Saturday Links
On taste, writing on paper, John McGahern’s prose, revisiting Roger Scruton’s “The Disappeared,” and more.
Good morning! Salmagundi hosted a symposium on taste in 2023. It has now been published:
How to account for radical disparities of response, especially when they involve people who might otherwise be much like yourself? Are sharp disparities of response, to a political event, or a film, or incendiary statement, the sign of deep and essential differences of outlook and ideology, not merely of disposition or sensibility? . . . Ought we to hope that everyone will respond in more or less similar ways to extreme representations or occasions of violence or crudity or malignity? The term of choice for many of us when we confront such questions, obviously, is taste, a word often used to insure that disparities of response will be blandly consigned to the domain of the trivial, the merely personal, with the understanding that not much can be done to close the gap between us. We must tolerate, after all, what are merely differences in taste, yes? And yet taste will, some of the time, take on a darker significance, even where small or trivial matters are in play.
It is a long discussion, and it somewhat oddly gets to the topic of transgenderism. I have some thoughts, which I’ll share next week, but it’s Saturday, so let’s get to some (slightly) lighter fare.
Amit Majmudar reviews Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Writing on Paper:
When Charles Darwin went on his excursions from the Beagle, he packed light, carrying only two books. One was a copy of Paradise Lost, a fitting companion as he ventured onto island Edens of the Southern Hemisphere—doubly fitting, since his later speculations led him to describe the branching pattern of evolution as a “tree of life,” though he briefly entertained the metaphor of coral. The other book he carried was a notebook, one specially designed to facilitate all-weather jottings in the field—a “velvet notebook,” its pages coated in a chemical that, when written on with its special pencil, created a waterproof line.
Roland Allen’s fascinating The Notebook: A History of Writing on Paper is full of these kinds of multidisciplinary insights, connecting advances in European knowledge and creativity to the humble technology of bound and portable paper bundles. I myself have always taken notebooks for granted, and from my own writing life, they are totally absent—the rare ideas or phrases I don’t keep in my head, I simply text to myself. Yet notebooks served as the laptops of their day, interface and hard drive in one, and their centuries-long era may not be over yet, since hundreds of thousands of notebooks are still sold every year. Regardless of its future in the digital age, the notebook’s place in history, thanks to Allen’s wide-ranging and well-researched book, is secure.
In The American Scholar, Janna Malamud Smith revisits Charles W. Eliot’s John Gilley of Baker’s Island—a misleading “paean to the honest virtues of Maine fishermen”:
Eliot carefully presents his portrait of the humble fishing family. William and Hannah farmed the land and raised their children, among them Elisha and Joseph. Hannah taught them to read and write. The girls helped their mother by tending poultry, churning butter, and spinning wool. The boys worked with their father clearing and planting land, raking hay, farming potatoes and livestock, and fishing. Hannah spun clothing from wool and made coarse linen from flax. The children went barefoot all summer, but one of the sons sewed shoes for winter. When they needed cash, they sold bird feathers, fish oil, butter, smoked herring, and eggs to various markets as far away as New York City. My research in local archives revealed similar stories. It is the way Eliot deploys them that seems curated. He allows that the Gilleys’ labors were “severe” but is quick to reassure us that they possessed the virtues of “health, strength and fortitude.” Indeed, Eliot portrays an almost Edenic existence on Baker’s.
The problem is that Elisha and Joseph were criminals:
In the 1840s, on dark, foggy evenings on Baker’s . . . brothers Elisha and Joseph Gilley would leave their houses and walk to the water’s edge. There they would set about the work of faking shipwrecks on the island’s rocky ledge.
The historical record offers scant detail, but somehow, likely using torches or lanterns to signal, the brothers would guide vessels toward the shore until they foundered and came to grief. Once the crews—complicitous in the scheme—were rescued, the men would strip the wrecks of cargo, spars, masts, sailcloth, rope, and copper fittings. Weeks or months later, they would load their goods onto a “coaster” and sail to Boston. The Gilley family regularly delivered smoked fish to Boston markets and likely knew just where to sell all they had salvaged. In turn, the owners would file insurance claims stating that their boats had fallen victim to fog, rocks, or roiling seas. Many vessels had several co-owners. Making money could be challenging. When times were tough—a rotting hull, no fish, a bad market—false insurance claims offered hard-to-come-by cash.
In Harper’s, Sam Sacks writes about the beauty and emptiness of John McGahern’s prose:
The idea of empty time—of minutes and hours ticking by unfulfilled—haunts McGahern’s characters, lending an atmosphere of eerie philosophical dread to the realistic depictions. It is in these tableaux of monotonous waiting that Beckett’s influence is most recognizable. (“You want to go on and you can’t” is, of course, a stark reversal of “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”) In The Pornographer, Beckett’s lanky shadow hovers over the narrator’s invocation of nothingness in an inner monologue that adopts the stressed cadences of liturgy:
“What had I learned from that clandestine night? The nothing that we always learn when we sink to learn something of ourselves or life from a poor other—our own shameful shallowness. We can no more learn from another than we can do their death for them or have them do ours. We have to go inland, in the solitude that is both pain and joy, and there make our own truth, and even if that proves nothing too, we have still that hard joy of having gone the hard and only way there is to go, we have not backed away or staggered to one side, but gone on and on and on even when there was nothing, knowing there was nothing on any other way.”
The abiding paradox of Beckett’s writing is that nothing is itself something, and can beguile the mind if one is able to accept it. Certainly it provided him substantial material. “To know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker,” he writes in Molloy. The narrator’s like-minded discovery in The Pornographer is that rejection alone is inadequate as metaphysics. Some manner of living must be embraced to transform the quality of time’s passage. For the narrator, this is writing itself—ironic because he devotes himself to producing mindless raunch. But at no other moment does he feel as free and unburdened as when he is writing, except perhaps during the release of sex. These are activities during which time ceases to be oppressive. “Seldom is it given, but when it is it is the greatest consolation of the spinning, time passing—sizable portions of time—without being noticed.”
David Samuels visits the Sphere:
A dark sun waits at the desert’s edge. The Sphere’s pictures on its outer skin are visible from miles away, that’s how clear and perfect they are, how good the resolution is. As you approach, it’s like sitting before a giant digital snow-globe, 16,000 pixels by 16,000 pixels, which is far higher resolution than your home TV set, with your favorite band strumming their instruments at many hundreds of times human size while flying through space. A monstrous jukebox.
Do I hear $7,500 for a front-row ticket to see the Eagles, those who are still alive, and remain in the band — being the greatest home-grown fairgrounds attraction of the 1970s? You can charge it to your credit card, or withdraw it from the nearest ATM. Either way, your money will never leave this place. So why not be amazed? The Sphere is powered by one-hundred-and-fifty Nvidia RTX A6000 GPUs, each of which has over 10,752 cores, consuming 28 megawatts of power, allowing you to personally experience the bright desert daylight of 268,435,456 pixels that cover both the inner and the outer surface area of a sphere, whose radius is 258 feet. It’s a man-made-sun, lit up from the inside and outside both, the cynosure of all eyes. Once seen, you will never be able to unsee it.
James Baldwin in Istanbul: “‘James loved to speak in exaggerated terms, but it is in a way true that Turkey saved his life,’ David Leeming told me over the phone. Leeming was Baldwin’s long-term assistant and is the author of 1994’s James Baldwin: A Biography. The two also met at a party in Istanbul, in 1962, when Baldwin was finalizing his draft for Another Country, the other seminal work that he produced during his years in the city. ‘There was too much expectation of him in the U.S., and even in his second home, Paris, where he was also well known by the early sixties,’ Leeming added. ‘He was isolated and could lead a normal routine in Istanbul without understanding Turkish or being stopped on the streets.’”
Matthew Gabriele reviews a new history of the Vikings: “Barraclough’s focus is on objects that have survived (in many cases) for more than a millennium and what these often small artifacts can tell scholars about a society and culture. And in this, the book largely succeeds . . . the book’s chapters . . . move inductively from some archaeological site or individual material remains to a broader conclusion that illuminates a larger, messier world. We learn of board games and sea travel, of farming techniques and animal husbandry, and the richness of Norse society that existed over several centuries. Combs — so many combs! — testify to the importance of grooming and bodily care in this culture, while medallions, figurines and wooden carvings that survive (sometimes through the accidents of a cold, marshy climate) speak of religion as a lived experience . . . Viking society was also a culture of violence and subjugation, and the book covers those hard realities reasonably well.”
Poem: Aaron Poochigian, “Bash Bish Falls”
Against David Lynch: “A native of Missoula, Montana, whose youth included stints in Idaho, North Carolina, and Virginia, Lynch was deeply familiar with the rhythms, inhabitants, and colloquialisms found in middle America, but in several of his best-known films and TV shows, including Blue Velvet, the Twin Peaks series, and its various offshoots, he used his cultural context as mere fodder for gruesome violence, graphic sexuality, and repellant sarcasm. Again and again, he presented the superficial order and courtesies of small-town America as a cover for the sordid and profane. That Lynch nonetheless persisted in presenting himself, in interviews and appearances, as a darn-tootin’ everyman a la mode du Tim Walz reveals either his cynicism—his persona was part of the joke—or his complete lack of self-awareness.”
What should we make of “romantsy”? “The combination of romance and fantasy isn’t new, of course. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, published in 2005, was a breakout success that mainstream publishing has strived in vain to replicate ever since. But it wasn’t until TikTok that readers got together and demonstrated through their choices and enthusiasms just where the sweet spot lay.”
Dominic Green wonders what’s wrong with Wikipedia:
For a long time, I was an Olympic fencer. Then, I became a Michelin-star chef. No one asked me how I managed to julienne my vegetables while wearing an epée glove or if, given my busy schedule, I ever picked up the wrong weapon and impaled my opponent with a carrot. I was a swordsman by day and a chef by night, but the small hours were still free, so it seemed reasonable that when I wasn’t fencing or frying, I was managing a jazz club.
All of these activities were imputed to me by the Wikipedia page that I did not set up. My imputees operated under pseudonyms, so I have no idea who they were. Their informational method was, in the spirit of the age, completist and moronic. They trawled the digital universe with the assumption that I was the only person in the world to be called Dominic Green, apart from the science fiction writer of that name, which is actually my name. I’d take it back if he wasn’t also a part-time kung fu instructor.
Revisiting Roger Scruton’s The Disappeared: “Set in the fictional Yorkshire city of Whinmoore, and based to a large extent on the damning revelations contained in the official Jay Report about more than 1,400 victims of sexual child abuse in the city of Rotherham alone (with no doubt thousands of others elsewhere), The Disappeared exposes how the ‘thought police’ had indeed found a home in police and social work departments.”
Paul Krugman tells the Columbia Journalism Review that he left The New York Times because they asked him to write less frequently:
Kingsbury, her deputy, Patrick Healy, and publisher A.G. Sulzberger all told CJR that they wished that Krugman had stayed at the paper . . . Krugman agreed that he could have stayed at the paper. But in an interview, he said the circumstances of his job changed so sharply in 2024 that he decided he had to quit. He had been writing two columns and a newsletter every week, until September, when, Krugman said, Healy told him the newsletter was being killed. “That was my Network moment,” Krugman said. “‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore’”—a quote from the Howard Beale character in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film.
It is classic Krugman to treat an attempt at giving a declining columnist with the habit of repeating himself a gracious exit as some great injustice.
Forthcoming: Aaron Gwyn, The Cannibal Owl: A Novella (Belle Point, January 28): “Drifting through the broken plains of 1820s Texas, Aaron Gwyn's latest venture into the American frontier tells a riveting coming-of-age story. Inspired by the real-life figure Levi English, a settler who ran away to live with the Comanche (Nermernuh) People as a young boy, The Cannibal Owl follows his journey of not quite belonging within a community that is nevertheless kinder to him than his own family. When Levi is eventually forced to confront growing tensions among the tribal leaders, he must make difficult choices about loyalty and self-preservation amidst deep grief and unrelenting violence.”
The Gwyn book you mention in “forthcoming” is quite worth reading.