his detractors are equally passionate about his show-offy style and his heavy-handed, ill-considered invective. These polarities have been at the forefront surrounding Amis’s recently published collection of essays, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom.

Never one to shy away from a challenge, even when it would probably be in my best interest to do so, your humble correspondent recently agreed to go mano-a-mano with Matt Sturrock, a Toronto-based bookseller and writer, whose work has appeared in the National Post and Books in Canada, among other places. Not strictly a review, the following forms more of an intellectual battle royale, with Sturrock taking the pro side, and your humble correspondent arguing the contra. Be warned: there will be blood.

Matt Sturrock: Well, I won’t claim to be completely surprised by the censure and opprobrium Martin Amis has won for himself with The Second Plane. We’ve seen similar brutalizations after the publication of Yellow Dog and Koba the Dread, but those were for his alleged failings as a writer, not as a person. The criticisms this time are ad hominem — and much more damaging than those surrounding, say, his dentistry bills. The reactions we’ve seen from other writers, the media, and the chattering classes have been appalling, and, to my mind, quite undeserved. What has been his great crime, exactly? In this book, we have an author who, seven days after September 11, hopes America’s retaliatory assault on Afghanistan will be “non-escalatory,” and will see its impoverished people “bombarded with consignments of food”; who, in March of 2003, denounces the reasons given for the coming invasion of Iraq, and deplores the new doctrines on torture and nuclear weapons usage; who finds the anti-intellectualism of the Bush administration (and its Rapture-inspired geopolitical strategies) abhorrent in the extreme; and who, generally speaking, is opposed to a small but exceedingly dangerous contingent of people (racially and culturally heterogeneous people, mind) who are demonstrably “racist, mysogynist [sic], homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitional, imperialist, and genocidal.” Is this an unreasonable stance?

In the old days, Amis could destroy Norman Mailer or Brian De Palma on the page for their gross artistic excesses or wonky personalities, and we’d all have a good laugh. But when he goes after theocratic goons who decapitate journalists or throw acid on the faces of women who wear make-up, he elicits widespread condemnation. It’s baffling.

Steven W. Beattie: The ad hominem attacks roiling around Amis predate the publication of The Second Plane by a matter of years, and often have to do more with his own, shall we say, intemperate public utterances than with his writing.

The widely reproduced comment that Terry Eagleton picked up on, for example, from a 2006 interview that Amis gave Ginny Dougary for the Times:

What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.

Certainly advocating discrimination of an identifiable group is not unique to Amis, even in the “enlightened” West; one thinks of the Japanese internment camps or Canada’s refusal to accept Jewish refugees during World War II. Still, in light of such inflammatory comments, from which Amis has since taken pains to distance himself, his repeated assertion in The Second Plane that he is not an Islamophobe, but rather “an Islamismophobe, or better say an anti-Islamist,” rings slightly hollow.

So when, in his short story, “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” he imagines the pilot of the first plane to hit the twin towers on September 11 as having not moved his bowels “since last May,” possessing breath that “smelled like a blighted river,” and having “a feverish and unvarying ache, not in his gut but his lower back, his pelvic saddle, and his scrotum,” such that “[e]very few minutes he was required to wait out an interlude of nausea, while disused gastric juices bubbled up in the swamp of his throat,” the rampant grotesqueries are wholly unsurprising.

In any combat situation, soldiers — unless they are already raving sociopaths — must depersonalize and dehumanize their enemy in order to kill them. Amis goes further, viewing his stated “enemy” as something almost subhuman, a creature more akin to Shakespeare’s Caliban than a man. He refers to the Islamist leadership as “a shifting crew of mono-eyed mullahs, tin-legged zealots, blind sheikhs, and paralyzed clerics,” and suggests that Sayyid Qutb, “the father of Islamism,” was radicalized by a frustrated desire to get it on with sexually liberated, Western women:

The theme of the “tempter” can be taken a little further, in the case of Qutb. When the tempter is a temptress, and really wants you to sin, she needs to be both available and willing. And it is almost inconceivable that poor Sayyid, the frail, humorless civil servant, and turgid anti-Semite (salting his talk with quotes from that long-exploded fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), ever encountered anything resembling an offer. It is more pitiful than that. Seduction did not come his way, but it was coming the way of others, he sensed, and a part of him wanted it too. That desire made him very afraid, and also shamed him and dishonored him, and turned his thoughts to murder.

There it is, then: Islamic terror as the manifest expression of male sexual frustration. This is surely a psychosexual analysis that would have given even Freud pause.

Whether it’s his demonization of the other, his belittlement of their sexual prowess, or his fear, in a largely adulatory review of America Alone by the frothing right-wing zealot Mark Steyn, that the swarthy hordes are out-breeding us, Amis’s advocacy of reason in the face of theocratic terror is too frequently undercut by a ravenous hysteria, a wide-eyed, arm-flapping denunciation of the barbarians kicking at his gate.

Matt Sturrock: It may very well be that, beneath Amis’s exterior as the suave, chain-smoking ironist, there does lurk a full-blown hysteric. The next few decades will tell us whether the hysteria is misplaced or not. In the meantime, for people who irritatedly ask, “Why is he taking all this Islamist business so personally?” there is the beginning of an answer in Amis’s novel, The Information. His protagonist, the failed writer Richard Tull, broods on the nature of the artistic mind:

Sometimes Richard did think and feel like an artist . . . He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.

Now take the owner of this sensibility (for it’s one we can prudently assume Amis himself possesses) and have him bear witness as a disintegrating Boeing 767 is purposefully rammed into one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers at 600 miles per hour. We can then see how this moment and its gruesome (and as yet unfinished) aftermath continue to dominate his literary output nearly seven years later.

The block quote you’ve pulled from Amis’s interview with Ginny Dougary (the same quote that’s forever being prodded and dragged about by members of the jackboot-wearing thought police) does not, I’m relieved to say, have him “advocating discrimination of an identifiable group.” It has him merely confessing to an atavistic feeling — one that he experienced fleetingly in the wake of another foiled terrorist plot in the United Kingdom. (Anyone seeking elaboration on this point is urged to read Amis in the December 1, 2007, edition of the Guardian newspaper, where he demolishes Ronan Bennett and the embarrassingly sophomoric diatribe that author had aimed at Amis the week prior.)

As for Muhammad Atta: I’m not sure why you object to the torments meted out to him in The New Yorker piece. Amis has always been cruel to the characters populating his fictions. And up until the moment Atta atomizes himself and hundreds of other innocents, I don’t think he fares any worse than, say, John Self in Money (with his tinnitus, his obesity, his blackouts), or Keith Whitehead in Dead Babies (with the social cruelties attending his dwarfism), or poor old Richard Tull (with his vanishing career, his receding hairline, his hectoring family life). I remember reading an interview with Amis some years ago (although I’m damned if I can find a record of it now) in which he discussed the nature of effective satire. If you want to visit the maximum amount of revenge on the villain in your story, he said, you don’t just have another character stride up and shoot him. You first have the audience catch the villain scratching his ass or picking his nose when he thinks nobody else is watching. The purpose of the endeavour is to ridicule the powerful. Laughter robs the villain of his ability to instill fear. Why shouldn’t Amis subject one of the most notorious mass murderers of the 21st century to a little ribaldry?

Finally: Mark Steyn’s America Alone. To describe Amis’s review as “adulatory” is a serious misrepresentation. In his piece, Amis says Steyn “writes like a maniac” (and later derides his “flashbulb vulgarisms” and verbal “incontinence”); he decides that Steyn’s “sense of decorum is inhumanly thin”; and he argues that the book ultimately surrenders to “iteration and circularity” while failing to follow through on its many implications. I thought the review was a cautious one; it allows for the importance of the book’s topic while castigating its author for his histrionics.

Steven, you complain about Amis’s response to the “barbarians kicking at his gate,” and there’s no denying that said response has been a vociferous one. But I’m glad we can at least agree that the barbarians are there (to say nothing of the determined fifth column within those gates). Living in a conciliatory little democracy like Canada (one whose cities have not yet been violated by human bombs), it might be easy for some of us to forget that a threat exists at all. Amis is at least engaging with that threat, however off-putting you might find the spectacle.

Steven W. Beattie: Leaving aside for a moment the almost painful irony that attends to Amis describing another writer — any other writer — as suffering from verbal “incontinence” or a lack of decorum, the tenor of his Steyn review is, as I suggested, largely adulatory. He acknowledges at the outset that Steyn writes like “a talented maniac,” but he then locates Steyn’s mania in his use of My Big Fat Greek Wedding as the springboard for his arguments about Islam. Amis’s only quarrel here is that Steyn’s “sane and serious” themes are appended to an exegesis of what Amis feels is a piece of Hollywood piffle. He does quarrel with Steyn’s prose — as indeed would any reasonably literate human being — but hopes that “his admonitions will gain some momentum,” because “[i]f every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, it doesn’t matter what creed or color they are; but if some of them believe in sharia and the Caliphate, and so on, then the numbers are clearly crucial.”

Here, again, we have Amis, the declared “Islamismophobe,” refusing to make a distinction between the fanatical psychopaths who perpetrated the atrocities of September 11, and who at a liberal estimation account for maybe three percent of all adherents to Islam worldwide, and everybody else. In an interview with Alex Bilmes, from the October 8, 2006 edition of The Independent, Amis is quoted as saying, “I just don’t hear from moderate Islam, do you? They’re there in the papers, but there’s no sort of mass presence.” In the essay “Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind,” he goes so far as to declare moderate Islam the “loser” in the battle with Islamism: “The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible.” Which may indeed be true, but it’s in the nature of moderates not to froth at the mouth, but to remain sensible and — to invoke a favourite Amis word — rational. One would not expect hordes of moderates marching through the avenues of London to descend on 10 Downing Street and demand — what, exactly?

Even when Amis does tilt towards acknowledging the strata of Muslim society, he does so with his fingers crossed behind his back. In the Bilmes interview, Amis says, “We’ve got to keep the sympathy of the vast bulk of the Muslim community. Getting tough wouldn’t work there.” Note two things about this statement. First, Amis says that we must keep their sympathy, we must keep them on our side, rather than us being sympathetic to their plight (i.e. racial profiling in much of the Western world, rampant poverty in their homelands, etc.). Further, we should not try “getting tough” with them only because that strategy wouldn’t work. If there were a reasonable expectation that it would work, you could be sure that Amis would be the first one to support it.

Regardless, when Amis supports Steyn’s argument about demographics, he’s really focusing on the wrong numbers. Instead of looking at birth rates, why not focus on the fact that the Islamists he so deplores are finding their new recruits from among the uneducated, unemployed populations of countries like Syria, where eighty percent of the people are under the age of thirty-five and the unemployment rate sits at around twenty percent. When you have a mass of idle, uneducated, unemployed youth to tap, it’s little wonder that the cultish Islamists are able to woo them. Why not advocate dealing with the root causes of this situation — the poverty and disaffection that is rampant in much of the Middle East — rather than hurling insults and fomenting division?

Matt Sturrock: We should take the time to acknowledge right now that this piece on Steyn entitled “Demographics” accounts for fewer than five full pages in a 204-page book. And for brevity’s sake, it looks like we’re going to have to agree to disagree about the meaning of the word “adulatory” as it applies to America Alone. Nowhere in Amis’s review did I find (if the OED definition of “adulate” is anything to go by) an instance of him “flatter[ing] obsequiously.” It seems to me that what gives Amis pause, what captivates his attention, is not Steyn’s overheated arguments, but the simple mathematical formulae that spawned them. The numbers as they apply to the demographics are startling, even if you ignore those that focus on the ascendancy of the global Muslim population, and concentrate only on the collapsing birth rates in the West. None of us can ignore the fact that, if the identified trends continue, and steady emigration turns European and North American democracies into majority-Muslim countries, then what makes the West “the West” might disappear. We’d be remiss not to anticipate, in a worst case scenario, a reversal of the secularization we’ve seen since the Enlightenment, the demotion of women in the political and social arenas, and more. The point that neither Steyn nor Amis concedes, however, is the one that Theodore Dalrymple makes in his excellent book, Our Culture, What’s Left of It — that many of the Muslim refugees are in essence “fleeing Islam, not seeking to extend its dominion.” They’re heading to the West in order to enjoy its advertised political and intellectual freedoms (if not its hyper-consumerism, its licentiousness, etc.) So, I’ll hasten to state that this massive collision will see that which makes Islam “Islam” change irrevocably, too. Let’s hope the resulting cultural hybridization claims far fewer lives than did the mass migrations of the 20th century.

Now, you mention the poverty and ignorance that blight Syria and other Muslim countries, and how these problems help drive recruitment to the Islamist cause. But I hope you don’t subscribe to the fallacy that it is these factors only, or even these factors mostly, that create a terrorist. Remember that almost all of the September 11 hijackers were from the staggeringly wealthy nations of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; many were raised in well-to-do families and were university educated. Islamism is attractive for the same reasons as any extremism: it brooks no compromises, it simplifies an otherwise confusing world. It also promises everlasting life for martyrs (and a celestial carnival of carnality), and it provides cover for those inclined toward baser criminal activity (drug running, extortion, etc.). Fame-seekers, action junkies, sadists, and sociopaths — whether poor or not — will always seek out these movements. Whatever the case, I’m not sure why you think it’s incumbent on Amis to “advocate dealing with the root causes of this situation.” He’s a novelist, not an OXFAM representative. And, besides, he has repeatedly demonstrated concern for the people of Afghanistan in particular (remember his wish that they be “bombarded with consignments of food”), and has lambasted the U.S. and its allies for pushing on into Iraq rather than concentrating on nation-building after the fall of the Taliban. Even that “tediously centrist” position, he recalls, won him abuse on a BBC talk show.

Your point about the apparent passivity and quiescence of moderate Islam is well taken. The hoarse shouting of a zealously belligerent minority is going to win more attention than the actions of an equable, law-abiding majority. The last time I was in London, there were neighbourhoods I ventured into where many a street corner was tyrannized by some bearded yobbo with a Koran in one hand and, in the other, a placard calling for the deaths of those who insult Muhammad. It unduly coloured my impression of the city at the time, even though I knew, at bottom, that the tolerance the state exhibits towards malignant fools such as those is a testament to the democratic West’s strength and its enshrined freedoms. There’s no need for moderate Muslims to march on Downing Street. But to see them march on Tehran, or Damascus, or Riyadh: wouldn’t that be something?

Man Booker Longlist 2008 Announced

Posted 29 July, 2008 in Awards | 1 comment

And, true to form, I haven’t read a single one of them.

The baker’s dozen are:

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
Gaynor Arnold, Girl in a Blue Dress
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
John Berger, From A to X
Michelle de Kretser, The Lost Dog
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs
Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency
Joseph O’Neill, Netherland
Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence
Tom Rob Smith, Child 44
Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

The longlist will be whittled down — barring a Frank O’Connoresque runaway jury — on September 9, and the award will be presented on October 14.

So Nutty It Just Might Work

Posted 29 July, 2008 in Film | No comments

From the New York Times:

The director Darren Aronofsky will develop a new installment of “RoboCop,” Reuters reported. He is teaming with the writer David Self to bring the crime-fighting half-human, half-machine back to life.

I seem to remember Aronofsky’s name bandied about to helm a new Batman movie before Christopher Nolan took over the franchise, so it would appear that he’s got an affinity for dark, futuristic fanboy-type stuff. Now if only he could find a way to insert a subplot in which RoboCop’s mother becomes addicted to diet pills …

Department of Unintentional Irony, Part … Oh, Fuck It, I’ve Lost Count

Posted 28 July, 2008 in Literary Criticism | 1 comment

A list of the 10 best Canadian books, complied by Robert Fulford, David Godfrey, and Abraham Rotstein, in the volume Read Canadian: A Book about Canadian Books:

Morley Callaghan, Stories

Donald Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays

George P. Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism

Harold Adam Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History

Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel

Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographical Man

E.J. Pratt, Collected Poems

Mordecai Richler, St. Urbain’s Horseman

***

The first step in developing a genuine poetics is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism, or talking about literature in a way that cannot help to build up a systematic structure of knowledge. This includes all the sonorous nonsense that we so often find in critical generalities, reflective comments, ideological perorations, and other consequences of taking a large view of an unorganized subject. It includes all lists of the “best” novels or poems or writers, whether their particular virtue is exclusiveness or inclusiveness.

– Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Northrop Frye

It should go without saying that the bolded emphases in the above are mine.

(Via Nigel Beale.)

The Novel: Aesthetics vs. Interpretation

Posted 25 July, 2008 in Literary Criticism | 2 comments

Jacob Russell, thinking out loud about the novel as a self-generating organism:

The novel as self-generating game. What it generates is the game, the rules of the game, rules to reconstruct old and generate new rules. What are rules? Rules are what they do. What do they do? Rules define the parameters of change.

… I think I just learned something from Gertrude Stein.

These questions — What are the rules of fiction? How does the novel operate? Is the novel organic and self-sustaining, or does it require something outside of it (i.e. a reader, and a reader’s sensibility) to be added in order to generate meaning? — go to the heart of much structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory, and pose a number of provocative questions.

In his book, The Literary in Theory, Jonathan Culler speaks to what he perceives to be one of “the major problems of literary studies”:

… the assumption, all too infrequently challenged, that the goal of literary studies is the interpretation of literary works and that the test of any theoretical discourse is whether it makes possible new and convincing interpretations of individual works. This presumption produces a rather odd situation: although we have vast numbers of interpretations of every major work and of very many minor ones, we lack adequate accounts of how literature itself works: what are the norms and conventions that enable literary works to have the meanings they do for members of a culture?

Russell uses the example of Jane Austen’s Emma and Mr. Knightley and asks, what constitutes these characters? What are they essentially made of? I suppose the most basic answer to this question is also the most obvious: they are made of words on a page. But how does a reader construct meaning out of these words on a page, how does the process of decoding these symbols create in each individual reader’s mind an individual understanding of who these characters are? If the novel really is self-generating, then the mechanisms by which we understand these characters should be contained within it, within the series of words on the page. The individuation of Emma and Mr. Knightley — what renders them specific for each reader — is bundled up in the ways in which Austen’s novel engages with the rules of fiction: the ways it reconstructs old rules and generates new ones.

In Russell’s conception (and likely also in Culler’s), one mistake that readers make in approaching a novel is to confuse what is inside the novel with what a reader brings to the novel from the outside:

That’s the usual method: mix up what is in the novel with what is in us and what is in us with what is in the novel. Even if that’s the most important part — where the meaning lies … that mixing up of us and it, how can we understand what we’re thinking about if we can’t answer the question: what is Emma made of, What is Mr. Knightly [sic] made of? What is in the novel that stays in the novel, that stays the same? Anything? Nothing?

These are heady questions, addressed in the writing of Saussure and Barthes and Derrida, concerning the notions of langue and parole and the infinite play of signification. They speak to first principles: how can we begin to approach this complex thing called the novel if we don’t have a grammar to discuss it; if, on a very basic level, we are unable to agree on what, exactly, it is?

While I certainly don’t want to deny the importance of first principles, what has often given me pause about this kind of literary theory is its apparent elision of the reader as a locus for determining meaning. Its elision, pace Culler, of interpretation. If literature is ever to be more than marks on a page, if it is ever to have meaning for a reader, it seems important to allow for a critical theory that engages with the process of literature, that recognizes that literature exists and thrives in the interstices between text and reader, and that it is probably not possible to eliminate the individual reader’s response to a text — a response that is, frequently if not necessarily, based on things outside the text itself. Derrida’s idea of infinite play speaks to this notion, as does Michael Riffaterre in his book, Structuralism:

[T]he poetic phenomenon, being linguistic, is not simply the message, the poem, but the whole act of communication. … The message and the addressee — the reader — are indeed the only factors involved in this communication whose presence is necessary. As for the other factors — language (code), non-verbal context, means of keeping open the channel — the appropriate language of reference is selected from the message, the context is reconstituted from the message, contact is assured by the control the message has over the reader’s attention, and depends upon the degree of that control.

This is not to deny the essential primacy of the text itself as, in Jane P. Tomkins’s conception, “an object rather than an instrument, an occasion for the elaboration of meaning rather than a force exerted upon the world.” But although the words on the page remain constant, my individual reaction to them may change over time, depending upon my current life’s circumstances, my degree of learning, my evolving worldview — all things exterior to the text itself. My experience of Philip Roth’s novel My Life as a Man is likely to be different if I read it during a painful break-up with a strong woman than it might be were I to read the same text in the context of a stable, happy relationship. On the “cellular” level, it’s the same book; but its visage now appears different, it’s more or less sunken and gaunt, it has gained or lost weight, it has a black eye or a chipped tooth.

I wonder, is there a way to reconcile the desire to view the reading of a novel as a purely aesthetic experience with the desire to engage in an act of interpretation? Should this even be an issue?

UPDATE: Jacob Russell has posted some additional thoughts about my final two questions on his blog.

With Friends Like These …

Posted 23 July, 2008 in Technology | 14 comments

Last weekend, a friend of mine travelled to Montreal where, among other things, she met up with a man she had previously known only online. This seemed strange to me, and not just for the obvious reason that a lone woman in an unfamiliar city walking into a bar to meet a man who is, in effect, a complete stranger could be construed as a somewhat dangerous prospect in this age of Internet luring, identity theft, and online predators. That aside, I had trouble getting my mind around the intersection between life online and life in the “real” world. Does an online correspondence necessarily translate into an actual friendship if the correspondents do eventually meet up?

Several readers of the current blog have been brave (foolish?) enough to approach your humble correspondent publicly, and a few of these have even become friends. Often when this happens, the person in question seems taken aback because the private figure bears scant resemblance to the impression they had in their minds from reading my online blatherings. There is, of course, a simple explanation for this: what you are getting when you read this blog is not Steven W. Beattie, so much as “Steven W. Beattie” — that is, a carefully and, make no mistake, consciously constructed character. The persona that readers encounter in these online environs is not quite built out of whole cloth, but don’t have any illusions that you are seeing anything other than precisely what I want you to see when you log onto this site. And that, ultimately, has little to do with the person I am when I log out.

Which I assume not to be the exception online, but the rule. People play roles in almost every facet of their daily lives: the person one shows at the office is not the same person one shows to one’s good friends, who is in turn not the same person one shows to one’s spouse. Even in the most personal kind of online diary (which, it should go without saying, this site was never meant to be), the author is engaged to at least some extent in the construction of a character; this goes double for people who choose to remain anonymous online, or who troll chat rooms under the guise of any number of different pseudonyms.

Certainly there is a long and enduring tradition of pen pals in Western society, and some of our greatest writers have engaged in lengthy correspondence with people they don’t know, or know only through the briefest of acquaintances. In the years 1903-08, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to an aspiring poet, Franz Xaver Kappus, who had sent Rilke a number of his unpublished poems. Ten of these were later collected in the remarkable little volume Letters to a Young Poet. And the correspondence between Flannery O’Connor and Elizabeth Hester, who met only a handful of times, has been called “probably the most important collection of letters in American literature in the latter part of the [20th] century.”

Still, there seems to be something qualitatively different between the writers who engaged in this kind of extended correspondence and our current environment of anonymous Internet encounters, Facebook “friends” we’ve never actually met, and shifting online identities.

Which is what makes Hal Niedzviecki’s recent experiment so damned interesting. Niedzviecki is a Toronto-based novelist and cultural commentator, the author of books such as Hello, I’m Special and The Big Book of Pop Culture. He recently inaugurated a Web site called The Peep Diaries, which is part of the author’s investigation into what he sees as a rampant culture of voyeurism that encompasses not just the Internet, but all cultural modalities that require a person to blur the distinction between the public and the private realms:

But this blog isn’t just going to be a public diary. I’m going to set goals and challenges for myself like posing in my underwear in front of a webcam and trying out for reality tv. Over the next year or so, the blog is going to chronicle my attempts to become more and more a part of what I’ve started to call ‘peep culture’. Blogs, Reality TV, YouTube, Facebook – these are all part of a new culture of self exposure and mutual voyeurism that is unlike anything society has ever come up with before.

So I’m blogging about the new peep culture. I’m also going to write a book about it.

One of the challenges that Niedzviecki set for himself involved a project he called The Hal Needs New Friends Event. Basically, Niedzviecki contacted all of his Facebook friends (circa 600 people), all the people who follow him on Twitter (twenty people), and all his blog readers (between twenty and fifty people a day), and invited them to meet him at a Toronto bar for drinks on the evening of July 17. Even assuming a certain amount of overlap among these three categories, that still leaves a hefty number of people invited. The only stipulation was that you couldn’t already be someone Niedzviecki has met in person. He even offered to buy each attendee a drink.

According to a post on his blog, he received numerous responses from people he’d never met saying that they would attend, or that they would probably attend.

And how many actually showed up?

One.

There were various reasons offered for this — one commenter said, “I was going to come, but [then] I remembered I don’t live in [T]oronto.” Niedzviecki himself puts the lack of attendance down to three factors: 1. a “maybe attending” response to a Facebook invitation doesn’t imply any feelings of obligation on the part of the respondent (you needed an experiment to tell you this, Hal?); 2. people lead busy lives and have other demands on their time; and 3. people feel socially awkward walking up to a stranger in a bar and introducing themselves.

Niedzviecki’s third observation comes closest to hitting the mark, I think, but even it falls short. Here’s how he sums it up on his blog:

[P]eople are, in fact, more likely to attend an “event” they are invited to via Facebook then [sic] accept an invitation to a personal encounter. An event is anonymous. You don’t commit, you don’t extend yourself, don’t feel like there’s someone on the other end judging you. An event, like a night at home watching tv or surfing other people’s pages, is far less of a trial than a non-event involving actually having to meet and engage with other people in real life. The more disengaged we are, the more comfortable we feel.

Fair enough, but what about people who read an author’s blog online and feel a personal connection with that person, feel that they “know” that author in a way that is closer and more intimate than would be possible simply from reading that person’s books? Why do authors feel the need to maintain personal Web sites, blogs, and the like, or, for that matter, to appear in public at book signings and in-store events?

Last summer, author Ami McKay found that the number of people who thought they were friends of hers as a result of reading her novel, The Birth House, and following her blog had become so voluminous that she was forced to issue an online disclaimer:

By the end of last summer, the drop-in visits to the house got to be a little crazy. On sunny weekends, we’d have several carloads a day. Well, it seems that the by-chance knocks on the door are ramping up even more-so this year, and they are coming right as I’m trying my best to pull myself away from the world to write the next novel and my first stage play. So, while I wish you well as you happily wander around Nova Scotia on holiday, I’m afraid that I must retreat into a summer of solitude.

It all comes down to the slippery definition of “friendship,” a definition that is rendered ambiguous by the Internet’s systemic blurring of the divide between the personal and the private. A person can be, in Niedzviecki’s definition, “disengaged” by virtue of a computer monitor, yet still feel a personal connection with an online figure, whether that person be someone met in a chat room, through the comments section of a blog, or via an online gaming community. The Internet has in many ways eliminated the physical aspect from many people’s experience of friendship, which, it should go without saying, is not a good thing.

Friends get together with one another, they go to movies and to dinner, they attend each other’s weddings and significant life events. Online “friends” have the potential to be faceless entities that one never sees in the flesh, never really engages with, and it’s possible that many people like it just fine that way. That may indeed be the dark secret at the heart of Niedzviecki’s experiment. He wanted to know whether online acquaintances could translate into real-life friends. Perhaps only one person showed up because in their hearts all the others already knew the answer, and it was no.

The Lowest Common Denomination

Posted 21 July, 2008 in Quotable | 4 comments

“We recognize this mental atmosphere, and its name is anti-intellectualism. Noticeable, too, is the re-emergence of sentiment as the prince of the critical utensils. Commentators respond, not to the novel, but to its personnel, whom they want to ‘care about,’ in whom they want to ‘believe.’ Such remarks as ‘I didn’t like the characters’ are now thought capable of settling the hash of a work of fiction. This critical approach will eventually elicit what it fully deserves — a literature of ingratiation. And we will have then reached the destiny that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted for American democracy: a flabby stupor of mutual reassurance. The simultaneous consolidation of ‘dumbing down’ is not an accident. PC is low, low church, like the Church of England; it is the lowest common denomination.”

– Martin Amis, “The Voice of the Lonely Crowd”

New(ish) Review Online

Posted 18 July, 2008 in Book Reviews | 1 comment

My review of Maggie Helwig’s new novel, Girls Fall Down, is up at the Coach House site. The review originally ran in the May 2008 issue of Quill & Quire.

A Designer Reconsiders the Look of a Library’s Collection

Posted 17 July, 2008 in Design, Libraries | No comments

As anyone who maintains a book collection of some size (and this obviously includes librarians) knows, some sort of classification system is essential if one wants to facilitate ease of access, storage, and retrieval. Having worked in a library myself, I am only too aware of how difficult this matter can become, although my experience did provide me with the ability to recognize almost any book by its spine — a useful talent if, like your humble correspondent, you’re too damn lazy to alphabetize your books.

Communications designer Valérie Madill tackled this problem as part of a senior grad project at Emily Carr University, and came up with a rather unique solution. Madill begins with the premise that a library is a place of magic, a repository of adventure, imagination, and knowledge. “Why is it then that the magic, mystery, adventure and knowledge is not sensed when entering a library? It is disgraceful that a library should be considered dull and stuffy.”

Taking as her starting point the Library of Congress Classification System employed by most academic libraries, which breaks the collection down into twenty-one different subcategories, Madill created a colour-coded system of classification for a large collection of books:

I Initially wanted to cover the books individually with a standard removable sleeve that I would design displaying all of the book’s information in a clean, efficient and legible manner; however, it took about 30 seconds in the encyclopedia section to feel how boring and unbearable this solution would make one’s library experience. The trickiest part was realizing that having the same template for every book did not ease one’s book search, but rather cause the book to completely to disappear within the others, making it impossible to see or stand out. All signs of curiosity vanish.

The results, which can be seen on her Web site, are intriguing.

It’s hard to imagine this system catching on in private libraries, and academics may prove too stuffy to adopt it, but it’s always interesting when innovative design ideas are applied to existing or outmoded systems.

(via Callie.)

David … Jesus … The Joker

Posted 16 July, 2008 in Film | No comments

From the Arizona Daily Star:

I’ll do my best here to avoid falling into slack-jawed, worshipful hyperbole over the wonders of “The Dark Knight.”

But analyzing the successes of such a blistering, genre-defining masterwork (I’m already slipping) is tantamount to judging the contours of Michelangelo’s David or evaluating the shading and form of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”

Do I even have to say it?

[UPDATE: Perhaps I was too hasty …]

(“Creation of Joker” (detail) by Jessica Davis & Michelangelo.)