Why Culture Matters

Admittedly Richard Pells is a professor of history (UT Austin) while I am just a former PhD candidate. So when he says that his fellow members of the academy are ignoring the role of the arts in influencing history, his opinion should matter more than mine. The fault, in his opinion, are social historians who stress social movements and the marginalized.

Starting in the 1970s, it became unfashionable for historians to write or teach about America as a community of shared beliefs and values, defined by its artists and intellectuals. The new scholarship concentrated instead on the divisive repercussions of race, class, gender and ethnicity.

We have learned a lot from these revisionist interpretations of American history. We know more today about the inequities in the nation's past. Yet the fixation with social history has led to a severe case of tunnel vision among American historians, an almost exclusive preoccupation with the exploited and victimized, along with an oppressive orthodoxy about what kinds of courses should be taught and who should be hired at universities.

As a result, Pells, argues, "Universities are turning out students who can tell you about midwives, sharecroppers and blue-collar workers but not about architects, poets or symphony conductors."

Pells is absolutely right that high culture matters. And I LOVED using visual art, music, literature, and film as tools for understanding the world I was studying. My faculty advisor, Richard Stites, has been a master at this. However, I don't see it as either-or. Nor do I think that's what it happening in the university today. Not in the courses I took. Both the midwife and the poet brought respected voices to the table. Maybe I was naive - maybe I was missing a whole bunch. But I certainly hope not.

omg maybe the saddest expression ever

I have been steadily working through The New Yorker today, and reached the Summer Fiction issue. (That would be mid-June for those of you wondering how behind I have fallen.) In past years, the SF issue introduced me to writers like Jonathan Safran Foer. The debut piece in this year's installment is "Sweetheart Sorrow," by David Hoon Kim.

I'd be willing to bet that Kim has been influenced by Haruki Murakami. Or rather, I was willing to put money down. But an extra search made the whole thing irrelevant (see page 2 of the interview for the confirmation). It wasn't just that the characters were Japanese - it was that they were out of place, living between cultures. And there was sorrow and silence, and a willingness to live inside the mind rather than wholly in the world.

Of course it is a quintessentially New Yorker story too. What that means exactly, I'm not sure. I know there is such a thing. And I've heard definitions. For me, it means that I read the last words under a curtain of solemnity.

But anyway, to the saddest expression ever. The title, it seems, is from the Danish "kæreste sorg—sweetheart sorrow—to describe the sadness one feels at the thought of a love affair nearing its end. A sadness one is not yet ready to face." The phrase is so evocative and real - I knew immediately and wholly what Kim - and the Danes - meant.

You can't always get what you want...

... but you just might find, you get what you need.

Shriver's The Post-Birthday World continued to delight me. It was so honest. That there are no perfect choices. That when two paths diverge in a wood, both have their merits. And we get to inspect the ramifications, on both sides, of a fateful kiss (or not).

Since I've already shared some thoughts on the book, I thought I'd just do special quotes instead.

She theorized that for everyone there was that one high you couldn't refuse, for which you'd sell your soul - and anyone else's. [...] Thus the only protection from yourself in this instance was never to try it [...] Yet here was Ramsey Acton, the one substance on earth that Irina Galina McGovern could not resist. She'd had fair warning in July, sniffed a few heady grains from a split vial, just enough to know that this was the drug that she had been avoiding her whole life.

Haven't we all felt like that? And a comment on 9/11 that is so easy to forget, and yet so true:

Much as it's worth recalling that for whole years of World War II no one knew whether Hitler might win, it would soon behoove Americans to remember that for a few hours on that eleventh of September no one knew if more plans might be out there [...] Now that the spinning globe on which we hurtle was clearly not standing still, anything could happen, and anything did

But here's a line, from a description one of Irina's children's books, that sums it all up:

Because when he looks back on his life, Martin realizes that he has spent his life doing something that he loves, and that, to him at least, is beautiful.

We don't only have one destiny. And lucky us, we get to see two of Irina's.

Your first is always special - L.A. Times

We all know that, right? Turns out that the Times is playing coy, about reading no less.

We're passionate about books -- and about encouraging reading. So is First Book, a nonprofit organization founded 15 years ago with the mission of getting new books into the hands of needy children.

Krasinski has good taste in books

Well played, dear newspaper. Except I haven't really seen the evidence of this book passion and reading encouragement in print (um, combining the book review with the Sunday opinion section anyone?). Of course, there is always the Festival of Books, and that makes up for a lot of faults.

But I digress. The point is First Book's survey: What book got you hooked?

More than 100,000 people responded to First Book's poll, www2.firstbook.org/ whatbook/top50.php. The vox pop's top five are:
1. Nancy Drew series by Carolyn Keene
2. "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss
3. "Little House on the Prairie" by Laura Ingalls Wilder
4. "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott
5. "The Cat in the Hat" by Dr. Seuss

"Many of us remember the one book that we wanted to read over and over again -- the book that really stirred our imaginations and left us wanting just one more chapter before bedtime," First Book President Kyle Zimmer told Publishers Weekly. "The fact that there are millions of children in our own country that will grow up without these kinds of memories because they have no access to books is devastating. We are delighted that so many people shared their stories in order to help us shine the spotlight on this critical issue."

Other discoveries: Joyce Carol Oates responded with "Through the Looking Glass," John Krasinski of "The Office" chose Roald Dahl. I think I responded to the survey online a few months back, and entered the Little Golden Books "Monster at the End of this Book," starring Grover. But really, when I think back to my childhood, I couldn't choose just one. I loved Beverly Cleary and her Ramona Quimby so much. And E.L. Konigsburg's A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver helped make me a historian.

Who was your first literary love?

Sliding Doors

This 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow film is one of my favorites. It's a reminder of how little it takes sometimes to send life hurtling down another path entirely. And reinforces my childhood belief in parallel universes. (Do I believe in them still? I couldn't tell you.)

Anyway, the conceit of Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World is roughly the same. Although this time the choice the protagonist makes is hers alone, not forced upon her by a girl with a Barbie doll. And the setting - late 90s London - is also the same. Oddly enough. Maybe London is an epicenter of parallel lives? Irina has dinner with her partner Lawrence's friend, continuing a long-standing tradition while Lawrence is out of town. She's not particularly excited about her charge, but as the evening wears on, she is drawn inexorably toward Ramsey and is about, unless she can stop herself, to kiss him.

Then, in alternately chapters, the way life unfolds depending on her decisions. So many parallels. So similar, and yet utterly different. I'm not quite half-way through yet, but I am so drawn to the story. So fascinated. And surprisingly invested in the characters.

An early passage, from before the big choice:

At its most torrid, your love life was merely titillating to others, and the done-deal nature of established couples like Irina and Lawrence was doubtless a big bore. Romantic devastation occasioned, at most, an onlooker's tinny sympathy or schadenfreude. Romantic delirium was even worse. Newly inlove, you expected to draw envy or admiration, but were far more likely to attract a finger-drumming impatience for you to get over it. [...] Some friends regarded Irina-and-Lawrence as a factual matter, like the existence of France. Others relied on the couple as a touchstone, proof that it was possible to be happy; the role was a burden.

This rang so true to me. And yet, it's so strange that while we often feel this way about the people we know, we are able to invest so much of ourselves into these same situations when they occur for characters in a book, a film, or even a tv show. Any thoughts on why?

Dreams and Destruction, or Heyday

When I finish a book that has created a world for me, I get a little dazed and dreamy. Like I'm in love. It's this intense satisfaction, and a tiny effort to hold onto it instead of letting it go and returning to reality. For a long time I wondered if I was the only one who felt this way - but I saw a friend do so last week as he finished Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer) and happily realized I am not alone.

Usually I wait at least a few hours after finishing a book before starting my review, but I am still clutching at the feel, and thinking that writing about Heyday will help. I couldn't tell you how Kurt Andersen's novel made it on my list of books to read. (I sometimes think that books just magically appear on there, but no mind.) Normally I wouldn't expect a novel about mid-nineteenth-century America to appeal to me, but this one involved a "band of brothers" and their quest for a beautiful woman, and hell, I like that. And then Andersen drew me into the complicated and fantastical world of 1848 and 1849 - years of European revolution and counter-revolution, and an American rush for gold in my favorite of states.

Our central hero is Ben Knowles, Londoner transplanted to the land of his adventuresome dreams. But there is also Duff and Polly Lucking - he a soldier with a secret, she his actress (and more) sister - and Renaissance man Timothy Skaggs. Ben's immediately infatuation with Polly forms the heart of the plot. But the central theme is that of discovery and creation - and its converse. America is being born and torn down all at once - even then a land without history. And each character (oh, and there are more that the central four) has his or her own obsessions that relate to creation and destruction. But it's a theme that fits so well with that period in time that it doesn't seem overbearing - even at its most explicit.

My quibble with Heyday is the name-dropping. Of course Knowles is related to Toqueville and Skaggs used to write about Lincoln when he was a small-town lawyer and the group would run into attendees of the Seneca Falls Convention and ... well, you get the point. It's a little out of control. I understand that Andersen is trying to make clear exactly how free-wheeling and eventful and wild this period was, but I could have done with a few fewer references.

What I loved - California. The Golden State, even before it was a state. Andersen refers to the "topsy-turvy summer of '48" in California, and it's an apt term. American exceptionalism runs rampant, and I get bored of it, but I never tire of Californian exceptionalism. I am a snob. :) Even 150 years ago, a magnet for dreamers.

Politics = High School all over again

In between answering pledge calls for KCRW, I read the Opinion section of today's LA Times. And I am easily amused. While opining on how best to rein in the Iranians and their swaggering self-confidence, I came across the following:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite who lived in exile in Iran, held hands with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week during a chummy visit to Tehran, to the annoyance of President Bush.

I think Bush is just jealous because he remembers his hand-holding days...

I wish I were as amusing as Patricia Marx

Last month I read Him Her Him Again The End of Him, by Patricia Marx. It's a pretty recent book, as I was reminded this evening when I was looking through my Google Reader and came across a Q&A she did with New Yorker writer Nancy Franklin.

Marx cracks me up. She is funny is a very understated way. Where you realize how funny something is a second or two later. Some highlights:

Q: Did you know there is actually a pop star named Patricia Marx in Brazil?
A: I do know and I’m so happy, because if anybody ever Google-Images me, they’ll think that I’m a beautiful Brazilian pop star.

(the Brazilian Marx)

How she is like my interns: I just loved [SNL]. I had never lived in New York; I loved that. I loved being there twenty-four hours a day. If there had been two hundred and forty hours in a day, I would have loved staying there those hours, too. I especially liked the fact that there was Diet Coke in the refrigerators that you could have for no money. It was summer camp.

On not liking her name: My mother said to me the other day, “Why does your name have to be Patty? My friends say, ‘How’s Patty?’ and I think they could be saying, ‘How’s Jane? How’s Anne?’ ”

So I've become a Marx fan. A Marxist, you could say. But that's just one example of how I'm not as funny as she is.

Recycled Paper... mmm, my favorite

I have of late been dedicating myself to the daunting task of reading through the e-mails I have amassed in the past month. (One observation: I am beloved by several political mailing lists.)

While I was doing so, I came across an old Co-op America newsletter that had an interview with Sheryl Woodhouse-Keese, paper-recycler extraordinaire. Now I love recycling, but it never occurred to me to make it into a business. Woodhouse-Keese, on the other hand, founded Twisted Limb Paperworks, which turns office paper, junk mail, and more into unique and super-green invitations. Or, more poetically, "we blend our love of paper and colors with our desire to preserve the Earth's resources and to make a difference in our community."

Why didn't I think of this?! Anyway, Twisted Limb is doing good work. Check them out.