Content & Context

This Week:

The State of Reading
Places & Culture
Dialogue: Being in Iraq
Weekly Digest

THE STATE OF READING

I’M NOT SURE who started the rumor—it may have been Sam Goldwyn or, more probably, Marshall McLuhan—but somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, people came to believe that books were doomed. The future belonged to film and television, it was assumed, the prevailing media in an increasingly visual age: Queen Victoria read books, but we will watch video screens.

It didn’t exactly turn out that way. The book lives.

So begins Brian Murray’s review in The Weekly Standard of Clive Bloom’s new book Bestsellers. Indeed, the state of publishing today, now that the wild-eyed e-book prophecies have died down and massive publishing houses continue to disgorge books like Pez tablets from a toy dispenser, inspires a sense of Dickensian ambivalence: It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. Print is no longer the “supreme expressive form” in a multimedia culture, Bloom says, and yet never have books been “consumed by a greater number of people who speak and read English … at any other time in history.”

So the demise of reading, as you can imagine Mark Twain would observe, has been greatly exaggerated. For those who forever forecast its doom, reality checks are in order in four areas—books, where one critic says seekers of “serious reading” just need to know where to look; magazines, where “highbrow” is enjoying a renaissance; newspapers, where the future isn’t necessarily worse than the present; and literature scholarship, which one columnist says has done more damage to itself that a “lowbrow” culture possibly could.

• BOOKS: The January dismissal of Ann Godoff from Random House was lamented as the latest sign of the decline of “serious” and “highbrow” publishing by the literati, says Benjamin Schwarz in the April issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Op-eds in the New York Times waxed apocalyptic: “Publishing is now driven wholly by the search for blockbuster books and blockbuster profits,” said one. (Now?) “The chill runs through the corridors of all large publishing houses and into the home offices of thousands of serious writers,” said another. These wailings would have more credibility, Schwarz observes, if “serious” writers weren’t ignoring so many “serious” titles.

Book snobs decried the literary clout of Oprah Winfrey—but why aren’t they lamenting the influence of the Times, which, while spotlighting the execrable Memoirs, overlooked two recent, far more worthy nonfiction titles, Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Children and Mark A. Noll’s America’s God (a history of American Protestantism), which were in turn ignored by the cultural elite that bemoans the sorry state of serious book publishing?

(Evidently the “cultural elite” also ignored Books & Culture‘s cover story on Noll’s book in January.) As the Atlantic‘s book editor, Schwarz says he’s “astonished that so much literary fiction and what can only be described as decidedly noncommercial nonfiction issues from an industry supposedly obsessed with the bottom line.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/04/noteworthy.htm

Also:Slate founder Michael Kinsley says the problem isn’t too few good books; it’s too many—so many he can only skim and guess in his role as National Book Awards panelist:http://slate.msn.com/id/2074427 As for Oprah’s bemoaned literary clout, she’s now become an influential missionary for the classics:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12190-2003Feb27.html

• MAGAZINES: After September 11, the types of successful magazines seemed to bifurcate—those, like upstart US Weekly, that sugar up their audience with celebrities and other cotton candy, and those, like the resurgent 145-year-old Atlantic Monthly, that bring an intellectual perspective to the serious business of world events. Indeed, while US Weekly was the fastest-growing magazine in the last six months of 2002, with a 55.2 percent rise in newsstand sales, it was trailed closely by the Atlantic, which sold 52.4 percent more copies (thanks in part to William Langewiesche’s magnum opus “American Ground”), according to David Carr in The New York Times. The New Republic and Harper’s also saw a spike in newsstand sales. But magazines that try to straddle this line between “blatantly escapist and loaded with gravitas,” as Carr put it, took a hit—Time and Newsweek sales were down more than 30 percent. – Abstract of Carr’s article here – Read a transcript of NPR’s interview with Carr about this storyAlso:Columbia Journalism Review on the Atlantic, which CJR calls “one of the few American magazines that still dares to publish high-quality, complex narratives.”http://www.cjr.org/year/02/6/sherman.aspCJR on the state of magazine writing:http://www.cjr.org/year/02/6/index.aspNote: The Atlantic suffered a tragedy last week when Michael Kelly was killed while covering the war in Iraq. Kelly was editor-at-large and former editor of the Atlantic and a columnist for the Washington Post. The prayers of Books & Culture are with Kelly’s family and colleagues.The Post‘s Howard Kurtz on reaction to Kelly’s death Statement from the Atlantic Monthly

• NEWSPAPERS: We have seen the future of newspapers—if that isn’t a contradiction in terms—in the form of Red Eye, the Chicago Tribune‘s hip new newspaper for readers age 18-34. “Make articles shorter and choose relevant stories,” is the paper’s professed creed. It isn’t clear “what relevance means at RedEye, but a lot of great editors have demonstrated it can become whatever you want to make it,” wrote Chicago Reader media critic Michael Miner. “So far, RedEye and Red Streak [the Chicago Sun-Times‘ counterpart] haven’t made it much of anything.”

Still, Miner points out that Red Eye wouldn’t have to appear so desperate to find a new generation of newspaper readers if the Tribune itself weren’t so somnolent. There may be nobility in taking journalism seriously, but not in being boring. The Tribune, says Miner, “is gray and forbidding.” As he points out, “RedEye could be a laboratory for the kind of lively writing and design the Tribune seems too lumbering and institutional to accommodate.”http://www.chireader.com/hottype/2002/021108_1.html

Also: My thoughts on RedEyein the Banner, and on media and relevance at nbierma.com/journalism. Read my op-ed column for RedEye last fall here.

CJR on RedEye and what young readers want in a newspaper

• LITERATURE SCHOLARSHIP: It’s a bad time to be an English professor, says syndicated columnist Suzanne Fields. The profession suffered the biggest plunge in new jobs in ten years, from 983 in 2002 to 792 this year. The tweed-clad have only themselves to blame for trivializing their work, Fields says.

Somewhere in the cracks between the “Derridadaist” and the Neo-Marxist, the Poststructuralist and the Deconstructionist, literature got lost. Between the New Historicist and Biopoeticist, radical feminist and post-colonialist perspectives, the language was hopelessly garbled. … In the hodgepodge known as modern scholarship, students of literature are taught that there is no “Shakespeare himself.” The actual author is the reader. There’s no such thing as beauty or truth, common sense is the “bourgeois status quo” and there’s no distinction between “text” and theory.http://www.townhall.com/columnists/suzannefields/sf20030117.shtml

Also:Can “Friends” save literature? A fascinating essay from the June 2000 Chronicle of Higher Education on the parallels between the storytelling of modern popular culture and the classics.http://chronicle.com/free/v46/i41/41b00401.htm

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times:

TWEE RIVIEREN, South Africa—The educated city people—a government minister, a chief executive and several directors of the nation’s most important scientific organizations—traveled at sunrise to this barren region of the Kalahari Desert to see for themselves the cactus that has been trumpeted as a natural wonder. But when they stood before it, a puny cluster of spiny stalks that looked like wrinkled cucumbers, the magnitude of the moment escaped them. “That’s it, huh?” asked Dr. Ben Ngubane, minister of arts, culture, science and technology. … From a desert weed known as hoodia, one of the world’s oldest and least developed peoples hopes to enjoy its first taste of prosperity. … Pfizer, the international pharmaceutical giant, has begun work on an appetite suppressant from the plant, and agreed to share the profits. … Here among the San, the concept of wealth has begun to sink in. The first payment to the San, some $30,000, was made last month, and there are already plans to buy land and build clinics.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/01/international/africa/01AFRI.html*

ZIHUATANEJO, Mexico, Feb. 8 – This was paradise. But a sewer runs through it. Mexico’s environmental protection agency sampled the water in Zihuatanejo’s beautiful bay back in September. The results were not pretty: the agency said sewage from the city’s wastewater plant had tainted one of the nation’s loveliest harbors. Winter currents are cleansing the bay, and hundreds of tourists are frolicking on the beach. The report has driven few people away. But it singled out Zihuatanejo among 16 of Mexico’s most popular beaches that suffer from pollution. … The right to know is a novel concept in Mexico. The local hoteliers reacted to the report’s becoming public this week like a man with a hangover hearing an alarm clock. After years of living in denial, the businessmen who live by the tourist dollar here have been forced to admit they have a problem: they may be killing the thing they love. “This one piece of data from five months ago could destroy this entire community,” said Zihuatanejo’s former mayor, Armando Federico Gonzalez. It could also change the way Mexico treats a treasure: the beaches that draw millions of tourists who sustain the country’s economy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/13/international … * (abstract only)

DIALOGUE

Last week’s weblog linked to Victor Eremita, whose own weblog records his thoughts on forming a Christian perspective on military intervention in an age of global terror. In an e-mail interview, I asked about his experience as a humanitarian worker in Iraq and how it shaped his views on the current war.

Books & Culture: Describe your work with Mé;decins Sans Frontières after the first Gulf War.

Victor Eremita: I was at the Cukurca refugee camp on the border of Iraq and Turkey. (There are a couple pictures I took in the camp here.) The camp consisted of thousands of Kurds who were living in tents in the mountains, having fled the backlash by Saddam against their U.S.-encouraged uprising. Having no medical skills I was assigned to spray chlorine throughout the area of the clinic and around the areas where anyone died in the camp. The goal was to avoid the outbreak of disease in the camp. I was there for two weeks before traveling throughout Iraq with a peace team delivering food and medicine.

B&C: What was the hardest adjustment to make to both the climate and culture you encountered? What is the hardest thing for people who have never been to Iraq to understand about both?

VE: In my experience, Muslim people put Western Christians to shame when it comes to hospitality. Undoubtedly, this seems like a sharp contradiction of the dominant images we see of Muslims at this time of conflict. I traveled overland through Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt within a couple months after the Gulf War. I encountered very little hostility and consistent acts of generosity. In my experience, if a Westerner shows basic respect for Muslim culture—by not wearing shorts or showing an excess of flesh—the people tend to be very open to you. Even in postwar Iraq, no one did anything to me because they’ve all learned not to act without official permission.

It is probably impossible for someone who has not experienced a fear-driven dictatorship to imagine what Iraq is like. Aside from traveling to a ruthlessly dictatorial country (which I would encourage) the best suggestion I can make is to read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Try to imagine living with your choices constantly constrained by legitimate fears. I wouldn’t have believed it without experiencing it.

B&C: You write that your experience changed you from a pacifist Christian to a “Bonhoeffer Christian.” How, and did this happen while you were there or through reflection when you returned?

VE: This happened largely upon reflection after leaving Iraq. As I pieced together the extended conversations I had with English-speaking Kurds, and the whispered messages from a number of other Iraqis, I began to realize the degree to which Saddam’s regime had to be intolerable for Christians called to care for “the least of these.” How can we expect oppressed people to embrace a God who loves them if the people carrying the message of God’s love show little concern about the source of that oppression? “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food [or safety from a dictator], and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:15-17).

I am still a pacifist Christian in the sense that I think that prior to the use of force in international conflicts it would be in keeping with the self-sacrificial tradition of Jesus and the prophets for a large group of Christians to seek nonviolent regime change at the risk of their own lives. I outline these ideas in an addendum to “Call to Christian Peacemakers for Confession, Imagination, and Action.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived most of his life as a pacifist. Yet Bonhoeffer was involved in a plan to assassinate Hitler and was executed by the Nazis after the discovery of the plot. Bonhoeffer scholar Renate Wind wrote that Bonhoeffer “faced the question of which was the greater guilt, that of tolerating the Hitler dictatorship or that of removing it. In particular, anyone who was not ready to kill Hitler was guilty of mass murder, whether he liked it or not.” Bonhoeffer always felt that killing was evil but said, “It is better to do evil than to be evil [by tolerating the Nazis].” He came to hope for an Allied victory and said he was “willing the defeat” of the Nazis.

It is pretty safe to guess that an Iraqi Bonhoeffer would have taken the same positions under Saddam’s regime and would now be in one of Saddam’s prisons hoping for a quick victory by the “coalition of the willing.” Bonhoeffer wrote from prison, “We in the resistance have learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the excluded, the ill treated, the powerless, the oppressed and despised … so that personal suffering has become a more useful key for understanding the world than personal happiness.”

Through my exposure to Iraq I became a Bonhoeffer Christian in the sense that, like Bonhoeffer, I came to believe there were worse things than the use of force. Like human rights under Saddam. Those who would suggest there was peace in Iraq prior to this war are crying “‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” I would like to see an international group of self-sacrificial Christian pacifists seek nonviolent regime change by demanding monitored elections from within the countries where brutal dictatorships currently exist. I think this would be a great witness for Christ to the world. In my mind, the treatment of these Christians would serve as a kind of humanity test for the dictator. If the dictator failed the test by refusing to willingly step down and welcome fair elections I would then grudgingly accept the use of force as the best of the bad options remaining.

I think Bonhoeffer was saying something similar about a dictator who failed the humanity test when he told his sister-in-law, “If I see a madman driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.”

In this current conflict, I believe it is the Church that has failed in practicing self-sacrificing peacemaking, not the Bush administration. (I have made a previous proposal for remaking the U.N. that would, I believe, be helpful in promoting democracy and ensuring that dictatorial regimes are called to account by a multinational body.)

This interview continues at my personal notebook blog, where I ask Victor about his pseudonym and about tolerating unintended consequences of the spread of democracy.

Latest War links:

Amid the blanket coverage of television’s blanket coverage of the war, these two articles stand above the dozens of other pieces of media criticism: Sports Illustrated’s Steve Rushin on the oddity of CBS’ dual coverage of war and basketball, and the New Yorker’s Nancy Franklin on the clarity and befuddlement of television reports from the front lines.
The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson reports from Baghdad. Also from the magazine: a dispatch from Northern Iraq on the mood of the Kurds, and a column on what to do with Iraq’s postwar debts.
Latest news from CNN, the BBC, NPR, NY Times, Wash. Post, and more.

DIGEST

• Few works of mid-twentieth-century social studies were as broad in scope and widely read as Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which told an ominous tale of global overpopulation. More recent trends have proven Ehrlich wrong, says the New York Times in an editorial entitled “Humanity’s Slowing Growth.” But although the statistics are starkly different, the tale is no less ominous, says the Times.

Now population growth rates are plummeting—for good and tragic reasons. The implications are profound. According to a U.N. report issued recently, most advanced countries could, in effect, slowly turn into old-age homes. For example, by 2050, the median age in Japan and Italy will be over 50. Fertility rates in nearly all well-off countries have already fallen below 2.1 babies per woman, the rate at which a population remains stable. In the developing world, meanwhile, fertility rates average three children, down from six a half-century ago, and the United Nations projects that the rate will dip below the replacement level in most poor nations later this century. Slower growth rates are both the cause and the consequence of a higher standard of living, and of the emancipation of women.

(Note: As of last week, nytimes.com links now expire after 7 days. This editorial was reprinted in the Naples Daily News.)http://www.naplesnews.com/03/03/perspective/d914157a.htm

Related: Response from Overpopulation.com:What the Times doesn’t note is that the situation would have been far worse had the world listened to Ehrlich and followed through on his suggestions of using military might and a denial of aid to cure the overpopulation cancer that Ehrlich claimed was afflicting the planet.

http://www.overpopulation.com/articles/2003/000013.html

How ugly is AIDS in Africa? Botswana risks literally dying out, says the London Spectator.

See also this remarkably comprehensive weblog of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity: www.cbhd.org/news

• For the first time since Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court has agreed to broadcast audio of its oral arguments in the two affirmative action cases now before it, says Slate correspondent Dahlia Lithwick. The high court has no illusions about how daunting the social implications of its discussion are, says Lithwick.

One of the most striking aspects of today’s arguments was how very untechnical and legalistic the discussion actually was. … The court showed less interest in arcane three-part tests than in fundamental fairness questions: How can racial equality be imposed on the backs of whites? Is there any race-neutral policy that could adequately address the problem of racial disparity in this country? Are we supposed to allow racial preferences to continue indefinitely? How can we fix our racial problems without taking race into account? … These are not really legal questions at heart; they are almost insoluble social and moral ones.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2080999

• Galileo saw 40. Modern telescopes can see 300. This month, you can see some of the stars in the “Beehive” stellar cluster near Jupiter, though you might have to use “averted vision,” says Discover magazine.

This month Jupiter points the way to one of the most storied star clusters: the Beehive. Step outside around 9 or 10 p.m. on a clear night. High up, creamy Jupiter outshines every star in the sky. Its steady gleam—planets do not twinkle—dominates the dim surrounding constellation, Cancer. Just to the right of the brilliant planet you will see an eerie little smear of faint light. That is the Beehive. The Beehive’s individual stars lie on the tantalizing threshold of visibility. To the unaided eye, the specks of light tend to blur together into a blob. Binoculars transform the cluster into a swarm of glowing bees, and suddenly its name makes sense. http://www.discover.com/apr_03/gthere.html?article=featsky.html

• Satire, said Kierkegaard, “must be firmly based on a consistent ethical view of life,” notes the New Criterion. Tell that to Juvenal, the Roman satirist whose visceral work can seem to exude as much aimless bitterness as levity, writes the Criterion‘s Roger Kimball. Centuries later, Juvenal can still deflate humanity’s post-Enlightenment smugness.

Probably the most politically incorrect Roman poet, certainly the most caustic, was the satirist Decimus Junius Juvenalis—Juvenal to us. We expect satirists to expose hypocrisy, injustice, corruption. Juvenal does this. We also expect satirists to exaggerate, to caricature, to lampoon. Juvenal does this, too, in spades. But satire, like liquor, comes in a variety of flavors and potencies. There is mild satire, whose means are gentle and whose aim is comic. … Gentle satire pokes, but gingerly, in fun. Its goal is enlightenment, yes, but also laughter. Juvenal belongs to a different tribe. http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/apr03/juvenal.htm

• Few people have embodied the marvel of the human mind as fully as Leonardo da Vinci. But a recent exhibit of his work at the Met in New York suggests the man was more captivated by the human soul, writes Ingrid D. Rowland in the New York Review of Books.

For Leonardo, the idea that eyes were the gateway to the soul was a matter of literal truth; he examined a human skull in hopes that its interior structure would reveal traces of the soul’s presence and chased down life’s evanescence in drawings that are a whirlwind of brief moments captured in furious succession. No matter how strange the fleshy clothing of his grotesque heads, their eyes look outward from the soul’s domain with fierce clarity; the splendid physique of his ideal man takes second place to the noble expression in that man’s eyes. The eyes of Leonardo himself must have been more phenomenal still: something like the ravening eyes that stare out from photographs of Picasso, bright with a relentless fever to devour the world by looking, and through looking, to create.http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16178

• Few acts of legislature could be as pure and unmarred by politics as the appointment of poet laureates, right? Andy Lamey of the Canadadian National Post says the gestures are “tiresome schemes that smother poetry under icky marmalade gobs of civic sentiment.”

In 1998, Oxford poet Craig Raine was asked by a reporter if he wanted to be Britain’s next poet laureate. “Oh God, no!” he replied, and hung up the phone. Raine expressed a dissatisfaction many poets share about laureateship. Scottish poet Ann Duffy has said if she were appointed laureate she would refuse the traditional duty of penning tedious verses celebrating marriages of the royal family. … Despite poets’ misgivings, laureateships are springing up everywhere. In recent years, San Francisco, Saskatchewan and Toronto have all appointed laureates. So has Canada: Last year, B.C. poet George Bowering was the first writer to take up the position. … It’s all very nice and high-minded. It’s also colossally misguided.http://www.nationalpost.com/artslife/story.html …

• Ten years ago this month, a deranged fan came out of the stands and stabbed tennis star Monica Seles. Sports had never seen anything like it. The only thing worse than the fact that the offender never served time behind bars is that he succeeded in his mad objective: ensuring that Steffi Graf would proceed to become the more accomplished tennis champion. Seles returned to competitive tennis but never played with the flair she had before she was wounded. And yet, writes Frank Deford at Sports Illustrated online, Seles has achieved a new triumph: playing with a sense of peace and pure joy that accompanies few professional competitors.http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/inside_game/frank_deford …