Dr. Rufus Black

John Haffner, currently in China, wrote in to say that he thought Sans Everything readers would be interested in a lecture by Dr. Rufus Black, which can be found here.

John Metcalf, age 2, with older brother Michael.

John Metcalf, as I’ve said more than once, is both a great writer and a great editor. On my bookshelves I have scores of novels and short story collections edited by Metcalf, by writers such as Russell Smith, K.D. Miller and Annabel Lyon. These books maintain a level of quality unmatched in modern publishing: the least of them is worth reading and the best are the equal of any fiction currently being written.

Metcalf is such a good talent scout in part because he himself is a splendid writer: his prose has a sprightly elegance, classical without being stodgy. He can be as giddily funny as Wodehouse yet his stories can plumb into emotional depths that few comic writers are willing to risk. Underlying his antic comedy is a strong sense of all the ways life can go awry, the diminishments and disappointments that accompany the simple act of being alive. Alice Munro nicely captured the paradox of Metcalf when she wrote: “John Metcalf often comes as close to the baffling, painful comedy of human experience as a writer can get.”  The humour that hurts (“painful comedy”) is the essence of his fiction

John Metcalf, age 70, photographed by David O'Rourke

Metcalf the editor and Metcalf the writer are part of the same package deal: the writer alive to language has gathered together a tribe equal devoted to words. Yet there is a certain tension between the two roles as well: all the time Metcalf puts into editing keep him from being as prolific as he could be. During the 1970s, he published a novel or story collection every two years. Since then, the pace has slowed: Metcalf-devotees have to be content with a story or novella every decade: Travelling Northward (1985), Forde Abroad (1996),  Ceazer Salad (2008).

The good news is that the world’s supply of Metcalf has unexpectedly increased: the latest issue of The New Quarterly (#112, available here) features a new Metcalf novella, The Museum at the End of the World, along with a long interview with the writer/editor. As with Metcalf’s other recent fiction, the novella deals with the writer Robert Forde, a sensitive and easily exasperated soul whose travels and travails are an opportunity to record the indignities experienced by an aesthete constantly confronting the ugliness of the modern world.

In his latest adventure, Ford goes on a cruse with his wife Sheila which takes them to Turkey and the former Soviet Union. Among the eccentrics they meet is a Father Keogh, a reprobate Irish priest who is looked after by a mysterious minder. Early on, the following exchange occurs:

   Father Keogh was wearing a flat plebeian tweed cap and sat staring straight ahead.

 

   “The monastery didn’t attract you?” said Sheila

 

   He considered her.

 

   “And why,” he said, “would I be wishing to visit a nest of schismatics?”

 

   “Hmmm,” said Sheila.

 

   The minder started his soothing babble of sound, weaving repeated words and phrases, encompassing the rain, the gloomy foliage, the steepness of the path, the grandeur of that morning’s breakfast, his mother and something and soda bread. It was a song, almost, an Irish crooning which made little sense. The flow of words did not seem to be directed at the priest personally but seemed rather like oil on generally troubled waters, placatory, a hush-now, hush-now.  

As a bonus, the Metcalf interview has some interesting photos. It’s amusing to see that Metcalf at age two had the same sly half-smile, with his right cheek protruding out, that he still has today. As with the infant Hercules, the child was a forerunner to the man.

George Eliot: a crucial figure in Marchand's reading life.

The National Post, formerly my employer and still an occasional publishing outlet for my stray essays, is rather like a Dickensian heroine: abandoned by a feckless father (a jailed genteel social climber no less, rather like Little Dorrit’s dad) the paper lives an orphan’s precarious existence, fending off creditors, the poorhouse, and even death itself. Yet like the spunky star of a Victorian cliff-hanger, the Post always manages to escape at the last minute from the numerous threats against its existence.

The paper’s most recent near-death scrape happened a few weeks ago. For many reasons I’m happy to see that the paper has once again outwitted fate, but chiefly because the Post is the current home for Philip Marchand’s book review column.

Because he’s a literary jack-of-all-trades, Marchand doesn’t quite have the profile that he deserves. He’s written 5 books, all in completely different genres: Just Looking, Thank You (Tom Wolfe style reportage), Marshall McLuhan (a superb biography), Deadly Spirits (a wry noir crime novel), Ripostes (literary criticism), and Ghost Empire (a unique mixture of history and travel writing).

Rare for a newspaper writer, Marchand is extremely well read, although he rarely shows off his erudition but rather uses it to inform his take on new books. Marchand’s one rival among newspaper reviewers is the Washington Post’s Michael Dirda, similarly learned. But Dirda tends to be a bit of a dandy with a love of eccentric minor writers. Marchand, by comparison, brings a greater moral seriousness to his reviews. Marchand manages to be worldly without being cynical and morally concerned without being self-rightous. His recent reviews can be found here.

Below is an excerpt from one of Marchand’s best columns, his reflections on his life as a reader:

Congratulations, anyone reading this column. You’ve overcome the toughest intellectual challenge of your life, and you did it by the age of three. You acquired language. You’ve also overcome the second-toughest intellectual challenge of your life, which is learning to read. I don’t know exactly how old I was when this happened to me, but I will never forget the moment when I looked at a page of a book — there was a drawing of a forest, I recall, and a sentence beneath that illustration — and suddenly, looking at that sentence, the simplest possible sentence it must have been, I understood. I had cracked the code. The sentence spoke to me. Something huge opened up in my life, of great but not unambiguous good.

As I grew older, I acquired a love for books. The reason I loved them was simple: They were an alternate world, a refuge from living in the real world. It was hard sometimes to be accused of “always having your nose in a book,” but I needed that refuge. People who do not need this refuge, or have other means of coping with life, are often rightly suspicious of avid readers. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a cheerfully unintellectual squire says of a retired naval officer, who is often engrossed in books, “His reading has done him no harm, for he has fought as well as read. He is a brave fellow.”

That’s not just a philistine talking. From time to time, we all have to take our noses out of a book and fight, so to speak — go to that job interview, put up the storm windows. There is a famous Twilight Zone episode in which a bookworm is a sole survivor of a nuclear war and is delighted because he now has all the time in the world to read books without being pestered by other people — until he discovers his reading glasses are smashed. Moral of the story: If you are determined to cling to this particular refuge, always and everywhere, the gods will punish you.

*****

No literary snobbery, no judgment of the ages, sways our childhood reading. Unlike the late Susan Sontag, I was not enchanted by Kafka and Proust in my adolescence. Instead I devoured Landmark Books, a series of histories published by Random House for “young readers” between 1950 and 1970. I remember nothing of the content of these books — they simply created or reinforced an intoxicating sense of history as another refuge from living, so potent in its charms, so loosely connected with facts, that I spent numberless hours daydreaming about what would now be known as “counter-history.” In these daydreams, I altered histories of whole countries into more satisfactory shapes.

Somewhat different was the effect of historical fiction on my young imagination. History enacted by invented characters, it turned out, was more lasting in its impression than real history. I remember the characters and events of James Michener’s 1959 novel, Hawaii, which I consumed as an adolescent reader, more vividly than I remember the characters and events of War and Peace, which I read just 20 years ago. I also remember Michener’s characters with much more clarity than any real personage out of the Landmark Books. Such was the lesson that I didn’t fully absorb until years later, the lesson that fiction — even the kind produced by Michener — ultimately has more impact on memory than non-fiction, because fiction is designed to have this impact. It bypasses reality directly to order the imagination, whereas history must deal as best it can with the hopeless mess.

Fiction also did something else. In 10th grade English class we were assigned George Eliot’s Silas Marner, and in that novel I remember being startled to read Eliot’s description of a character’s train of thought. “Instead of trying to still his fears,” Eliot wrote of a man who was in trouble, “he encouraged them, with that superstitious impression which clings to us all, that if we expect evil very strongly it is the less likely to come.” Until I read that sentence, I assumed I was the only person in the universe who entertained this superstition. It was a logical fallacy — bad things take you by surprise, therefore if you expect them they will stay away — that I thought was my own.

Eliot’s remark about her character truly did demonstrate the power of fiction to heighten reader awareness and broaden human sympathies. The day I read it, I felt less alone, less freakish. A woman of the Victorian Age had reached out to a young teenager living during the presidency of John F. Kennedy and planted the seed of a notion in his brain — that books could be a liberation as well as a refuge.

Crumb's version of Abraham and Isaac

Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated is one of the most exciting books of the year. I reviewed the volume for Bookforum, which can be found here. On the Inkstuds radio program, I engaged in an extended conversation on the book with Paul Stanwood, an English professor at the University of British Columbia. You can listen to our talk here.

I was greatful for the radio talk, because it allowed me to bring up issues that I had to skimp in the review, in particular Crumb’s use of ethnicity (unlike many other visual represenations of these stories, the characters actually look Middle Eastern), the fact that Crumb is working in the tradition of the grotesque rather than the heroic, and the merits of the translation Crumb relied on.

Here is an excerpt from the Bookforum review:

As presented in the Bible, the characters in Genesis have no internal lives: We see them speak and act, with little sense of their motivations. When a primary character (God or one of the patriarchs) speaks at length, we can only guess at how the words were received. Crumb’s major interpretive act is to offer reaction shots to this biblical speech making. When God tells Noah that divine justice demands the destruction of almost all life on earth, the poor farmer is aghast. In chapter 35, Jacob calls on the members of his household to cleanse themselves and destroy their idols. The text is silent about their reactions, but Crumb shows the women of the family quietly crying as they hand over their beloved objects.

Among its many riches, Genesis is a book about bodies, a book where men and women constantly grapple with one another, where a servant swears an oath by putting his hand under his master’s thigh, where even angels are threatened with sexual violation. Crumb has long been the preeminent cartoonist of the body. His women are notoriously full-figured, with ample butts and protruding nipples (a motif he uses in this book). But more significantly, the bodies he draws—whether they are quivering or standing still, dancing or drooping—have a visceral impact few artists can match. That’s why he was the perfect cartoonist to illustrate the Book of Genesis, a fitting capstone to a great career.

In an extraordinary bid to lure traditionalist Anglicans en masse, the Vatican said Tuesday that it would make it easier for Anglicans uncomfortable with their church’s acceptance of female priests and openly gay bishops to join the Roman Catholic Church while retaining many of their traditions.–The New York Times

Congratulations on deciding to make the switch!  If you’re a PC user who has just switched to the Mac and want to find out how to adapt your old working habits to the Mac OS, you’ve come to the right place.  Wait.  Sorry.  That was plagiarized from Apple.com.  But really, it’s not such a different concept.  In converting to Catholicism, you are really just switching over your “files” (ideas/customs/most profound expressions of faith) to your “Mac” (Catholic) “hard drive” (brain/immortal soul.)

Although it may feel that you’re entering a brand new world on your Mac with Catholicism, you’ll be happy to know there are some interface elements that should be familiar from Microsoft Windows the Anglican church.  For instance, you are clearly already experienced with suspending disbelief.  The Anglican church has no central hierarchy, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is the first among equals.  Right.  That makes sense.  (I’m rolling my eyes.)  If you don’t think that’s weird, you are prepared for our notion of geography. Vatican City is in Rome, which is in Italy, but it’s actually its own city and country.  Pretty cool, right?  Similarly, once you start believing that communion is literally the body and blood of Christ, instead of a symbol, anything seems possible.  Life is way more fun when you are optimistic.

When confronted with something new, it can be tempting to think of the ways it is a lesser version of the old.  This will make you depressed.  Instead, like a new boyfriend who you need to stop comparing to your ex who was actually a lot cuter and knew how to take you to restaurants besides Thai Gardens lunch special, try to focus on the ways Catholicism is great for its own special reasons.   For instance, the Anglican church was founded by King Henry VIII, who, while mad hot on The Tudors, was actually a fat lard.  The Catholic Church was founded by Saint Peter, who wasn’t  fat and currently lives in heaven with Jesus and Peter Gallagher when he dies.

Besides Jesus H. Christ, history is filled with cool, famous Catholic people.  What’s that you say?  That’s because they were born before the Reformation?  Sorry, I can’t hear you. My Ludwig Van Beethoven cd is on too loud.

Some other smaller perks include being able to write a great autobiography, especially if you are from Ireland.  We get 50 cents off at Tasi Delight (with a valid Tasti Card), and all nail salons have a secret back room with secret colors that only Catholics know about, including Wafer White, Thorny Brown, and Vatican Velvet.  These are also the names of our secret racehorses that run in secret Catholics-only races.

Speaking of races, a lot of people considering the switch have been asking about our policy on black people.  We currently allow them.  But we’re working on it.

In conclusion, although it may feel like you’re entering a brand new world on your Mac, with Catholicism, you’ll be happy to know that there are some interface elements that should be familiar from Microsoft Windows. Because Catholicism is way better and you are going to love life a lot.

Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are

The recently-released movie adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things are has been quite a hit. One happy result of the success of the movie is that many people are returning to the original book. A surprisingly cogent essay on Sendak was written in 1980 by Hilton Kramer, before his descent into terminal crankiness. Kramer reviewed Selma Lanes book The Art of Maurice Sendak. Kramer’s review can be found in his book The Revenge of the Philistines.

Among other things, Kramer wrote:

For how can the imagination that produced Kenny’s Window, Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and the Grimm illustrations be penetrated without a frank examination of their psychoanalytical origins?

 

The great appeal of Mr. Sendak’s work lies precisely in his success in transforming this psychoanalytical vision of experience into fictional fantasies that have something of the quality and mystery of traditional folktakes and fairy stories. His audacity in opening up the traditional children’s story to the terrors, including the sexual terrors, that are disclosed to us in psychotherapy is the very mark of his originality. A criticism that is evasive on this score, even if prompted by the most generous of motives, cannot in the end be anything but incomplete.

 

When it comes to dealing with the evolution of Mr. Sendak’s illustrational styles, however, Mrs. Lanes is generally on much firmer ground. Another of the many audacities to be found in his work is the way he has moved from emulating traditional models (Blake, Rowlandson, the Victorians, et al.) to using the materials of popular culture, and about this aspect of the work Mrs. Lanes is superb. Anyone who ahs ever wondered about (and been delighted by) the appearance of Oliver Hardy in In the Night Kitchen, or about Mr. Sendak’s use of comic-book styles, Busby Berkeley movies, Art Deco design, and sundry other elements of popular culture, will find a definitive account of these and other such matters in this book….

 

Missing, too, is any attempt to place Mr. Sendak’s work in the literary history of his time. In some important respects, the writer he often seems closest to is not any other author of children’s books – far from it! – but Philip Roth. Isn’t In the Night Kitchen the Portnoy’s Complaint of children’s books? Both the comedy and the anxiety are very similar, and so is their attitude toward family authority and sexual release. Both books belong to the cultural history of the sexual revolution

The Human Torch burning bright

In a plot line inspired by Robert Frost’s poem Road Not Taken, fictional character Archie Andrews has already proposed to Veronica and will propose to Betty next month.  I wonder what it would be like if other comics were inspired by poems…(imagine dreamy music and blurry vision.)

On His Blindness—John Milton

Spiderman is blind, worries about his moral value as a superhero, comes to a new appreciation for spidey sense.

The Imperfect Enjoyment –Lord Rochester

Calvin and Susie finally do it, it doesn’t go well.  Probably because they’re in first grade.

The Waste Land—T.S. Eliot

The Green Lantern considers a stranger’s childhood in Austria, plays game of chess HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME into the fire Power Ring Jesus Buddah Shakespeare your mom HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME and we shall play a game of chess The Giant Puppet.

An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot—Alexander Pope

Superman laments his status as the number one superhero because it means lots of annoying hero-wannabes are all up in his grill for advice.

The Lady’s Dressing Room—Jonathan Swift

While visiting Professor Xavier at his Westchester mansion, Angel accidentally walks in on Marvel Girl while she’s changing. He finds out just how many pairs of spanx are required to get her into the green body suit.

Hollow Men—T.S. Eliot

Anthony Stark quits being Iron Man for a while, goes back to his company, but he’s just middle management.  It’s not as fun as being a super hero and driving a sweet Audi.  His alcoholism is less charming and more necessary

All those cat poems—T.S. Eliot

Batman loses his brooding, grumbley side.  Becomes jolly, whimsical, roly-poly.

The Shield of Achilles—W.H. Auden

Steve Rogers becomes Captain America, except World War II actually really terrible.

Tiger—William Blake

The Human Torch is in the forests of the night.

Well, he is Semitic....

According to the Daily Telegraph — alas, not a reliable source on this or any other matter — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is really Jewish. I’ll just quickly note that this opens up the way for a whole new round of jokes about Jewish self-hatred. My favorite in the category is Woody Allen’s emphatic denial of the accusation: “Hey, I may hate myself, but not because I’m Jewish.”

Dear Diary,

This summer, I was reading my book on the steps in Union Square when one of the chess teachers came up and made me smell his cup of “tea.”  I’m pretty sure it was just gin.

Dear Diary,

One winter I was in the playground with my friends, and we wanted to make a snowman.  I scooped out a bunch of snow from the trash can.  I also scooped out a diaper filled with poop.

Dear Diary,

This summer, while waiting in line outside to sell books to the Strand, my line friends and I watched a homeless guy get in a fight with some garbage.  I thought nothing of it and went back to playing solitaire on my ipod, but the guy in front of me called the police, explaining that “he’s not really doing anything, he’s just scary.”  The police came, but by that point the homeless guy had moved down the block, so I didn’t technically see what happened.  But I imagine the homeless guy continued leading his life of grinding poverty, and the guy in front of me continued his life of being a complete jackass.

Dear Diary,

One time a girl in my high school met a guy on the subway, and she gave him a handjob.  True story.

Dear Diary,

Today I sat down next to a cute old lady on the M86 bus and smiled at her.  I didn’t realize I’d accidentally sat on a tiny corner of her Burberry Trench until she pulled it from under me, saying, “Watch it, fatty.”

Dear Diary,

A few years ago, I was waiting for the subway at Chambers street when I saw a rat run down the platform with a cheeseburger in its mouth.

Dear Diary,

Today I threw an empty soda bottle into a trashcan, and a rat jumped out at my face.

Dear Diary,

A few years ago I was running into the subway to get to school on time, and I was proud of myself to have picked a practically empty car.  As we rolled out of the station, I was filled with questions. Why is everyone crowded into that far corner away from me?  Why is the homeless guy next to me snoring so loudly?  And why is does that huge pile of human feces by the door have sneaker prints leading to my sneakers?

Dear Diary,

In the spring the ginkgo trees make my neighborhood smell like barf plus fart.

toot toot!!! All aboard!!!!!!!!!!!!

In an effort to make travel safer and more pleasant for women, several new commuter trains in India are for women only.

Other Places I would Like To Be Only For Women

1. The women’s bathroom at the movie theater on 68^th street last night.   That was really weird.

The end.

xoxo

Gossip Girl

(Sophie)