Hating Beloved - the Post-Game Summary

by Scott Bradfield

In 2001, somebody called me on the phone six months before I was scheduled to speak in Berlin and asked what the title of my lecture would be. They were paying good money, so I felt I should try something new - a “personal essay.”

My desk at UCONN was covered with these terrible How to Teach Beloved textbooks I’d been picking up at used bookstores because, frankly, I had no idea how to teach Beloved. And I was getting frustrated. So I said, “I’d like to write about why I hate Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” The Berliners printed up lots of flyers, ran ads in newspapers, and six months later, I had cornered myself into writing this essay.

After the lecture, a young blondish Paul Verhoeven-looking Austrian man stood up and said, sounding a lot like Governor Arnold, that he was disappointed I hadn’t really blasted Toni Morrison, and that I should have kept my promise. Then he walked out.

I turned the lecture into a prose-essay the next year, when I taught a graduate seminar at UCONN entitled, “Literature and Crap: What We Like and What We’re Supposed To.” For two years, I sent the essay around to dozens of journals and periodicals, all of whom rejected it on one of two grounds:

1) they “didn’t get it”
2) they agreed that they didn’t like the book either, and agreed with most of the things I said, but they ”just couldn’t” publish it

The essay was eventually accepted by a young(er than me) critic and short story writer named Paul Maliszewski, who was guest-editing The Denver Quarterly. Paul accepted the essay, and subjected it to his version of close-editing - which was excruciating, never-ending, and, more often than not, really helpful. Shortly after the essay was published, Paul wrote me an e-mail which said something like: “Oh, and there’s this awkward phrase on page seventeen we still need to look at.” It was the only e-mail from Paul to which I never replied.

I have been snubbed several times since the essay appeared by people who wanted me to know it. At one dinner party, a colleague and his partner picked up their plates and left the room when I suggested that Charles Johnson (a good novelist and short story writer I have never met) had every right to say that he didn’t like Beloved (I don’t know if he did say that, by the way, but that’s what somebody had reported.) And still, every so often, I will meet an academic who will say to me, “Beloved is a very, very important book to me.” They say it completely out of the blue. Then they drop the subject.

The essay was never reprinted or made available on the internet. So I was glad that Eric and Eliza agreed to make it available at Two Dollar Radio, where we are all encouraged to freely love and hate books as we see fit. Even our own.

After the essay appeared in print in 2004, I received a few clandestine nudges and winks from people who told me they liked the essay, but that was all. Then, a few months ago, somebody sent me Wikipedia’s entry on The Denver Quarterly, which described one of DQ’s high points as the “published to acclaim” Morrison essay. (And I didn’t write the entry, I swear.)

I sent the entry to Paul Maliszsewski, who promised me he hadn’t written it either. Then he suggested that “published to acclaim” was probably a cliche, so we should cut it.

“Please don’t,” I replied.

Why I Hate Toni Morrison's Beloved

["Why I Hate Toni Morrison's Beloved" was first presented as the Seymour Fischer Lecture at the Free University of Berlin, on January 17, 2001. It has been greatly revised and expanded.]

by Scott Bradfield

The first time I told someone that I had problems reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, she started yelling at me in a Marie Callender's restaurant in Dana Point, California. I had recently received my Ph.D. in English at U.C. Irvine, just a dozen miles north, and we were having what graduate students consider a "blow out" (food and beer) at a moderately-priced franchise restaurant; it marked the saying of our goodbyes before I drove my truckload of books to the heretofore unglimpsed state of Connecticut. This wasn't the first time that someone has yelled at me in a restaurant, by the way. I don't even think it was the first time someone has yelled at me in a Marie Callender's restaurant. But it was the first time anybody has ever yelled at me, at length and in volume, for disliking a book. Oddly enough, I didn't even hate Toni Morrison's Beloved at the time. I was just having trouble reading through its middle pages and seeing what the fuss was all about.

There are two reasons why the title of this essay appealed to me so much that I decided to write some pages to follow it up.

First, it strikes me as an almost unspeakable statement. In our apparently jaded culture, where every conceivable obscenity has already been made a common topic of talk radio, web cams and trash TV, it still manages to anger and shock people; and unlike most expressions of relative value, it makes me hesitate before uttering it. Now, let me say that I hate a lot of things, and hating them has rarely gotten me into any trouble, or caused anybody to yell at me in restaurants. I hate, for example, margarine. I hate chemical sweeteners, automatic transmissions, trade paperbacks, and just about every book Norman Mailer has ever published. I hate that smarmy sitcom "Friends," George W. Bush and Al Gore, the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, Jay Leno (who's going to burn in hell someday, I swear), genetically modified food, rap music, static electricity, Bruce Willis, the Modern Language Association, kiwi fruit, and the Grammys. We all like and dislike different things, love and hate them, but we accept that personal opinion is a free-form, shoot-from-the-hip business, so we do our best to tolerate one another, and not get too bent out of shape when we like and dislike different things. But hating Toni Morrison's most famous novel seems to bother people to an exceptional degree, especially those who teach literature (as I do) at an American university.

What's more, saying "I hate Toni Morrison's Beloved" may actually be unhearable. As an expression of personal opinion, preference, idiosyncracy, taste, what have you, I am not sure that people hear this statement in itself, since all sorts of cultural, social, and historical meaning gets tangled up with it. To take an obvious example, an Anglo-Irish non-denominational suburban guy such as myself will be "heard" in a variety of ways that he might never wish to be heard; and, whether he likes it or not, many assumptions will be inferred about his opinions on history, race, politics, power and so forth. Or, to dispense with the issue of race altogether (something that's not easy to do when discussing Beloved), I could even be accused of writerly bad faith. I mean, we writers are an envious lot, and here I am hating a book which has succeeded spectacularly in ways that none of mine ever have or, I can admit it now, ever will—such as winning a Nobel Prize for its author, appearing on Oprah and selling a gazillion copies.

And let's not overlook the issue of gender, either; I certainly can't. For example, when I was yelled at in that restaurant, I was told that my inability to appreciate Toni Morrison's Beloved manifested a genetic failure on the part of my man-ness. The argument ran, as I recall, thus:

I felt threatened by the success of a woman novelist because of my inborn inability to embrace her radically new perspective on history which could only be generated by all-embracing female heterogeneity; in fact, by disliking Morrison, I was validating many opinions that many female colleagues already held about me and the fact that I had completed my Ph.D. in a manifestly sexist English Department, since at least one member of my committee was a known sexist who had reputedly engaged in a long-standing affair with a female graduate student....

And so forth. It really did continue for a while, dredging up a lot of unspoken emotions. Some of them surprised me; others didn't. I won't belabor this conversation, or the way my statement was "heard" by an individual whom I liked, respected, and continue to be friends with. But I do want to place this anecdotal moment in the context of contemporary academic scholarship, since I don't consider it arbitrary or inconsequential. In many ways, it strikes me as surprisingly representative of contemporary scholarly thought.

To put it simply, there are many important issues raised by the ways my statement ("I hate Toni Morrison's Beloved") can be heard or misheard by intelligent individuals. And while I concede that issues like sex, race, the canonizing of texts and the subverting of canons all provoke, and should provoke, a lot of heat when we discuss them in university, this still doesn't get me past my immediate concerns as a reader and a writer:

1) I have trouble saying that I hate Toni Morrison's Beloved, mainly because I don't want people to think I am either a racist or a sexist, and;

2) people have trouble hearing what I think I'm saying.

As a teacher of literature, where does that leave me when I try to teach Beloved? If neither I nor my students, can express a simple statement of opinion or conviction, where does that leave us when called upon to explore even more difficult issues? And where does it leave the common reader who picks up books and puts them down again according to the many multifaceted, and deeply idiosyncratic reasons we all pick up books and put them down again?

As academics, can we even begin to discuss what it means to read, enjoy, and dislike books?

#

In a sense, I'm writing about two different objects of reading. On the one hand, there is the specific book that I hold in my possession, a blue jacketed thirty-eighth printing Plume paperback that I purchased across the street from the University of Connecticut at the Paperback Trader. This is a limited, identifiable object. On the other hand, there is this, I don't know what to call it exactly, this illimitable presence, this "landmark of contemporary literature," this vast region of wisdom and light which stands over us in judgment, a manifest benevolence which can only be called

Toni Morrison's Beloved.

I've set these words off in twenty-point boldface type, which doesn't do justice to the way I see them projected on the screen of our cultural imagination. As I really see them, they flicker above and behind all our heads, just out of vision, emitting a vibratory thrum, like a neon sign. You can feel the words in the air before you glimpse them. To my mind, twenty-point type doesn't do these words justice. Thirty-point type, perhaps. Forty-point. But then I wouldn't have any space left over for writing this essay, there would just be page after page of

Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Which might be a little hard to take.

Now maybe it's my imagination, but whenever I hear those words spoken, they are accompanied by a little sigh, a half-sensible expiration. The speaker places a hand over his or her chest, a little woozy in admiration. They aren't just speaking the name of a book, you see; they are speaking their own puny inarticulacy in the face of this, this thing called

Toni Morrison's Beloved.

A silence falls over us in our divided spaces.

What else can you say?

It's up there now, looking down as I type these words. This vast pulsing network of affirmation, filled with superlatives.

Finest. Greatest. Inspiring. Unparalleled.

You have to love it or—

Or.

I would like to get to this "or" in a moment.

#

According to the MLA International Bibliography, since 1987 there have been more than five hundred articles published in respectably vetted journals on the subject of

Toni Morrison's Beloved.

And almost every one of them is laudatory in the extreme. Occasionally you might find an article which appears value-neutral—examining image-clusters or ideological configurations or whatever—but for the most part these articles never make a negative or qualifying statement about Beloved; and they almost always refer to it as a masterpiece, or one of the twentieth century's greatest novels, or something along those lines.

At my university library, for example, one and a half shelves are devoted to Toni Morrison, and most of them contain the word Beloved in their title, or in one of their chapter titles. And each year, many more books on the subject are published, along with at least two or three introductory texts for beginning students, since Beloved is already a significant topic on everything from the SATs to your next Master's exam. Now the liberal academy often likes to congratulate itself for being "open-minded" on the subject of books and ideas; our systems of tenure and advancement are built upon the unexamined assumption that it is not what you say that counts, but only how responsibly you say it. But if you would like to investigate just how tolerant the academy really is to disagreement within its ranks, you might like to read one of these introductory surveys on Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Take, as a purely arbitrary example (it's on top of the stack of books I have assembled in my office), the Ikon Critical Guide, edited by Carl Plasa. This survey of critical essays and topics contains interviews with Morrison, framing comments by the editor, and a fairly standard critical bibliography. Subtitled "The Student Guide to Secondary Sources," it is designed to teach students how to compare and analyze arguments, then extrapolate new arguments of their own. Like most books teaching you how to do something, it teaches you how not to do something as well. And what it teaches you not to do is pretty frightening.

In his introduction, Plasa reminds us of the existing approbation: calling Morrison a "superstar," and "the American and African-American (woman) writer to reckon with." He then assures his readers that ever since Beloved's publication, almost every critic and reviewer has been "fully in step" with the "general acclaim," the only notable exception being an article in The New Republic by "the right-wing commentator, Stanley Crouch." As Plasa goes on to explain (just so you know what to think about Crouch's review when you get to it, sixteen pages later):

The extract from Crouch, by contrast, is a denunciation of Beloved/Morrison, as vehement as it is both scurrilous and wrong-headed. Running thoroughly counter to the overwhelmingly positive critical reaction to Beloved, it is included here less in the interests of some spurious critical balance than as an illustration of just how highly charged debates about Morrison's work can sometimes be.

"Highly charged," indeed. I guess it's a good thing that even-handed critics like Plasa are around to help the cooler heads prevail; perhaps this is why he prefaces Crouch's review with a comment by Nancy Petersen, which accuses Crouch of "capitalizing on the desire of white readers to consume black women's tales of being abused by black men." (I'm sorry, but I have no idea what that means.) Plasa then takes every opportunity to misread or selectively quote from Crouch in order to make some pretty damning statements. At one point, he claims that Crouch, insensitive to the brutality of slavery, refers to the Middle Passage as little more than a "trip across the Atlantic." This is an inaccurate and misleading statement. Crouch doesn't appear to suggest anything of the sort, though he does argue that Morrison misreads historical events in order to validate modern presumptions, especially feminist ones. It's an argument worth considering by any serious student.

I must confess that I don't know much about Stanley Crouch. I saw him interviewed recently on PBS, so I know he's black; he writes for The New Republic, a so-called "neo-conservative" weekly out of D.C. which I have no interest in reading; and he clearly knows how to get up people's noses. His work may well reflect some serious cultural and political biases; but the same could be said of Plasa and his colleagues, pumping away on their critical Stairmasters. Finally, though, I wouldn't call Crouch's review of Beloved any more "wrong-headed" or irresponsible than any of the others reprinted by Plasa; at least he writes more clearly, and raises some interesting and contentious points—points that deserve, but don't receive from Plasa, fair-minded consideration and reply.

Which is, of course, the job of any critic or, for that matter, any teacher.

#

Here are some lessons a young student might learn from the first thirty pages of Plasa's book, thus equipping him or her for a high-flying career in literary scholarship:

1) Some white male and female academics consider themselves incapable of saying anything about Beloved—though this doesn't render them incapable of asserting that Toni Morrison represents "a major figure of our national literature";

2) Everybody who loves Beloved is "fully in step" with the vast mass of scholarship being produced today;

3) Anybody who disagrees with points 1) or 2) above is probably "scurrilous" and "wrong headed," and may well be pandering to white readers who like to see black women abused by black men.

That's quite a tutorial.

#

When I walk down the corridors of any literature department in any university anywhere in the world, I get the overpowering sense that my relationship to an individual book (in this case, my thirty-eighth printing trade paperback of Beloved) is overseen, and in some sense monitored, by this huge presence called Toni Morrison's Beloved, a presence elevated above us, in a region that we can't quite see.

And I have to say that I hate that. I really, really hate Toni Morrison's Beloved.

I hate the smugness of it. I hate the sanctimony. I hate the unquestioning sense of superiority. And I hate everything about it that takes the individual book out of the individual reader's hand. This hateable thing clearly isn't limited to Beloved, by the way. For example, I might just as well have entitled this essay "Why I Hate Herman Melville's Moby-Dick," a book which I have enjoyed hating with genuine conviction over the years. I studied American literature in grad school, and wrote my dissertation (and a subsequent book) on it, and while I've always liked the man Melville appears to have been, and many passages of Moby-Dick are undeniably angry and beautiful and unique, I've always considered it a big fat drag to read from beginning to end. I'll concede that you can learn all sorts of things about American culture from it; it can be fun to teach, and to be taught; and Melville had a lot of interesting observations about consumer culture, racism, and those institutions of slavery that he saw around him as a sailor, a writer, and a clerk. But there are still many books I'd rather take on my next plane trip; it contains far too many descriptions of harpoons; and out of all the dozens of articles and books I've read on the subject of Moby-Dick, none have more accurately defined my feelings for it than this statement from one of my best (and first) undergraduate students: "It's just too long." That statement comes to mind every time I see, or discuss, or consider discussing Melville's Moby-Dick. Not a lot of blather about landmarks of cultural hegemony deconstructing the western metaphysic blah blah but just the simple fact of it in your hand, and the daily task of reading it.

Moby-Dick is simply "too long."

#

Or I could have written about "Why I Hate Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum," which I simply never got through, or "Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children," which, sure, it's probably a very intelligent book and has lots to say about post-colonial rhetoric and so on, but Rushdie has a wooden ear and his sentences are, I'm afraid, just too angular and clunky. And while we're at it, let's add Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to the list, and anything by William Burroughs or Jack Kerouac, and most of Saul Bellow, and more than half of Ulysses, and the entirety of Henry James's late period, and Vladimir Nabokov's Ada (which is nowhere near as good as Lolita or even his great early novel, Laughter in the Dark), and okay, you can probably hear it, I'm getting a little out of breath, I'm ranting, I'll stop. But I'm afraid this is what happens when I start exercising about all these books and authors I've forced myself to read, or failed to read, or could only read in order to teach for some survey course which paid my rent.

Books that are bigger than I am, and bigger than my students, staring down at us from on high, and inviting us to share our opinions about them—just so long as we don't say anything "scurrilous" such as, say, that we don't like them.

#

Consider my trade paperback copy of Beloved, purchased second-hand for $2 from the Paperback Trader in the late spring of 1999. It features an author photo of an attractive, middle-aged woman, along with some pretty impressive jacket copy, most notably:

Winner of THE NOBEL PRIZE in Literature

and a highly-placed quote from the important American reviewer, John Leonard, who says: "I can't imagine American literature without it."

When I hold this book in my hand, I do not feel alone; nor do I feel like a free individual with his own thoughts and opinions. The presence of Toni Morrison's Beloved looms oppressively, its bristly tentacles and veiny suction devices wrapping themselves around me, coating me with a warm, treacly substance. It entangles my limbs and thoughts, attaches itself to my nerves and vertebrae and belly, feeding me reality like one of those pod-spiders in The Matrix. In order to read this book, clearly and simply, as one person reads any book in the privacy of his own head, I require something I don't normally bring to my reading experience. I require an act of will and a monumental act of forgetting. I must uproot all the snake-like wiring and suction creatures and find my own way, word after word and page after page. And frankly, I don't know how well I can do that. I don't know how well I can let this book speak for itself, amidst the sanctimonious reverberating thrum of Toni Morrison's Beloved. And if I'm honest with myself, and I think as clearly as I can about what I've read, I find myself concluding something a lot more outrageous than that I hate it.

The book starts off really well; the central character of Sethe, and the haunting of her family, is strange and surprising and beautifully written; but the book never recovers from the arrival of the mysterious ghost-girl. I lose sight of Sethe; and the succubus doesn't work for me at all—some of the passages told through her eyes strike me as sentimental and phony, like beat poetry. Finally, I don't like it when the town's wise women come along at the end to sort things out; I'm always annoyed by books where the women turn out to be more noble and capable than the stupid men, since it's the longest-reigning trope of just about every TV commercial I've ever seen since I was three years old. ("Oh, honey, stop fiddling with that drain. Just pick up the phone and call Roto-Rooter!")

I've been in academia long enough to know that all my objections to Beloved can be explained away by critical methodology—theories of alterity and the mise en abyme and so forth. ("You're supposed to be lost when the succubus appears—you're experiencing Sethe's self-estrangement.") I am even willing to accept that I suffer from my fair share of cultural misconceptions; that I'm not as smart as I should be; and that my missing the point of Beloved may be precisely its point. But, at the same time, none of these theories have anything to do with the way I read books. Nor do they explain the pleasures I experience when reading a book I enjoy, or the annoyance I feel when I'm reading a book I don't.

#

Like many people who enjoy books, I have fond memories of being read to as a child. It is strange to think that while my parents did many things for me when I was growing up—fed and clothed and housed me—that I still remember evening bedtime stories with a special fondness. In my early years, before my brother was born, my parents guided me through large picture books—I especially enjoyed the ones filled with photographs of lions and tigers and zebras. Later, we read smaller pages with more words in them—books which I didn't understand sometimes, and didn't need to. There was something about the ritual warmth of reading that mattered more than what the words conveyed. It provided, in fact, a different sort of consensus: cuddling up around the book with my brother and one of my parents, I would listen to that night's chapter of Call of the Wild, say, or Alice in Wonderland, and ask endless questions about what it conveyed, and what might happen next. ("I don't know," my Mom or dad would explain simply, "we'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out, won't we?") Finally, after making sure I knew the title of tomorrow's chapter, and had glimpsed at least one of its illustrations, I went to bed with these weird visions of other worlds in my head. I might imagine my brother and me riding bobsleds across the frozen steppes, or sitting down to tea with the Mad Hatter, or leading Black Beauty home to her lost master. They weren't better than me, these books. They were inseparable from the imaginative life I lived in my home. They never spoke to my mind, but conversed with it.

Eventually, I learned to read books for myself, preferring stories about travelling to faraway countries and planets. The word "Voyage" figured often in their titles, as in A Voyage to the Mushroom Planet, or The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle. I was especially intrigued by stories about boys who built things in their basements—zoos, printing presses, secret laboratories—and overcame various obstacles in order to achieve worldwide renown. Sherlock Holmes figured prominently on my bookshelf. And I read everything I could find about Snoopy, the Hardy Boys, and Encyclopedia Brown.

About the same time that I was reading books to find out what was in them, I was growing intrigued by the mass, volume and variety of all the books I couldn't read. Both of my parents had been to college, and their old textbooks were assembled in a long, waist-high wooden bookshelf that divided the living room from the hallway in our suburban tract-style house in San Luis Obispo. If I lay down in this hallway, hidden away from my parents in the smack-dab middle of the house, I found myself in a "secret place" of books where I never felt entirely lost. They included quite a few dog-eared and spine-warped bestsellers, such as the James Bond novels my Dad was always reading, and about which he seemed vaguely embarrassed. ("They're kind of like grown-up comic-books," he used to say.) Then there were my mother's nursing textbooks, featuring glossy schemata of bowels and reproductive organs and brains and lymphatic tissue. And finally, there were the "adult story books." Most of these were in Modern Library editions, without even jackets anymore to illustrate what they were about; their titles and authors were embossed in flaking gilt on fading green spines, just above the figure of a tiny ankle-winged Hermes, messenger of the Gods, weirdly poised like a ballet dancer.

I still remember the titles of these books as vividly as anything I have ever read. There was Of Human Bondage, of course, and I had no trouble imagining what that was about. Some brave man, captured by Indians, lay trussed up in a closet for 837 pages until he triumphed, broke free, and saved his family from being burned at the stake. Then there was War and Peace (which couldn't be half bad), and Native Son (young Navaho seeks freedom on the plains), and finally Pride and Prejudice, which, somewhere on the periphery of my suburb-locked understanding, seemed to invoke all these news reports I had been hearing about long hot summers and bussing in the south.

I remember loving Moby Dick before I read it. What's not to love when you're five or six years old? This one-legged Captain driving his crew across the seven seas in search of a gigantic white whale? What a great book not to read. I even loved the movie when I was little (it was on par with "The Amazing Colossal Man," though it didn't give me so many nightmares), and I went on to purchase the Classics Illustrated edition at the local Rexall drugstore. I read and reread it, carrying it around scrunched up in my back pocket until it resembled the head of a mop. In fact, I read it so often and so intensely that, many years later, as an undergraduate at UCLA, I got away without reading the actual novel on at least two exams. I have many friends who love Melville, and I hope that the day arrives when I can say I like Melville as much as I loved that Classics Illustrated comic book. In my most subjective universe, that would be saying something.

Then there was The Brothers Karamazov, another one of those titles that jumped out at me when I was five years old. I had a brother three years younger than myself, and we were very close, so I figured it had something to do with us and the games we played together. My mother aroused my interest even further by informing me that it concerned a murder ("Great!") and finding out who did it ("Even better!") and that one of the four brothers who might have committed the murder was an atheist who didn't believe in God.

Wow, I thought. And, for that matter, still do.

For me, Dostoevsky has always been one of those rare writers who lives up to the hype.
I remember this space on the hall floor, surrounded by books I couldn't quite read, with great fondness. These books were far from objects of worship, and I played with them like toys, stacking them in interesting configurations—pyramids and forts and obelisks—and imagining what might happen if the characters they contained were to wander out of their books and move into one another's spaces. Would Ellison's Invisible Man be a match for the Invisible Man of H.G. Wells? Would Mailer's naked soldiers perform bizarre and unconscionable acts with Samuel Butler's flesh-bound travellers, very likely in a hot bath before bedtime? I played with these books and even developed a sense of commitment to reading them some day, when I grew up, because I wanted to know what was really in them and wanted them to know what was in me.
Whenever I think about books, or the act of reading, with pleasure, I always think about this time I spent alone on the floor with these books I couldn't yet read. It was the most enjoyable relationship with books I have ever known.

#

Something has happened to the reading of books in my lifetime. I don't want to sound like one of those cranky old men who say everything was better in my day, because I don't think it was. But the worst aspects of book-reading definitely have taken the place of the better ones. Our academics and critics select a few books each year (often written by their friends) as worthy of consideration without having read anything else; then they congratulate one another for liking the same books, or pick petty quarrels about which end of the book should be cracked first. Which book is more reactionary than the other two? Which undermines gender stereotypes more effectively, or unravels the always unravelling thread of language? At the end of the day, you don't feel anybody is talking about books at all. They're talking about themselves, and the disciplinary institution called, for want of a better term, literary culture. They're talking about their boring jobs.

When I think about all those huge indigestible books hovering up there behind us, I think about the statues on Easter Island that were erected by people we don't know much about. Statues bigger than us, more frightening, and more real than we're supposed to be, and while I think that I can live with the statues erected by somebody a few thousand years ago, I can't bear to watch my colleagues, my students, and myself, straining to erect more of them.

Books are about a lot of things: race, gender, the Napoleonic Wars, sex, death, food, social norms, social outcasts, social incasts, fantasy, fact, dreams, sadness, loneliness, elation, injustice, class, the Mason-Dixon line, language, stupidity, co-habitation and rage. But ultimately, they are about the process of reading them; they are about the things their authors have known and seen and imagined long enough to write them down. They are, by their nature, transitory experiences, just like our lives, and we shouldn't judge them, or be judged by them. We should only live with them, much the same way as we live with one another. We do not owe them respect or allegiance; we only owe them the considerable effort of trying to read them the best we can.

When I first thought up the title of this essay, I felt uncertain and defensive about it. But in the course of writing it, I have come to conclude that I don't mind hearing anybody say that they hate or love any book, or any writer. To hear people disagreeing about books, hating and loving them, doesn't make some of those people good and other ones bad. It doesn't sound like a bunch of "right wing" people arguing with a bunch of "fully in step" ones. It just sounds like the noisy contentious clash and accord of people reading. You see, it's my opinion that the most terrible statement you can utter is not "I hate X" or "I love Y." The most terrible thing you can say, especially to your students, is: "You must hate X." Or: "You must love Y."

For it seems to me that the greatest lesson we can teach our students about the power of beauty of books is that they are not—or should not be—a set of conclusions handed down to us by people who know better than we do. Rather they are a series of decisions we make every day of our lives, perpetually and unceasingly, each of us alone in our imperfect heads, continually glancing at one another for confirmation, elucidation, and contradiction, with the books stacked up around us, and lying on the floor.

Avid Bookshop

Our good friend, Janet Geddis, has been meticulously planning to open her own bookstore in Athens, Georgia, called Avid Bookshop. Her hope is to open this fall and this month she is making a large fundraising push. She's hoping to raise $13,000.

To help out, we're donating money from each and every book sold ($10 from every subscription sold; $2 from every individual book sold) through our website during the month of April to Avid Bookshop.

Through Indie Go-Go she has a number of cool perks available to saintly individuals willing to donate financially toward her effort.

You should also vote for Avid for the Pepsi refreshing ideas challenge (they allow you to vote 1x each day).

You can read more about her store in Flagpole (Athens alt-weekly), and on the Avid blog.

A Warning from Dr. Nathan Louis

Though I’m a great, if reluctant, admirer of Crust, I feel it’s my duty to inform its potential readers of my recent research at the University of Alabama Institute of Neuro-Otolaryngology, where I’ve been a visiting professor since 2008. As Lawrence Shainberg makes clear, it’s long been understood that the pleasure and frequency of Nasalism is inversely proportional to the picker’s level of self consciousness at the moment of initial impulse and investigation. Despite the fact that I am a lifelong Nasalist, I was not aware of this unfortunate equation until I read Crust myself and noted, as have so many (see AntiNasalist.com, NoShainberg.com, or for that matter, any of the 3234 other AntiNasalist sites which, according to Internetdirectory.com, focus on the dangers of Nasalism), the book’s disastrous effects on a habit which has long been my most dependable source of happiness and tranquility. I’m sure I share with many Nasalists the grief and anger one feels at such loss, but as a neuroscientist, I believe I was the first to realize that such effects are part of a reversible equation which could help us understand the mystery of self consciousness which, as all neuroscientists know, is one of the most important and elusive functions of the brain. We have suspected since 2007 that the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) is the neurochemical root of self consciousness, but thanks to Nasalism and Crust, I believe I am the first to confirm the hypothesis. Here at Alabama, working on a grant from the NIH, I have found clear evidence that Nasalists who’ve read Crust show significantly more activity and a greater number of synapses in the VLPFC than those who haven’t. Furthermore, my data has been confirmed by Dr. Elwood Baskin, our chief Otolaryngologist, who has shown a similar parallel between VLPFC metabolism and nasal activity, eg, the quantity and quality of secretion and the size and liquidity of crusts it produces.

As a neuroscientist, I am obligated of course to state again that my research remains incomplete and controversial, but as a Nasalist, I have no doubt that, even at this stage, it requires me to warn all Nasalists to avoid books like Crust and all other information about their habit. The message coming out of my laboratory is clear and unequivocal: if picking matters, don’t think about it.

Broken Embraces

Ambivalent or enigmatic paternity is one of the themes of Pedro Almodovar’s recently released Broken Embraces, as is the question of artistic patrimony. The provenance of the cinema-obsessed, fledgling filmmaker who lingers at the periphery of Broken Embraces is British director Michael Powell’s classic meditation on voyeurism, Peeping Tom. In his famed essay, “Contre Sainte-Beuve,” Proust criticized the autobiographical interpretation of art. Is the character of the abandoned son of a wealthy industrialist, who inadvertently films the scene of his father’s mistress’s infidelity and death, a stand-in for Almodovar, a voyeur at the scene of an accident?

Broken Embraces opens with another filmmaker, the blinded protagonist Harry Caine, unable to visually identify the woman he is possibly impregnating, and ends with him gaining paternity of a child he never knew was his.

Wordsworth famously wrote, “The child is father of the man.” But who is the father of the father? Are the claims of the flesh in fact too weak to take precedence over history, or, in the case of Almodovar, film history? Is the Oedipus complex irrelevant to Almodovar’s cinematic universe? Harry Caine steals the mistress of a powerful producer; he is blinded like Oedipus, and yet he goes on to live and thrive as an artist.

Art, rather than passion, is ultimately Almodovar’s lingua franca in Broken Embraces. One of the great transgressions of the movie is an act of vengeance by Harry’s longtime editor, who mutilates his art in a jealous rage. Substitute edit for castrate. The esthetic world that Almodovar creates situates its major rivalry in the act of creation. The real father of Broken Embraces is Bergman, whose Fanny and Alexander makes a cameo appearance as a reminder of the filmmaker’s patrimony.

[This was originally posted to The Screaming Pope, Francis Levy's blog of rants and reactions to contemporary politics, art and culture.]

It's a Jungle Out There.

I wrote this piece that appeared on The Rumpus about sort of confronting e-books as a publisher. I say "sort of confronting" because my "confrontation" as well as my interaction with e-books thus far has been entirely passive, and I still don't necessarily know what to think about them.

Still, I find it remarkable that with all the hoopla and the prospect of gobbling up a new gadget, the only people (I'm counting friends and family-members, not publishing industry-friends) I know that own an e-reader are my exceptionally active and travel-prone in-laws.

Generally, I don't think that e-books are a bad thing, nor do I think that they compete with print books. In the grand scheme of things, I find myself subscribing to the school of thought laid out by the new owner of the Harvard Bookstore, Jeff Mayersohn. In a piece on the Huffington Post, after discussing the print-on-demand Espresso book machine his store recently bought, he very incisively and wisely closes by saying:

"If the physical book survives, the model of centralized production and long-haul distribution is obsolete. The corporate book hawkers are doomed and they know it - unless they can convince you that the physical book is the dinosaur and not they."

Which is a much more convincing and honest reaction than any I've heard on the e-book debate. I think it also goes quite a long way toward underlining the prospects for the future of book publishing's "three-hundred pound gorilla," Amazon.

What is the future of Amazon? As the print-on-demand Espresso book machine circulates and becomes more accessible, it seems that if Amazon doesn't offer an option where shoppers can pick up their orders the same day as their order is placed then they will become obsolete. (Which itself is a silly thought, bringing us back to where we started, shopping from our neighbor's store.)

To me, it appears as though by offering e-books Amazon has begun re-branding themselves as a tech company rather than a retailer. By setting the standard cost of e-books at $9.99, they've also devalued their base product considerably.

I'd say Amazon's future is pretty bleak, and they have to know it, which is why they're placing such a bloated emphasis on e-books.

===========

I didn't set out to write all this.

My point was to say that beginning in April, we will begin making a couple of our titles available as e-books: Some Things That Meant the World to Me, by Joshua Mohr; The Drop Edge of Yonder, by Rudolph Wurlitzer; and I Smile Back, by Amy Koppelman.

Dear Nicholas Sparks: let’s have a fistfight, you douche!

Maybe I’m enjoying the meat of low hanging fruit here. But this Nicholas Sparks guy—the “auteur” who brought us such thought provoking hits as “Nights in Rodanthe”, “The Notebook”, and “Message in a Bottle” has a recent piece in USA today where he a) compares himself to Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Hemingway b) slams Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” as “pulpy" and "overwrought” c) did I mention he compares himself to Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Hemingway?

Then the twat has the gall to say this about himself: “There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do.”

I’m not making this up. He’s absolutely, fantastically this ridiculous. And if you hate yourself/ want to watch your heart rate hit mach speeds, you can read the whole insipid article here.

By the way, maybe a few of you want to give him the benefit of the doubt… maybe Sparks is joking, right? Is that what you’re hoping for? Nah, here’s what he says while holding a Hemingway novel and musing about the merits of HIS OWN WORK: “A Farewell to Arms… Good stuff. That's what I write.”

Not to sound too Dr. Seuss, but I want to fight him; I want to bite him. I’ll throw a haymaker at his nose, then kick his kidneys as he moans. I will box his ears so hard, they’ll ring for weeks with disregard. I can kick his ass all day; all in the name of Hemingway. Let’s tussle soon, you and me; before you write another thing.

Someone has to sock Sophocles Sparks in the chops, and it just so happens I’ve got bail money set aside...

[This post originally appeared at the Some Things That Meant the World to Me blog, that of Joshua Mohr.]

A Music Concert & Social to Benefit Literacy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Lauren Cerand, LCERAND[at]gmail.com or 917.533.0103

MAY 25: WRRRROCK ON: A MUSIC CONCERT & SOCIAL TO BENEFIT LITERACY
Featuring Japanther and Care Bears on Fire in Support of Girls Write Now

NEW YORK, MARCH 17 – Two Dollar Radio today announced "Wrrrock On," an evening to benefit Girls Write Now happening Tuesday, May 25th at Galapagos Art Space, located at 16 Main Street in DUMBO, Brooklyn, from 7-9PM. Admission is a suggested donation of $2-22 at the door, with 100% of those proceeds going directly to Girls Write Now. Japanther and Care Bears on Fire will perform, and Joshua Mohr will emcee the event. Wrrrrock On is made possible by the support of Chin Music Press, Coffee House Press, Exterminating Angel Press, Featherproof Books, Seven Stories Press, Small Beer Press, Tin House and Unbridled Books.

Described as a "Performance Galaxy" by Vanity Fair and "Super hard, incredibly fast and overall inspiring" by Thrasher, Japanther has always been a band apart, running the gamut from performance art to punk rock and back again. The story behind Rock ‘n’ Roll Ice Cream (Menlo Park Recordings) is an adventure tale of exploring harmonies, writing together, and a little bit of that West Coast surf vibe whilst lurking a bit towards Japanther’s salad days in Brooklyn to draw on pop hooks and simple drum parts that make skating seem easier and bikes move faster. Japanther is a party band that brings much more to the show.

Featured in The New York Times for their "furiously energetic playing" and "similar verve" to The Runaways, in Teen Vogue for "tearing it up" and – as The OC Register needlessly notes, "way cooler than most of us were at that age" – Sophie (lead vocals, guitarist), Izzy (drummer) and Jena (bass) are Care Bears On Fire. The band are regulars on the New York and festival scene (SXSW, Lollapalooza), not to mention "Late Show with David Letterman," winning over jaded hipsters of all ages with songs that capture the experience of being a kid with attitude and humor. Care Bears on Fire are punk meets garage, straight out of a Brooklyn basement: "Nanananananana, I don’t want to be like everybody else!"

Joshua Mohr is the author of the San Francisco Chronicle bestselling novel and one of O, The Oprah Magazine’s ‘10 Terrific Reads of 2009,’ Some Things That Meant the World To Me, and the forthcoming Termite Parade, both on Two Dollar Radio. He lives in San Francisco and teaches writing.

Girls Write Now (GWN), the first and only East Coast nonprofit to combine mentoring and writing instruction within the context of all-girl programming, has, since 1998, helped nearly 3,000 underserved or at-risk girls from NYC’s public high schools develop into the next generation of writers and readers. In recent years, GWN has been profiled in The New York Times and featured on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. In November, the organization received a 2009 Coming Up Taller Award from First Lady Michelle Obama and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, distinguishing Girls Write Now as one of the top 15 after-school arts and humanities programs in the nation.

Letter from the Editor

I don't really enjoy doing our gritty web-design work. I tend to let it stack up for a couple of weeks and then devote an entire afternoon to updating everything. One of the items that Eliza has been on me to add is a mention of the fact that each of the books included in our subscription packages come with a 'Letter from the Editor.' This letter could explain how we came to be introduced to the author, a history as a reader with the author's work, or just a general appreciation for the book.

One of the great distinctions for an independent publisher is the opportunity to interact directly with readers. Our idea as a press from the very beginning was to be inclusive and honest about who we were. (Someone had suggested once that we find an intern just to answer the phone and say we were busy, which is laughable to think back on now.) The intent of these letters was to include our subscribers, to allow them entry into the process of publishing.

Here is one example of the Letter from the Editor for Nog by Rudolph Wurlitzer, which we published in August 2009 (but which subscribers received when the book arrived from the printer in May '09):

"My first meeting with Rudy Wurlitzer was in a townhouse in the East Village. Two Dollar Radio was operating out of a cluttered loft in Bedford Stuyvesant, and Rudy was in town for a few days from Hudson, NY. Having no great suggestions for where we could sit down and chat about the prospect of publishing The Drop Edge of Yonder, he suggested we find a quiet room at the house where he was staying. The house turned out to belong to Philip Glass, and the entire time that we were speaking, Glass was plugging away at his piano in the room directly above where we spoke. It was surreal, and when I left I knew that something had happened that I would remember for the rest of my life.

"I loved the title Nog. And the blurbs and reviews that the book received at the time of its original publishing placed a profound level of significance on the work that would gradually be forgotten or eclipsed as time passed by all but an underground group of worshippers that rallied to the book, recommending it to friends, starting Facebook fan pages, and writing blog entries. It is an important book. As Pynchon said in his blurb, “very important in an evolutionary way,” and I’ve found Wurlitzer’s following novels, Flats and Quake (which we’ll be reissuing this fall), to be strangely prescient, especially in the wake of our modern natural catastrophes and instinctive human reactions to these.

"Wurlitzer is authentic. He is one of the few American artists that have traveled the highways and byways between literature and Hollywood frequently while remaining true to both his voice and his vision. It is our mission by reissuing his earlier novels to gain him the respect and the attention that we feel he deserves. He is, as Library Journal so aptly put it, “a major American writer.”"

The Most Downloaded Image in History

by Lawrence Shainberg

With rare exceptions of someone like WG Sebald, novelists don’t tend to think about illustration, but since Crust has always been a mock-dock in my view I decided early-on to add this dimension to the book. Fortunately, my good friend, Michael Flanagan, a painter and novelist who was once a book-designer, is also a fan of the novel, so he was enthusiastic to assist me.

Most of the illustrations I wanted -- portraits of major characters, brain scan images, historical and anthropological images, etc -- weren’t terribly difficult to develop. Anyone who knows his way around Google and PhotoShop could produce the sort of images needed to substantiate a novel which is explicitly about nosepicking and implicitly -- since this forbidden habit becomes a media sensation as well as an endless source of scientific, medical, theological and philosophical research and controversy -- about the terrifying world of information overload. One image however eluded us. George W. Bush is a close friend of the narrator who in the early stages of the book admits to being a passionate nose-picker. More important, his admission, which occurs (in one of our best illustrations) on Larry King Live, has cured him of a paralyzing depression which put him in a mental hospital when he left office in 2008. Needless to say, Bush is no ordinary picker. His public -- and much publicized -- embrace of the habit sends him on a complex paradoxical journey which has him -- publicly, of course -- embracing it, rejecting it and embracing it again, and finally, blaming it for his failures as a president. “Tell me how a man who can’t stand a moment’s discomfort in his nose is gonna deal with hurricanes or terrorists or global warming?” Finally, unable to resolve his dilemma, he leaves home and family and vanishes from public life. His disappearance produces a flood of rumor on blogs, websites and the whole spectrum of Internet news. There are reports of him working on a farm in Iraq, living with Osama Bin Laden in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, hospitalized with depression, dead by suicide, and kidnapped off his Texas ranch by “terrorists of unknown nationality.” Most of these tales, of course, are accompanied by photographs, video streams, or personal accounts which claim to verify them. The last, shows him sitting with hands tied in a straight-backed metal chair, guarded by two men or women wearing masks, one of them armed with a submachine gun, the other with a pistol, was the one I wanted to illustrate.

Michael and I tried at first to fabricate the image but eventually we realized we had to create it ourselves. My wife is a good photographer; my office has a white wall for a back-drop; Michael and I in ski-masks could do a fair approximation of terrorists; and the doorman in our building, a stocky spirited fellow named Julio who shares my opinion of Bush, was more than happy to impersonate him. All in all, it seemed like a morning’s work at most.

I called my film-director nephew, Steve Shainberg (Secretary, Fur), and asked him to put me in touch with a prop-person who could help me obtain the guns. As it happened, the woman he recommended was busy on a film, but she suggested I call a source she used -- Kaufman’s Army-Navy store, on 42nd St in New York City. The prop-man at Kaufman’s was a guy named Jim. I told him I needed to rent “some equipment for a photo shoot.”

“Like what?” he said.

“A machine gun and a pistol.”

“Not in our store,” he snapped.

If I’d been less naive about such matters, his voice alone would have warned me off, but when he asked for my email address -- “in case I think of something” -- I gave it to him. It was only later, when I told my wife about the conversation, that I began to think I’d been less than smart to be so forthcoming.

She’s not inclined to overreact but her eyes spread with disbelief. “A guy calls and wants to rent a machine gun? I’d say his next call is to the police. For all we know, our phones are tapped already! The building is surrounded! But don’t worry. You can always explain when they arrest you that this is for a couple of terrorists who want to kidnap George W. Bush.”

As it happened, however, her reaction was off the mark. When I called Jim the next day to ward him off, he apologized to me before I could him. “Sorry I couldn’t come up with somebody right away. As soon as I got off the phone, I remembered the guy who can help you.”

He gave me a number in Soho. Weapons Specialists, on Grand Street. On the phone, they were discouraging at first, explaining that real guns require police permits and a handler to go with them. With its handler, a single machine gun would set me back $1200 a day. I was about to sign off and look toward Google again for my illustration when he added, “On the other hand, we’ve got replicas. A machine gun will cost you about $150. Pistol, $50 to $75.”

Weapons Specialists is a two-floor business, its basement a huge spread containing guns and ammo belts and holsters and swords and suits of armor from any age in history and anywhere in the world. Some of the guns were made of rubber, some of metal, and many were real, with firing pins removed. The replicas were convincing enough for any sort of robbery. As a matter of fact, the salesman who helped me explained that Spike Lee had used the same guns I rented in his last film, when bank robbers actually acknowledged that the weapons they used were dummies.

Thus it was that two days after forsaking the Internet I returned from Soho with a long black case containing a machine gun and a pistol. Michael and I donned ski masks, Julio sat in a metal chair for the photograph, and later that day, his head was replaced, courtesy of Google, with George W. Bush’s. Check it out in Crust. As the narrator reports, “No YouTube image has been viewed, downloaded, or emailed more often.”

real people

As you may have surmised, while my novel is entirely fictional, it does invoke a number of “real life” celebrities from various art worlds, both highbrow and lowbrow. For a little while, I thought it would be interesting to contact some of these “real” people and give them an opportunity to deny any association with my fictional characters. I thought this might help my readers distinguish between fiction and reality.

The first person I approached was the philosopher Slavoj Žižek. I went to a talk he gave a few months ago at Cooper Union. The talk ended kind of abruptly because there was a bomb threat, but Žižek was gracious enough to stick around for a bit to sign copies of his book. I stood in line, but when I reached the front, instead of getting his autograph, I handed him a copy of my manuscript and said, “I wrote a novel and you’re a character in it.” He seemed kind of taken aback. He said, “Oh no, what, am I like that Jim Carrey character in ‘Dumb and Dumber’?”

I had inserted a brief note in the ms with my email address. I suggested that he might want to make a formal statement denying any actual association with my fictional characters. I’m afraid he didn’t write me back. I followed up with a message to his website. I thought he might want to say, “Santutxo Etxeberria is a figment of Barbara Browning’s imagination. He was never a guest at a dinner party attended by me, Analia Hounie and Gayatri Spivak. Furthermore, Cameron Diaz does seem like an interesting person. Why is this treated as a comical assertion?”

Again, he didn’t respond.

Then I thought maybe I should just pilfer some material from real interviews that were already a part of the public record. I thought maybe I could just cite them as though the celebrities were talking about my characters, but I could footnote the original sources so that any curious reader with an internet connection would quickly discover that they’d actually been talking about other things.

I ran this by a lawyer friend. Since I already mentioned that “Lacanian lawyer,” you may think I know a lot of people in the legal profession. In fact, I don’t. But I’m starting to find that lawyers can be pretty interesting people (who knew?). One of them told me I needed to worry about “rights of publicity,” which is basically exploiting somebody else’s celebrity status for your own personal gain.

I wrote one of the big shots in this legal field. I said I was thinking about trying to use a blurb from Björk that was pilfered from some random e-mail interview she’d done for the Brooklyn Rail (“i always feel i say too much...”), and maybe another from Mikhail Baryshnikov on Larry King (“Next question.”) – as though they were trying to be discreet about the identity of Vivian’s lovers. I said, “Are they likely to sue me?” He said a lawyer could really only prudently respond that anybody could sue you... He did, however, think it was an interesting idea... But very possibly actionable.

I gave it one last shot. I sent the manuscript to Laurie Anderson. She was so nice! She wrote back right away! She thought the book looked “cool”! But she declined to give me a blurb denying any association with Binh...

Binh wasn’t surprised. He said, “Laurie is a very sweet girl...”

Two Dollar Radio Shirts Make Your Nose Not Bleed at High Altitudes.

Because people are quite generally rad, we've gotten a really quality recent crop of model pictures from exotic locales.

People in Costa Rica, Peru, and on our tee page on mountains in Vermont defying nose-bleeds!!!

I love it.

Ponytail Live in Berlin

Binh was at this show. He never, however, made a music video for Ponytail. Also, anything you may have heard about a "slumber party" with the Vivian Girls is just gossip. But the story about the "playdate" with the couple he met at the UdK was true.

A Lacanian Love Story

I was recently introduced to a woman who was described to me as a “Lacanian lawyer.” I thought that was funny! She turned out to be charming and very interesting. Her area of expertise is art law. She writes about “moral rights,” a branch of the law which basically says that if you are an artist and I buy a painting you made, I’m not allowed to draw a moustache on it, even though I “own” it. I’m not supposed to compromise your artistic vision.

I found this appalling! The Lacanian lawyer was also concerned. We bonded over our mutual powerful reaction to those doodles that the Chapman brothers did all over that set of Goya etchings.

I mention this because Binh and I also discussed the Chapman brothers. He has some pretty unpredictable views on the topic of intellectual property. I am basically a communist, so I have my doubts about property in general, but Binh is a little more concerned about controlling his product. This may just be because I am something of a charlatan, while he’s what you might call an artist of genius.

Goya, needless to say, was an artist of genius. Still, or maybe because of this, I find this doodle by the Chapman brothers profoundly moving.

By the way, when I’m asked to describe my novel in a phrase, I sometimes say it’s a “Lacanian love story.” I think this is about as funny as a “Lacanian lawyer.”

wurm

Here’s a short video by Binh. He filmed it on his cell phone. He says he particularly likes the sound, although he has no recollection of the worm making this much noise: