Author: Caleb Crain

A declaration of aesthetic independence; or, Oh no we won’t

Rudolph Delson wants Secretary of State–to–be Clinton to rectify an abomination:

I feel that, as Americans, both the scrapbookers and I are entitled to passports that are not gussied up to look like the invitation to a fundraiser for the Daughters of the American Revolution. I feel that, as Americans, we are entitled to passports that do not look like the "home décor" aisle of Wal-Mart three weeks before the Fourth of July. I feel that, as Americans, we are entitled to passports that rise above geriatric kitsch.

“Like Christmas with bullets”

Paul Collins profiles the mail-order tycoon/cuisinier/fabulist George Leonard Herter for the New York Times Book Review:

Herter’s magnum opus, though, was “Bull Cook,” a wild mix of recipes, unsourced claims and unhinged philosophy that went through at least 15 editions between 1960 and 1970. Herter claimed one million copies sold; Brown guesses it was closer to 100,000. Either number is impressive, and the wild curveball of the book’s opening lines remains unmatchedin American literature: “I will start with meats, fish, eggs, soups and sauces, sandwiches, vegetables, the art of French frying, desserts, how to dress game, how to properly sharpen a knife, how to make wines and beer, how to make French soap and also what to do in case of hydrogen or cobalt bomb attack, keeping as much in alphabetical order as possible.”

Over at Weekend Stubble, Paul posts Herter’s plans for a fish-calling device.

Darkness legible

In The National (Abu Dhabi), Wesley Yang praises Jane Mayer for exposing America’s complicity in torture in her book The Dark Side but criticizes her for holding onto an illusion about America’s virtue:

Americans confronting a world of enemies who wish to do it harm have responded to those threats with varying degrees of restraint or its absence, stupidity or wisdom, and have compiled in the process a long and extremely mixed record of both heroism and abuse – sometimes fatally intertwined – that absolutely rules out the kind of wounded innocence that Mayer repeatedly sounds throughout The Dark Side. That she can sustain this view – and in this she resembles almost every other mainstream writer on the subject – in the face of her knowledge of precedents like Operation Phoenix, and despite the relentless rigour she brings to the pursuit of the darkest truths, testifies to a deeply ingrained predisposition of a certain kind of liberal: those who wish to reconcile a heroic view of the American past with a moralistic approach to foreign affairs.

How to write novels about history

In a long and astute essay in The New York Review of Books, not easy to excerpt because it makes its argument very gradually and carefully, Elaine Blair suggests that one half of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project raises questions that the other half neglects (subscription required for link):

What is it that we’re looking for, the novel seems to ask, when we visit the sites of historical atrocities, or read about them in novels, or watch them reenacted in movies? What kind of feeling can a novelist writing about a fifty- or hundred-year-old war crime hope to elicit in his contemporary readers? Visceral disgust? Pornographic interest? Solemn indignation? Is the best he can hope for historical clarification, or a pointed analogy to current events?

The most immediate implication of these questions would seem to be for Brik’s Lazarus story itself, and it is the great disappointment of the novel that the subtle and provocative questions suggested in one half of it seem to go unheeded in the other. Hemon seems to be hedging his bets, raising doubts about the nature of the Lazarus project in the Brik chapters, while in the Lazarus chapters the narrator bustles along as if none of these questions existed, confidently peering into the characters’ souls, speaking in their voices, and, it turns out, exploiting historical catastrophes for emotional effect.