Double Feature: Francine Prose's Blue Angel; 100 Manly Books

Feature #1:

By all appearances, Theodore "Ted" Swenson is living the sweet life. He's a tenured professor at Euston, a bucolic New England college; he's published a well-received novel; and his beautiful wife is smart, warm, and humorous. Ted's even managed to craftily pare down his teaching schedule and office hours to a bare minimum of acceptability. What more could a man wish for?

Of course, small irritations have a way of slowly rubbing the good life raw. Swenson's creative writing students are painfully untalented. How, for instance, can Swenson have any reasonable chance of improving Danny Liebman's tortured short story in which a teenager, drunk and spurned by his girlfriend, indulges in sexual congress with a raw chicken by the light of the family fridge? In addition, Swenson's new novel, "The Black and the Black," seems to be permanently consigned to creative purgatory, and the campus administration's recent obsession with political correctness has been whipped into a frenzy by the Faculty-Student Women's Alliance, a group headed by Swenson's arch enemy, Lauren Healy, who is perpetually offended by Swenson's crime of owning a penis.

When Swenson finally stumbles upon a student with true talent, he can't believe his good fortune. Angela Argo is writing a novel, and it's good -- really good. Angela (an avid fan of Stendahl, of course) is effusive in her praise of Swenson's first novel, and a series of office visits ensue. Thank heaven she's so physically unappealing. Swenson's avoided any scintilla of scandal for twenty years, and this skinny, scab-kneed waif with dirty hair, nose rings, and multiple lip piercings is about as removed from a freshman Lolita as anyone could imagine.

Well, life is full of surprises. The fatuous rationalizations that Swenson manufactures with each escalation of his inappropriate behavior, the predictable reaction of Swenson's "friends" and foes, and the haplessness of the human condition are all exposed with humor and pathos by Ms. Prose. I highly recommend this book.

Feature #2:

Jessica Crispin's recent post in www.bookslut.com notes that The Art of Manliness has compiled a list of 100 books that will turn you into a man. I present it here for your consideration, but beware -- it will put hair on your chest:

http://artofmanliness.com/2008/05/14/100-must-read-books-the-essential-mans-library/

Thoughts on "The Age of American Unreason"

I recently finished reading Susan Jacoby's "The Age of American Unreason." Her book is superb from start to finish, but one of her talking points struck me as particularly relevant in view of recent events.

In her chapter titled "Public Life: Defining Dumbness Downward," Jacoby laments the current rise of anti-intellectualism in America. She begins by describing a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy after he learned that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. In the speech, Kennedy quoted a line from Aeschylus's Agamemnon, in which the interrelationship of pain and wisdom is examined. Kennedy concluded with the hope that Americans would dedicate themselves "to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world." It is important to note that Kennedy's speech was given in Indianapolis, where he had originally intended to give a campaign speech to a predominantly black crowd.

One can only imagine what kind of a reception Hillary or Obama would have received in West Virginia this week if they had quoted any classic work of literature, much less Aeschylus. I can hear the hoots and hollers reverberating from Wheeling to the Big Sandy River Basin. The media would have erupted in an orgy of class-baiting; accusations of "elitism" would have flown through the air like sizzlin' pork rinds.

This is only to be expected in a campaign season in which candidates are scrambling all over themselves to hide any evidence of (gasp! the horror!) higher learning. We have now reached the point at which politicians are more willing to reveal prior drug use than the fact that they took Professor Hillyard's course in comparative literature during their freshman year of college. It is discouraging to watch the future leaders of our country compete with each other in the fine arts of beer swilling, bowling, and gun totin'. Can hog-calling and clogging be far behind? Jacoby points out that John F. Kennedy was notoriously opposed to donning cowboy hats, baseball caps, or any other headgear designed to show that he was just folks. Contrast that with John Kerry, an Ivy-Leaguer who felt compelled to borrow camouflage clothes and a blunderbuss to engage in a faux goose hunt. It's embarrassing.

I don't know about you, but I hope that whoever ends up running this country has more smarts than I do. I hope he or she has traveled to more places and spent more time learning about how other people in the world view us. I hope that he or she has had the advantage of conversing with and learning from the very best minds on matters of the economy, international relations, and social justice. The last eight years have taught us that the "brewski test" isn't just silly -- it's dangerous.

Bibliosomnia

A few days ago I decided to throw caution to the wind and drink a fully-caffeinated vente after 6 p.m. The immediate effect was electrifying in the best sense of the word. The latent effect six hours later was less than pleasant. As I tossed, turned, and periodically checked my bedside clock in a masochistic attempt to confirm the full extent of my self-induced misery, I began to think (always a mistake in the middle of the night) about the many books I have shelved over the years, and gradually the titles of those books began to coalesce into lists and categories. Before I knew it, I was engaged in compulsive list-making, one of the most diabolical agents of insomnia ever devised.

1:20 a.m.: Some book titles can put you off from the get-go, depending on your personal taste and inclinations of the moment. Throughout my teenage years, I avoided books with sobering titles like "The Way of All Flesh," "Of Human Bondage," "The Sound and the Fury," "Of Time and the River," etc. To my young mind, these titles implied a painfully premature inquiry into "the big questions" and radiated a sort of holy heavy-handedness that would suck me down into a state of terminal gravitas. (True confession: I haven't read any of those books in their entirety to this day, although I have since read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" with great pleasure).

1:40 a.m. Other books have tempted me with titles that were so undecipherable that I was compelled to pick the books up and poke around for clues. "The Quincunx" had me totally stymied, as did "Cryptonomicon." While on the topic, is "Tristram Shandy" the name of (a) a village in County Cork (b) a Gaelic wedding jig, (c) a character in "The Rake's Progress," (d) an Irish aperitif, or (e) none of the above. Good luck, unless you've read the book.

2:00 a.m. Some books tempt you to read them by sporting gorgeous titles that roll off the tongue like honey: "The Sheltering Sky," "The Wind in the Willows," "The Wide Sargasso Sea," "Finnegan's Wake," -- the list goes on and on. Other books have overly precious titles that make you dislike the (presumptively precious) author before you have even met him/her: "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten," etc. -- You get the drift. (Note -- some of these books can be quite good.)

2:30 There seems to be a trend toward one-word titles, particularly for nonfiction books: "Boom!," "Blink," and "Stiff" come to mind. Mary Roach, the author of the last-mentioned book, appears to have appropriated this particular shtick. She has already written "Stiff" (a nonfiction book about human cadavers), "Spook" (a nonfiction book about the afterlife), and most recently,"Bonk," a book that explores "the curious coupling of science and sex" (presumably this book will be more lively than her previous two volumes, heh).

3:00 a.m. Some books bear a title that contains an eccentric name: "The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit," "The Wapshot Chronicles," "The Puttermesser Papers, "Tristram Shandy" (our friend from 1:40 a.m. above), and so on. (It bears mentioning here that Tristram Shandy engages in a romantic entanglement with the Widow Wadman -- it just gets better and better.)

3:20 a.m. Finally, there are books with names that are so intriguing that you can't help but fantasize about having lunch with the author; "I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots," "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," and my favorite title of all time, "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept," fit this category.

3:45 a.m I have to get some sleep. Sleep . . . sleep . . .sleep?? "The Big Sleep," "Some Call It Sleep," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (Don't, do not, think of this post just before you doze off tonight.)