http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Tue, 3 Jun 2003 09:28:18 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/06/03/092818.php Aaron HaspelI just finished Michael Lewis's terrific book about Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager who consistently fields a great team with one of the lowest payrolls in the major leagues. The A's are baseball commissioner Bud Selig's particular albatross. Selig harps on the need for more baseball socialism ("revenue-sharing") because of the alleged "inability of small market teams to compete," when in fact it is only incompetently managed small market teams who can't, Selig's own Milwaukee Brewers prominent among them. Beane must drive him to drink. Now to anyone who has played fantasy baseball and read Bill James, which seems to be half of the male portion of the blogosphere, how to put together a winning baseball team with little money is no secret. You exploit inefficiencies, which is to say, you take advantage of the fact that many baseball executives are stupid. Certain traits are overvalued by other teams, like sculpted physiques or blazing speed or cannon arms. These don't translate very well into on-field success anyway, and you ignore them. Other, more useful traits, like a deceptive pitching motion or the ability to draw walks, are undervalued, and these are what you look for. The golden rule is that past performance indicates future performance, and ugly doesn't count. Essentially you work from the spreadsheet instead of the scouting report. Scouts hate that. So do fans, stat geeks like me excepted, because it slights any knowledge of the game that comes from actually watching it. When I played in a fantasy league I would regularly tell other owners that they watched too much baseball, and that they needed to stop believing their own eyes. I was delighted to note that Beane often tells his scouts the same thing.Beane himself is a former major-league player and hot prospect of exactly the type that he has trained himself, and his staff, to ignore. He was a high-school "tools" player, the type who looks better playing than he actually plays, and so highly regarded that many scouts and executives wanted to draft him first in his class, ahead of such future luminaries as Darryl Strawberry. But Beane's tools never translated into major-league success. By his own account, his temper destroyed him as a player: he couldn't cope with failure, and one bad at-bat would wreck his game, or his week.In other words, Beane, instead of hiring in his own image, has become a brilliant success by doing the opposite. If there are other executives who have done this, I don't know who they are. Books5839@blogcritics.org Tue, 3 Jun 2003 09:28:18 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/04/14/225520.php Aaron HaspelRichard Price has now written seven novels; Samaritan is his latest. He also writes screenplays for booze money, although some of them, notably Sea of Love and The Color of Money, turned into quite decent movies. Price grew up in a tough neighborhood in the Bronx and knocked about some before finding his vocation. His first four novels, The Wanderers, Bloodbrothers, The Breaks, and Ladies' Man were written from his own experience. They have their moments, especially his first, The Wanderers, which still enjoys a considerable reputation. But in retrospect they look like apprentice work. Price eventually ran out of experience, and sallied forth to do some reporting, out of which came his fifth novel, Clockers, an epic of the crack trade. With Clockers Price became the Balzac of the projects. Like Balzac, he has an unerring eye for status detail — which soft drink, which brand of sneaker, how low you wear your jeans. In the first chapter of Clockers you learn that the preferred reading of crack dealers is shopping catalogues. Ever since Peanut fished a dozen catalogues out of a garbage can, everybody was in a state of mild dosorder, passing around the thin glossies as if they were sex books. Strike would have cracked a whip if it was anything else, but he was the worst. He'd meant to go over to Rodney's store an hour before, during the dinner lull, but had remained glued to the bench, a half-dozen catalogues on his lap, running his fingers down page after page of camisoles, hand-carved Christmas-tree angels, computerized jogging machines, golf putting sets for den and office, personalized stationery, lawn furniture — anything and everything for man, woman or child. The catalogues made him weak in the knees, fascinated him to the point of helplessness, the idea of all these things to be had, organized in a book that he could hold in one hand. Not that he would order anything — possessions drew attention, made you a target. None of the boys would order out of a catalogue either, not necessarily because they were paranoid like Strike, but because the ordering process — telephones, mailings, deliveries — required too much contact with the world outside the street.You don't find this out hanging around writers' workshops.Price also has a remarkable ear. (He spends a good deal of his time in Hollywood doctoring dialogue.) One of the characters in Samaritan is a prison autodidact, but Price never says so, he doesn't have to; just listen to him talk:"You working?""Yeah, well no, not like an employee per se. However, I'm working on something. I got this idea for a nonprofit organization to help inmates return to so-called society? I call it LIFE — Living in Fear of Extinction. I want to set up a whole reentry program, you know, literacy, computer literacy, how to fill out résumés, how to communicate, how to be prompt, how to be inspirational, how to make eye contact. See right now, I'm at the research stage, I need to learn how to file an application for tax-exempt status, how to find sponsors, how to—""Anything else?" Ray unable to hear this shit."Other? Well, yeah, I had this T-shirt thing goin' on, you know, bought shirts in bulk, designed my own logo, hooked up with this printer did silk-screening on a delayed payment schedule but that's all on financial hold for the time being, and I was also working on a comic book I wanted to publish, called Dawgs of War, about the future, when America wages war on the Republic of Nubia and it was gonna focus on one platoon of guys from the hood, how they get educated over there, you know, come to understand that they're fighting...you know, that they're on the wrong side...""Per se," "inspirational," "on financial hold for the time being" — all of this is exact. But the acronym and, especially, the question mark after "so-called society" betray the hand of the master.Children are prominent in all of Price's novels, and the only novelist I can think of who shows a comparable understanding of the species is Richard Hughes, in A High Wind to Jamaica. Price's children aren't the precocious wiseasses of sitcoms, or Spielbergian tuning forks who, quivering to the music of the spheres, always sense the truth and can't persuade the cold-hearted adults to believe them. They're children — half-formed, amoral savages struggling to become adults.Samaritan, like its predecessors Clockers and Freedomland, is a police thriller. A crime is committed early on, the perp is unknown, and the story ends approximately when the investigating officer, always a major character, discovers who did it. (The legal machinations are always omitted. Price likes cops but seems to have no use for lawyers.)Although the plotting is always handled competently, and the identity of the perpetrator is always difficult to guess, Price's real interests lie with motive. His novels are whydunits more than whodunits, which I guess you could say about all good novels. They are mysteries because human motives are mysterious. In Samaritan the victim is Ray Mitchell, a former high school teacher and cabdriver turned television writer who, at loose ends, decides to move back to his own neighborhood and do good. Mitchell is assaulted and seriously injured. He knows who did it but refuses to talk. An old acquaintance of his from the neighborhood, Nerese Ammons, a twenty-year veteran with six months to retirement, winds up investigating the crime. The novel alternates chapters, to impressive effect, between the events leading up the assault and its aftermath.Mitchell spreads his money around — pays for one woman's funeral, underwrites another man's T-shirt business — learning the hard way the truth of John Jacob Astor's remark: "Why does that man hate me? I never lent him money." It buys him first bemusement, then solicitation, and finally enmity and a serious whack upside the head. "Ray thinks he wants to make a dent," his ex-wife says, "when he really only wants to make a splash." Nerese, too, questions her own motives in bothering with this case when she could just ride out the last few months to her pension.Ray himself is far from stupid, and he knows that his motives are mixed. He tells Nerese about blowing a big TV deal and taking it out on his daughter Ruby at the mall: "We get in the mall and I say, 'Ruby, the hell with it. Let's just buy shit. Whatever you want, who cares...' She says, 'That's OK, I'll just look.' I'm like, 'Ruby, c'mon, I just swung a big deal [he's lying and she knows it], a dollar's like a penny today.' And I sort of bully her into buying some studs for her ears, can't get her to buy clothes, can't get her to buy any skin stuff, she grudgingly lets me buy her some teen magazine and it got really tense, the both of us like in this battle in the mall. And at one point she stops at a kiosk where they're selling belly-button rings, and she got hers pierced a few weeks before and I see her eyeing this one ring, sort of a curved silver rod with dice at either end and, I'm instantly breathing down her neck, 'You want that? You want that?' Which of course makes her want to run away. She says, 'Just looking,' and wanders off. I'm so panic-stricken, the minute her back is turned, I buy it plus two others, then I sort of mosey up behind her, say, 'Miss, did you drop these?' and show her the three belly-button rings in my hand and she, goes, berserk. She starts sobbing and screaming at me, 'Stop buying me stuff! Stop buying me stuff! Please! Daddy! Please! I don't want anything!'"Ayn Rand covered thoroughly the horror of altruism for the giver. Price deals with its horror for the recipient, for whom it's like an oversolicitous host raised, in this case, several orders of magnitude. While Clockers is painted on a larger canvas, it lacks this sort of penetrating psychological insight.Which is the better book? Depends on your taste. But they're both awfully good, and in different ways, which gives me hope that Price may have yet to do his best work. Books4613@blogcritics.org Mon, 14 Apr 2003 22:55:20 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/02/21/100925.php Aaron HaspelChristopher Alexander is a (now ex-) professor of architecture at Berkeley whose most famous books, The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language, have inspired a sort of cult. He believes that in architecture beauty is attainable by following rules, or recipes, which he calls patterns. The same problems occur over and over again, and the patters, which he claims not to invent but to discover, are well-known ways of solving them. A Pattern Language consists of 253 of these, with photographs and descriptions. Alexander maintains that beautiful cities and towns will result from following the patterns. He aims to demystify all of architecture, and to a great extent he succeeds. His patterns range in breadth from city planning to room decor, and many of them are alarming in their specificity. Cities should contain no more than 9% parking space; political communities should be around 7,000 people (this is reminiscent of the 19th century socialist crank Charles Fourier, who recommended 500 as ideal); no urban downtowns should serve more than 300,000 people; most buildings should be no more than four stories high; terraces should be at least six feet deep; every room should have light on at least two sides. Sometimes Alexander buttresses his rather ex cathedra pronouncements with studies and arguments; sometimes not. "Nine Percent Parking" gives a fair taste of his style:We [he has co-authors] suspect that when the density of cars passes a certain limit, and people experience the feeling that there are too many cars, what is really happening is that subconsciously they feel that the cars are overwhelming the environment, that the environment is no longer "theirs," that they have no right to be there, and so on... Instead of inviting them out, the environment starts giving them the message that the outdoors is not meant for them, that they should stay indoors, that they should stay in their own buildings, that social communion is no longer permitted or encouraged.We have not yet tested this suspicion. However, if it turns out to be true, it may be that this pattern, which seems to be based on such slender evidence, is in fact one of the most crucial patterns there is, and that it plays a key role in determining the difference between environments which are socially and psychologically healthy and those which are unhealthy. [Italics his.] To begin with, nine percent parking is based not on "slender evidence," but no evidence. It is a "suspicion," which becomes a pattern, which becomes a dictum. Here you catch the faint whiff of the crank.Yet it is a very plausible suspicion, even if the particular number is bogus. Urban landscapes full of cars, like Los Angeles, are depressing. Most of Alexander's patterns are very plausible, even the ones that never would have occurred to me, like "Zen View": "If there is a beautiful view, don't spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, put the windows which look onto the view at places of transition — along paths, in hallways, in entry ways, on stairs, between rooms." The man who writes this has meditated long and profoundly about why some buildings succeed and others fail. Alexander generally begins with what people want. You might think that most architects would begin there, but in fact very few of them do. Instead they talk a great deal about form, function, structure, "machines for living," and the like. Alexander's solicitude is one of the great sources of both his unpopularity within his profession and his popularity in the world at large. The photographs in A Pattern Language are of warm, inviting, pleasant places that would be fun to live or play or work in. They are not of monuments, large buildings, or what one has been taught to regard as architectural masterpieces.In Alexander's cosmology, beauty in architecture consists of satisfying people's desires, and those desires are immutable. It follows that architectural standards are objective. There is a human nature, to which buildings will appeal more or less successfully. It follows further that Alexander is in on the secret. This assurance, more than anything, infuriates his fellow architects. Now I'm all for normative thinking, provided it's kept far away from the police power. Jane Jacobs, with whom Alexander is frequently grouped, takes pains to show how livable cities grow organically from people's natural behavior, while top-down planning leads to disaster after disaster. This concerns Alexander not at all: only ends interest him. Some of his grander patterns must be enforced by law, and he does not shrink from doing so. In "The Magic of the City" he writes: Put the magic of the city within reach of everyone in a metropolitan area. Do this by means of a collective regional policies which restrict the growth of downtown areas so strongly that no one downtown can grow to serve more than 300,000 people. With this population base, the downtowns will be between two and nine miles apart.He thinks people ought to own their homes. Arranging this is a simple matter: "Do everything possible to make the traditional forms of rental impossible, indeed, illegal." So you're not surprised when one of his former students says: "Chris's answer to my doubts about The Timeless Way of Building was to say 'Find out your psychological problem that prevents you from agreeing.'"Alexander's biggest fans are not architects but computer programmers. Unless you are a professional, you can't have any idea how vast his influence is in the field. The most important book written about software in the last thirty years, Design Patterns, takes its form explicitly from A Pattern Language. The authors enumerate thirty "patterns" that make for elegant, robust, even beautiful software. (The mark of a successful new technology today is the appearance of a book called Patterns in ....) These patterns are very like Alexander's: solutions for recurring problems in software development. Cities and software applications are both complex systems that must be broken down into components to be understood. Alexander's ideas lend themselves more readily to software than architecture because a software architect can control every aspect of a project. He need not rule the world to enforce his chosen patterns.So we're left with a brilliant crank, an inhumane humanist, an immodest prophet of modesty. Even so, A Pattern Language is one of the most interesting books about architecture, and the world, that you're ever likely to read.(A somewhat different version of this article, not to mention other stuff of this sort, can be found here.) Books3336@blogcritics.org Fri, 21 Feb 2003 10:09:25 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/11/24/130833.php Aaron HaspelThe girlfriend and I caught the Maysles' documentary Gimme Shelter on IFC the other night. It's about the disastrous Rolling Stones show at Altamont in 1969 and it's very good as those things go. There's a lovely bit of moral catatonia from the Grateful Dead, who show up late and are informed that there have already been a few scuffles and that Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin, trying to break up a fight, has managed to get himself knocked unconscious. "Oh, bummer," Jerry Garcia says. "Beating people up like that... that just doesn't seem right," Bob Weir addsBut the most interesting part has to do with Meredith Hunter. You all remember Meredith Hunter, right? He's the 18-year-old teenager who was set upon and stabbed to death by a bloodthirsty mob of Hell's Angels, high on bad acid and the $500 worth of beer they were paid to provide security for the show. Hunter, the 60s martyr whose death marked the beginning of the end of Flower Power. Except that's not what happened at all. In the movie Mick Jagger watches the crucial footage in slo-mo, and it is clear that Hunter rushes the stage and pulls a gun before any Hell's Angel lays a hand on him. He may also fire a shot. There is a brief orange flash in the film but it is inconclusive, and eyewitness reports differ. What is absolutely clear is that Hunter started it; whether he should have been stabbed five times is of course another question. Yet to this day many accounts of Altamont, like this one or this one, don't even mention the gun. Others claim Hunter pulled it in self-defense, which the movie clearly contradicts, or not at all. I confess that neither the girlfriend nor I knew the gun even existed, and I doubt we were the last two in the dark.This description from Dick Carter, owner of the Altamont Speedway, jibes in every particular with what you see in Gimme Shelter:Most of the books and articles about Altamont are filled with bull. Like the Hell's Angels were the only security, and they were hired for $500 worth of beer. We had every off-duty police officer available and every security guard in Northern California there. There were about 17 Angels who came to the concert because they were in Oakland for a convention. Sam Cutler, the Stones' manager, asked if the Angels would escort the Stones through the crowd on motorcycle and then sit around the stage during the show to protect the band. We had purchased $500 worth of beer for the bands, and Cutler told the Angels they could have some. The Angels were blamed for the death of Meredith Hunter. But that kid was waving a gun and screaming that he was going to shoot Mick Jagger. One of the Angels jumped his back, after Hunter fired a shot at the stage, and stabbed him with a knife several times. The audience was going to tear Hunter limb from limb, but the Angels formed a circle around him and got him out of the crowd and into a bread truck where he could be moved to get medical attention. He died in the racetrack office, but the Angels tried to save him. A few days later, the district attorney of Alameda called me and said that I was going to be blamed for the murder of Hunter, along with the Hell's Angels and the Rolling Stones. I said, 'For crying out loud, the kid had a gun, it was self-defense! You can see the gun on the film from the concert!' The DA told me I needed to produce the gun. So I tracked down Sonny Barger [a prominent Angel] by calling every lawyer in the phone book. He said he would make some calls, that one of three Angels might still have the pistol. Later that day he called me and said, 'We have the gun.' So I called the attorney, Melvin Belli, who told me to bring it to him in a shoebox. The charges were dropped after that.The three people besides Hunter who died at Altamont were not violent, merely stupid. Two were run over while sleeping, and one drowned in an irrigation ditch. Video1990@blogcritics.org Sun, 24 Nov 2002 13:08:33 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/11/17/211919.php Aaron HaspelYou hate poetry, like all self-respecting people who remember the English teacher's pet in high school, the girl who liked rainbows and Christina Rossetti. As Marianne Moore said, "I, too, dislike it." Besides, most of the stuff you had to read was lousy. If your education in lyric poetry was anything like mine, it consisted largely of Milton, Keats and Shelley and a swath of second-rate Elizabethans like Sidney and Spenser. The Norton Anthology of English Literature is an undifferentiated and indigestible mass of mediocrity.That's why you need this top five list. There are only five because if I posted ten you wouldn't read any. They are all under 30 lines long because the attention required to read great poetry properly is difficult to sustain. You never had to read them in school. You probably never read them at all. And they're far better than anything you did have to read. (Full Disclosure: I wouldn't know most of these poems myself if not for the great poet and critic Yvor Winters, who formed my taste.)To Heaven, Ben Jonson (1572-1637). This is a Christian poem that one need not be a Christian to appreciate. Jonson addresses the real issue, which is that in middle age people often grow tired of life; Donne, with his neurotic and overdramatized fear of death, seems phony by comparison."As imperceptibly as grief," Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Only Stevens, in The Snow Man, which I recommend to anyone who thinks vers libre is a contradiction, and in the fourth and eighth stanzas of Sunday Morning, another great poem but too long to make the list, conveys nature's alien majesty nearly as effectively. This poem also exploits off-rhyme more brilliantly than any poem ever written in English. "My spirit will not haunt the mound," Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Hardy speaking from beyond the grave again, which he does in his poetry quite often. Note the placement of the caesuras in the last line of each stanza. First between the third and fourth syllables, then between the first and second, and finally between the second and third, resolves the poem the way a musical note resolves a chord. Hardy, Wallace Stevens and Thomas Campion are the best metrists in English.Exhortation, Louise Bogan (1897-1970). The necessity of hatred.To the Reader, J.V. Cunningham (1911-1985). On one level this poem is about textual scholarship; on another, about the relationship between experience and the wisdom that can be drawn from it. In 54 syllables. Books1883@blogcritics.org Sun, 17 Nov 2002 21:19:19 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/25/142212.php Aaron HaspelSenator Paul Wellstone, who was killed in a plane crash this afternoon, was a professor of political science at Carleton College in the early 1980s, when I went there. Even then he was a charismatic figure, with a cadre of student followers, the "Wellstoners," who tried to stir up the usual leftist trouble, organizing the local farmers into coops or persuading the cafeteria ladies to strike. Wellstone's introductory poli sci course was the most popular on campus. Its core text was Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, and it was agitprop. This bothered me more then than it does now. Wellstone did openly what other professors did snarkily and on the sly. With him you knew where you stood.In the Senate he was much the same way. Anti-corporation, sure; but he also refused corporate campaign contributions. Never saw a tax cut he liked. Advocated a seven-year freeze on defense spending. Voted the true-blue anti-NAFTA AFL-CIO line. Always wrong, in short; but forthright, and incorruptible. Few on the left or right were like him, and I'm sorry he's dead. Culture1509@blogcritics.org Fri, 25 Oct 2002 14:22:12 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/25/093723.php Aaron HaspelHolden Caulfield was 17 in 1951, which means that, like a lot of his fans, not to mention his creator, he's collecting Social Security. Salinger too is retired; he had the good sense to stop writing when he had nothing left to say. So can we retire his novels too? Would that be OK? What everyone remembers about Holden is his passion, his positive mania, for sniffing out everything "phony." This keeps him very busy, which is good because he has nothing else to do. Ernie the piano player is a phony because he puts in too many arpeggios. His roommate is a phony because he's vain and stupid and succeeds with girls by sounding sincere. The guy across the hall is a phony because he describes a great basketball player as having "the perfect build for basketball." A girl he dates is a phony because she likes the Lunts and says "grand" too often. (Here Holden may have a point.) A teacher he used to like is a phony because he turns out to be an alcoholic homosexual who married for money.Now all of these people are ghastly in their own way. But showing off is one thing, and vanity is another, and envy is a third, and affectation is something else. It gets us nowhere to lump these traits together and call them "phony." This can't be chalked up to Holden's adolescent argot either. "Phoniness" recurs constantly in Salinger, no matter which book, no matter who's narrating.In Salinger's universe only children are never phony. It helps to be dead too. The only truly sympathetic characters in Catcher in the Rye outside of Holden himself are his sister Phoebe and his late brother Allie, a sort of proto-Seymour Glass who died of leukemia and wrote poems on his baseball glove in green ink.This harping on "phoniness" is indispensable to Salinger's continuing appeal. For all Holden's modesty, his ejaculations of "I'm an idiot, I'm a madman," at bottom he feels superior to the phonies and provokes the same feeling in the reader. And Salinger's settings, fancy boarding schools and prestigious colleges, intensify the feeling by elevating the baseline. It's always pleasant to feel superior, and especially pleasant to feel superior to the Ivy League. And the beauty part, for the reader, is that no actual achievement, no objective superiority, is required: it's all a matter of having your heart in the right place. (Many readers also appreciate that you can kill the complete works in a couple afternoons.)But whatever else you can say about Catcher in the Rye, at least no member of the Glass family appears. Here's a typical example of middle-period Salinger. Salinger is writing in the person of Buddy Glass, in Seymour: An Introduction:It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction -- extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isn't at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can't help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-earned runt of the litter. It's a thought, anyway, finally said, that I've lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again.This passage is not the best in the Glass works but it is by no means the worst. The comment on his own fervent and rather ghoulish admirers is amusing -- Salinger, like the sainted eldest Glass, Seymour, is a sort of suicide poet himself -- but let's look at the style for a second. Like many unprolific authors Salinger has acquired an undeserved reputation for brevity. In fact he is a gasbag, right in there with Thomas Wolfe, sentence for sentence, just fewer sentences. The snobbish qualification "to put it much more horribly than I really want to" is characteristic. He can't think of anything better than "floppy-eared runt" yet he wants to let his reader know, sotto voce, that he isn't really happy with it either. One might object that this is the voice of Buddy Glass, not Salinger himself; but in Franny and Zooey, where he's narrating on his own account, he writes exactly the same way.Then there's the jumbo list of authorial flaws in the middle of the paragraph. Salinger likes lists. Franny and Zooey has one, of the contents of the Glass family medicine cabinet, that's nearly three times this long and apropos of nothing.Not having read Salinger in fifteen years I didn't remember how awful, how self-conscious, how snobbish the style is; how full it is of parenthetical throat-clearing, pedantic qualifications, go-nowhere asides, shuck and jive. Only the Glasses, among the adults in Salinger, get a phoniness pass. As Zooey says to Franny, "Whatever we are, we're not fishy [phony], buddy." This is partly because of their surpassing brilliance, which, like most surpassing brilliance in literature, we have to take mostly on faith; and partly because they're more like overgrown child prodigies than actual adults. (All the Glasses appeared as children on a quiz show called "It's a Wise Child." Wisdom...children...get it?) But the Glasses, like Holden, are all potential, no achievement; all faith and no good works. What do they amount to as adults? Buddy, a literature professor at a cow college. Franny, a student and aspiring actress prone to fainting spells when near vulgarity. Zooey, a television actor. Boo Boo, a Tuckahoe housewife. Walt, dead in the war; Waker, a Jesuit priest. And finally Seymour himself, a suicide at 31. (He leaves 184 double haikus, and they are brilliant, masterly, Buddy tells us so. He can't actually print any of them, though, legal matter you understand. The trouble with having a literary genius as a character is that you can't show much of his ouevre, beyond the occasional letter or piece of juvenalia, without being a literary genius yourself.)And what sort of wisdom do these Wise Children impart to us? I yield the floor to Zooey, who finally snaps his sister Franny out of her religious mania with this:"But I'll tell you a terrible secret -- Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know -- listen to me, now -- don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? ...Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy."All of a sudden we're not supposed to feel superior any more. We're supposed to feel humble, because Christ is in us and of us. There's something cheap about this sort of fake wisdom, something tawdry, meretricious, something...what's the word I'm looking for? Phony. That's it. (This essay first appeared in a slightly different form here.) Books824@blogcritics.org Wed, 25 Sep 2002 09:37:23 EDT