While I’ve long been a fan of the work of Philip K. Dick I have to confess I never knew more than the basics about his life. Which is to say, I knew he took a lot of drugs. This made Lawrence Sutin’s standard (and sympathetic!) biography, Divine Invasions, a depressing revelation. Dick appears to have been a truly awful person: “a dangerous, demanding, self-pitying, and manipulative man-baby.” Gak.

I don’t think of myself as being that much of an elitist culture snob, but I do have standards. I never gave in to Harry Potter-mania, for one thing. I did read part of the first book and thought it seemed like the kind of thing I might have enjoyed when I was eight years old. Good for the kids. Why any teenager, much less any adult, would want to read them was a mystery to me. I think I remarked at the time that I’d rather look at porn because at least its fantasies were post-pubescent.

Nevertheless, after about the third book in the series Pottermania officially became an adult phenemenon. Whether this was kidult or hipster culture coming to its full fruition, I don’t know. But it’s depressing. The current fad for adult colouring books is less worrisome, as at least that has an arts-and-crafts or therapy angle to it. Why grown-ups would want to bury their heads for hours in brick-like children’s fantasies is something else. Escapism yes, but escape from what? An adult world?

Leaving that question aside, I come to Stacy Schiff’s recent book on the Salem witch hysteria The Witches: Salem, 1692. What does this have to do with Harry Potter? Very little, or more likely nothing at all, I would have thought. But as an author of popular history Schiff knows her audience and so introduces the boy wizard into a chapter titled “The Wizard.” At the beginning of this chapter we are told of an investigator into the accusations of witchcraft in Salem who saw the whole affair as typical of the devil’s business, something which was “managed in imagination yet may not be called imaginary.”

This seemed like a fairly innocuous observation in itself, though one pregnant with danger.  A footnote, nevertheless, is provided by Schiff to help the reader with a modern paraphrase:

Or as Dumbledore assures Harry Potter: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

No reference is given for the Harry Potter quote, perhaps assuming that we all know which book (or film) it comes from. Neverthless, I found it to be remarkable. In the first place because I wouldn’t have thought any gloss on the text necessary, especially one that jumps forward over three hundred years to snatch a platitude from pop culture. But more than that I was amazed that in a semi-scholarly work such as Schiff’s Harry Potter would be brought in not just as a cultural/intellectual touchstone, but as an example of universal wisdom.

In an earlier post I talked a bit about how every culture has its sacred texts, works that are part of the collective consciousness. One suggestion I quoted in the post was that The Wizard of Oz (the movie, not the book) was one of ours. Perhaps Harry is next.

Added my review of Steve Lillebuen’s The Devil’s Cinema over at Good Reports. It’s a well-written true crime story about the “Dexter killer” Mark Twitchell, and one that I think has some interesting things to say about the directions psychopathy might take in the twenty-first century as well as how victims are targeted and identified. Who are among the most vulnerable members of society? Perhaps surprisingly, single men are one of the groups most at risk.

From Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau:

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.

From Myth and Meaning (1978) By Claude Lévi-Strauss:

What threatens us right now is probably what we may call over-communication –that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world. In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority  over the others; it is only under conditions of under-communication that it can produce anything. We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from every culture, but of losing all originality.

Just posted some of my thoughts on In the Basement of the Ivory Tower over at Good Reports. Throughout most of recorded history, individual cultures have had special, if not always sacred, texts. The Greeks had Homer. Chinese civilization had the Five Classics. Christianity had the Bible. English literature had Shakespeare. What unites us today? Professor X was curious to find out:

One of the things I try to do in English 102 is relate the literary techniques we will study to novels the students have already read. I try to find books familiar to everyone. This has thus far proven impossible to do. Many of my students don’t read much, and though I tend to think of them monolithically, they don’t really share a culture. To Kill a Mockingbird? Nope. (And I thought everyone had read that!) Animal Farm? No. If they have read it, they don’t remember it. The Outsiders? The Chocolate War? No and no. Charlotte’s Web? You’d think so, but no. So then I expand the exercise to general works of narrative art, meaning movies, but that doesn’t work much better. That really surprised me — that there are no movies they have all seen, except one: they’ve all seen The Wizard of Oz. Some have seen it multiple times. So, when the time comes to talk about quest narratives, we’re in business. The farmhands’ early conversation illustrates foreshadowing. The witch melts at the climax. Theme? Hands fly up. (The students can rattle off that one without thinking. Dorothy learns that she can do anything she puts her mind to and that all the tools she needs to succeed are already within her.) Protagonist and antagonist? Whose point of view is the movie told from? Can anyone tell me the cowardly lion’s epiphany? Are the ruby slippers a mere deus ex machina? What would you say is the symbolic purpose of the winged monkeys?

The movie comes in handy. Discussions are pretty lively.

From El Narco (2012) by Ioan Grillo:

“When I did my first hit, I got a little too close and shot too many bullets into the body. Then the blood and guts exploded out all over me and I had to throw away my clothes and wash hard to get it off. That night I had bad dreams. I kept remembering shooting the person and the blood spurting out.”

Gustavo did more hits and the bad dreams stopped. Every few  weeks he would be given a new target. Mostly he killed in Medellín but he was also sent to take out victims in other cities across Colombia such as Bogotá and Cali. Soon he had killed ten, then fifteen, then twenty people. Then he lost count.

I ask him if he thinks about the victims. He shakes his head.

“I keep focused and do my work. Before I go out, I pray to Jesus and clear my mind. I never take drugs or drink before a job as I need my five senses. When I come back I will relax and smoke a spliff and listen to music.”

…

Does he feel remorse about the people he has murdered? I ask. How can he square what he does with his Catholicism? “I know it is bad,” he says. “But I do it out of need. I do it to support my family.

He also knows that his work may well lead to his own murder. But he tries to keep any fear tucked deep inside.

“I need to keep strong and focused. I can’t spend all my time worrying if they are going to kill me or not. Everyone dies in the end.”

From “Closing the Books” by Arthur Krystal, Harper’s Magazine (March 1996):

At fifteen or twenty, the books we read — or rather the minds behind them — are far more interesting than our own. But as we experience for ourselves the rites of passage that were previously only read about, and as we mature and reflect on what those experiences mean, novelists and poets begin to lose an important advantage — at some point we’ve all been down that road. And what may happen is this: we begin to find that most writers are less interesting than we think ourselves to be.

From Bookslut interview with David Markson (July 2005):

Where did I read that you no longer pay attention to more recent fiction?

It’s true. Any fiction, really. I hate to admit it, and I don’t really understand it, but it’s some years now — it just seems to have gone dead for me. Not just recent stuff, but even novels that I’ve deeply cared about — I try to reread and there’s none of the reaction I used to get, none of the aesthetic excitement or whatever one wants to call it, all a blank. With one exception of course — I can always reread Ulysses. In fact I went through it twice, consecutively, just a few years ago. But hell, that’s not like reading a novel, it’s more like reading the King James Bible. Or Shakespeare. You’re at it for the language. But even The Recognitions, which I think is categorically the best American novel of the twentieth century, just doesn’t do anything similar for me. It did, the first four times I read it — and four is not an exaggeration, by the way, in spite of its length — but the last time out it just went flat. It’s not the books, I’m sure, it’s me — I’m just not bringing the same receptiveness to them that I used to.

No other exceptions?

Oh, well, there are books by friends, that you do give yourself to. You approach them with a different psychological stance, somehow, wanting to enjoy. And doing so. As with the most recent Gil Sorrentino, for instance. Or Ann Beattie’s new collection of stories. But there’s simply no impulse toward anything else, and certainly not toward the latest generation. They all seem like they shouldn’t have driver’s licenses, even. You do become aware of the names, of course. Who are they, Lethem, Foer, Eggers? Are they mostly named Jonathan?

You know of them, but you’re not interested in reading them?

Seriously — to paraphrase Ezra Pound, there’s no record of a critic ever saying anything significant about a writer who came later than he did. You grow up getting interested in books, and the writers of your own generation or the generation or two before your own are the ones you pay most attention to. But listen, I’m scarcely as bad as some of the people I know. But good lord, some of the people I went to college or even graduate school with pretty much quit about nine days after they got their diplomas. And haven’t read a poet since Auden, or a novelist since Hemingway. There was one fat novel I did read. In 1996, in fact. I remember the date because my novel Reader’s Block had also just been published: Infinite Jest. Before I’d heard of David Foster Wallace, way back in 1990, he’d written a very perceptive long essay on Wittgenstein’s Mistress for a periodical. Even though I was never able to solve the structure of his novel, to understand why it ended where it did, I admired the hell out of it. Eight or nine years ago even, I wasn’t reading with the equipment I possessed when I was younger. But pat me on the head, I did manage to get through one novel that long in the past decade.

(1) Why does Helena rat Hermia out? Her competition for Demetrius is leaving Athens to get married! Let her go! But no:

I will go tell him of fair Hermia’s flight:
Then to the wood will he, tomorrow night,
Pursue her; and for this intelligence
If I have thanks, it is a dear expense.
But herein mean I to enrich my pain,
To have his sight thither and back again.

The “dear expense” is an ironic compensation. She’s betraying her friend to him for nothing but the bit of grudging attention she will receive. But it puts her in an even worse position than before.

I guess she’s one of those women, happy to be Demetrius’s dog.

I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
What worser place can I beg in your love —
And yet a place of high respect with me —
Than to be used as you use your dog?

Argh! They’ve always been with us.

(2) It’s often been remarked how the diminishment of one sense enhances another. Hermia expands on this when she follows the sound of Lysander’s voice in the dark:

Dark night, that from the eye his function takes,
The more quick of apprehension makes;
Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense,
It pays the hearing double recompense.

But is this true? Do we hear better at night? I think the science is still shaky, but it’s interesting that as folk wisdom the idea has such a long history.

(3) Near the end of Theseus’s “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet” speech he offers this up:

Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy

This strikes me as one of those profound human truths Shakespeare is always tossing out, but I wonder why it’s expressed in such clunky lines. They’re hard enough to read much less speak aloud. Was that intentional?

Last year I had the odd experience of reading (and reviewing) two new books that came out at almost exactly the same time and that were, despite being speculative fantasies, remarkably similar: Peter Norman’s Emberton and Alena Graedon’s The Word Exchange. Both books have heroes who work for dictionary publishers, which means they’re manning the bastions against the coming digital apocalypse of cyber-barbarism. The citadel, however, is crumbling both from without and within. Literature and culture are disintegrating, along with language itself. The  heroine in The Word Exchange is sure of the crisis we face:

As more and more of our actions are mediated by machines . . . there’s no telling what will happen, not only to language but in some sense to civilization. The end of words would mean the end of memory and thought. In other words, our past and future.

(1) When Romeo is looking to buy some poison in Mantua, he knows just where to go. Earlier he had seen a very desperate looking apothecary in a “needy shop,” presumably in a low-rent neighbourhood.

Noting this penury, to myself I said
‘An if a man did need a poison now,
Whose sale is present death in Mantua,
Here lives a caitiff wretch would sell it him.’

He knocks on the wretch’s door and is told that selling drugs is a dangerous business. The apothecary is aware that it’s a capital offence (and indeed in Shakespeare’s source for the story he is later executed for selling Romeo the drug). But Romeo is able to reason with him:

Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness,
And fear’st to die? famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression starveth in thine eyes,
Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back.
The world is not thy friend nor the world’s law;
The world affords no law to make thee rich;
Then be not poor, but break it, and take this.

So much for the war on drugs. “The world affords no law to make thee rich.” That is: You have no legitimate way to make a living. But this nice rich kid from Verona will help you out.

(2) Gazing on Juliet’s comatose body, Romeo thinks he sees signs of life and attributes this to a bit of folk wisdom:

How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry! Which their keepers call
A lightning before death.

Apparently this was proverbial, but why? Does it have any basis in reality? You’d think it must have been a widely observed phenomenon to have got a name attached to it, but I wonder. Or perhaps we just die differently today.

(3) What are we to think of poor Paris? When Shakespeare wants us to hate a character he can do it in a line. But Paris here seems a fairly sympathetic guy, if a bit eager to start dynasty building (“Younger than she are happy mothers made”). Structurally, he’s Juliet’s Rosaline, a potential lover to be tossed aside at the first sign of something better. But Rosaline is still out there at the end, presumably oblivious to her silent role in this tale of woe. Meanwhile, Paris is a neglected corpse. Nobody’s going to build any monuments to him! This is the real cruelty of love.