As you’ve probably noticed, THE HORIZON has gone on hiatus. The arts and culture bloggers you enjoy are still writing for us, but now they can be read at CONTENTIONS.

I don’t often make the time to listen to The New Yorker’s fiction podcast, but this month’s is a treat: T. C. Boyle reading and discussing Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain,” which first appeared in the magazine in 1995 and was included in Wolff’s 1996 collection The Night in Question. It’s also reprinted in Wolff’s forthcoming collection Our Story Begins, and was even made into a short film. (I can’t bring myself to watch it, though; I like the story too much.) In other words, it’s a very popular story, and I don’t think Boyle exaggerates in saying that it is, “at its length, perfect.” It’s six pages long.

“Bullet in the Brain” goes like this: A deeply cynical and vicious book critic named Anders walks into a bank. The bank gets held up. Anders cannot help laughing at the robbers’ clichéd lingo, at what he calls a “great script . . . the stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes.” Fans of the crime genre will think of Sam Spade’s remark in The Maltese Falcon: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” But Anders’s words to that effect don’t intimidate. They only earn him the titular bullet.

That isn’t a spoiler. The real story is what happened after “the bullet smashed Anders’s skull and plowed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down into the thalamus.” Wolff’s autopsy deadpan gives way to a miraculously condensed account of the life that doesn’t and the moment that does flash before Anders’s eyes. We see, in effect, what made Anders who he is—and the memory of who he used to be bubbling up in the final seconds of his life.

Boyle notes how like Flannery O’Connor’s writing this story is, in that it takes an essentially comical or cartoonish situation and transforms it into something “poignant.” Indeed, O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” has much in common with “Bullet in the Brain,” right down to the bullets and where they wind up. But I think Wolff’s story should be read alongside Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. It’s every bit as merciless in laying bare the accretions and losses of a lifetime, and what they might mean to us as life comes to an end. Ilyich’s death is as slow and agonizing as Anders’s is not. Compare these very different approaches, and I think you’ll agree that these very different approaches achieve similar effects. And “poignant” doesn’t come close to describing them.

• One of the smartest decisions the Library of America ever made was to include the complete text of Bill Mauldin’s Up Front in Reporting World War II, its two-volume anthology of World War II journalism. Up Front is the best collection of editorial cartoons ever published by an American, though that flat phrase cannot begin to suggest the true nature of the book’s excellence, much less its formal uniqueness. Not only are the cartoons themselves devastating in the deadpan eloquence with which they sum up the combat soldier’s now-grubby, now-terrifying life (“I’m beginnin’ to feel like a fugitive from th’ law of averages”), but the combination of Mauldin’s brilliantly evocative drawings and plain-spoken accompanying text adds up to something far greater than the sum of its considerable parts. He and Ernie Pyle were without doubt the best newspaper journalists to cover the war, and it is all the more impressive to learn that Mauldin was a smooth-faced boy in his early twenties when he drew the cartoons that went into Up Front—and all the more dismaying to discover that he never did anything remotely as good for the rest of his life.

Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front (W.W. Norton, 352 pp., $27.95), Todd DePastino’s too-admiring but nonetheless illuminating biography of the cartoonist, is interesting for the first two-thirds of its length, in which DePastino describes Mauldin’s troubled youth and the demanding circumstances under which he produced the cartoons that went into Up Front. Much of this story has already been told in Mauldin’s autobiographical writings, but DePastino goes over the same ground with more detachment and detail. It is especially interesting to see reproductions of Mauldin’s early work, which is conventional and devoid of obvious promise—it could have been drawn by any provincial cartoonist—and to watch his familiar style start taking shape as soon as he was shipped out to Europe in 1943. All at once (it is almost as sudden as that) he breaks free from the conventions of early-40’s cartooning and turns into an artist, one whose ability to embody the feel of modern war in individual, lightning-like flashes of candor and grim wit brings him on occasion within spitting distance of Daumier.

Then the war ended, and Mauldin, by now famous, returned stateside and started floundering. He would not be the first prodigy who later proved incapable of producing work comparable in quality to that with which he made his name, though DePastino fails to see what went wrong. The problem was that Mauldin, who had no feel whatsoever for politics, tried to fit his genius into the wrong mold when he attempted to retrofit himself as a political cartoonist. His newly acquired liberal views, which ran to the reflexive, were too obvious to serve as the basis of striking comment on the issues of the day, and the only postwar cartoon of his that continues to be remembered, the captionless caricature of the Lincoln of the Lincoln Monument holding his head in his hands after hearing of the Kennedy assassination, is both crude and mawkish.
Mauldin was largely forgotten by the time he died in 2003, though the publication in 1995 of Reporting World War II (an event of which DePastino inexplicably makes no mention whatsoever) was to introduce his and Pyle’s work to a small but significant number of readers born too young to know how well those two men captured the American experience in World War II. Owners of that invaluable collection will want to read Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front and see for themselves how the horrors of war transformed a confused ne’er-do-well into—briefly—a great journalist.

I am continually fascinated by the blogosphere—its odd blend of willful insularity and often-startling reach; its dominant personalities, at who’ve succeeded not so much at being larger than life, but at simply recreating parallel versions of themselves online, seemingly able to document every waking thought in real time; at the alliances and infighting that dominate, especially in political commentary; at the way it allows us to see the evolution of language, the spread of ideas, jargon, and stylistic modes, at a an amazingly rapid pace. In just the last few years, blogs have generated reams of material ripe for critical evaluation.

So I was rather disappointed by Sarah Boxer’s essay on blogs in The New York Review of Books, which seems written for people who have never—or only rarely—encountered blogs. The essay provides a cursory summary of how blogs work, notes a few of their literary tics, and suggests that they are popular because of the freedom they provide. It’s sort of “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog” in 5,000 words. It’s a primer on blogging, but it suggests very little about the medium that isn’t patently obvious to a regular consumer. All this might have been fine in 2004, but in this case, it comes off as a marginally less awe-struck version of what Ross Douthat has called the “critic-as-fanboy style of criticism,” which he says usually come in the form of “extremely long critical essays that describe their subject, often in painstaking and florid detail, without bothering to interpret it.” I’m glad to see that writers are taking the internet seriously as a medium that deserves thoughtful examination, but if Boxer’s essay offers indication, the critical community has yet to figure out what to make of it.

Donald Barthelme is among those writers, like Kurt Vonnegut and (please, no laughter) Richard Brautigan, whom I found funny—sometimes brilliantly so—before coming to resent them as one-trick ponies, responsible, albeit indirectly, for much of the dross which passes for humor in today’s literature. Years ago, when McSweeney’s appeared on my radar in website form, I found it funny for a while before getting the sinking feeling that many of its contributors were just “doing” Barthelme, piggybacking on a beloved formula. The consistent deadpan, the jarring concatenation of allusions and non sequiturs, the compulsive goofiness: It was déjà vu. It was depressing.

James Wolcott’s brilliant essay on Barthelme articulates perfectly the pleasures and limitations of his fiction. Having read it, I’m prepared to admit that I’ve been too hard on Don B. and his acolytes (not that they care one way or the other). How could they have resisted the influence of what they so thoroughly enjoyed in Barthelme’s work? To hear Wolcott tell it, nobody could escape that pull:

Over the years, Barthelme’s antic break with the traditional tactful manner of the classic New Yorker story, where every stick of furniture and motivation was neatly, firmly in place, would expand into an entire wing of the magazine’s house style. His mastery of incongruity and curveball allusions helped liberate the whiz brains in the office and scramble the genetic code of the magazine’s humor and fiction irregulars: By the ’70s, the set-piece fictions and “casuals” of Ian Frazier, Veronica Geng, Mark Singer, Marshall Brickman, and George W. S. Trow abounded with absurdist dialogues, box scores, chess notations, chicken-scratch scribblings, send-ups of familiar minigenres (liner notes, movie blurbs, capsule reviews, wedding notices), multiple-choice quizzes, and mash-up satires . . . . They ran riot while Ann Beattie stood slightly off to the side, strumming her hair.

Today, I would hazard (I’ve always wanted to hazard), the track marks of Barthelme’s suave, subversive cunning are to be found less in postmod fiction—although David Foster Wallace’s dense foliage of footnotes suggests a Barthelmean undergrowth and George Saunders’s arcade surrealism has a runaway-nephew quality—than in the conscientiously oddball, studiedly offhand, hiply recherché, mock-anachronistic formalism of McSweeney’s, The Believer, The Crier, and related organs of articulate mumblecore.

I would say to those heirs apparent that my disdain, for what it’s worth, is a classic case of “I’m not mad at you—I’m just disappointed.” They haven’t done the difficult job of dynamiting their idols, our idols, and building something new and superior with the rubble. A few days ago, after reading a string of disappointing “comic novels,” I asked my friends to name the funniest books they’d ever read. The list is growing pretty long—I hope to share it one of these days—but not a single person named a Barthelme collection. Perhaps when the market is flooded with knockoffs, even the Louis Vuitton can start to look a bit phony.

• Milt Hinton, who died eight years ago at the age of 90, was the most versatile jazz bassist who ever lived. He played with—just for starters—Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Benny Carter, Bing Crosby, Paul Desmond, Aretha Franklin, Erroll Garner, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Jackie and Roy, Michel Legrand, Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery, John Pizzarelli, Pee Wee Russell, Barbra Streisand, Jack Teagarden, Joe Venuti, Dinah Washington, Ethel Waters and Teddy Wilson. (It might be easier to list the famous musicians with whom he didn’t play.) He was also a serious amateur photographer who started bringing a camera to his gigs in 1935, and in 1988 he published a folio of his pictures called Bass Lines whose accompanying text amounted to a concise autobiography. The resulting volume was one of the finest illustrated books about jazz ever published, for Hinton, in addition to being a vivid writer, had a sharp eye and a knack for capturing his colleagues in unpremeditated poses.

Now Bass Lines has been reissued in an expanded edition called Playing the Changes: Milt Hinton’s Life in Stories and Photographs (Vanderbilt University Press, 364 pp., $75) that fills in the blanks in Hinton’s story and brings the narrative down to 1999, just prior to his death. If you love jazz but don’t own Bass Line, it’s an absolute must, and you’ll probably want to buy it even if you already have a copy of the earlier volume, since the new material in this edition is similarly interesting.

Though Hinton’s photographs are always striking, the real significance of Playing the Changes lies in its text. Time and again he tells us stories about the great jazz musicians he knew that illuminate their lives with the immediacy of a candid snapshot. A good example is this priceless glimpse of Louis Armstrong’s offstage life on the road:

Wherever he traveled, he took three tape recorders which were hooked together and stacked up on shelves in a special trunk he’d had made. One of his two valets would load all three machines and, as soon as Pops got into bed, the first one would be turned on. The music was always the same—his own or Guy Lombardo’s—and usually within a couple of minutes, he was snoring. The valets would take turns staying up and watching the machines. When a tape finished, they’d quickly switch on the next recorder, then reload the empty. They knew that if the music stopped, even if only for a few seconds, Louis would wake up.

This anecdote is accompanied by a photograph of Armstrong standing next to his triple-barreled music machine, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a plaid shirt and smiling proudly. It is one of hundreds of pictures so revealing that I can’t even begin to list my favorites, though I do have a special liking for one which was taken at the birthday party that Richard Nixon threw for Duke Ellington at the White House in 1969. It shows Duke Ellington and Willie “The Lion” Smith seated together at a grand piano, playing a duet for a cluster of dazzled onlookers and looking very pleased with themselves. I also like the 1940 photo of two weary musicians from Cab Calloway’s band standing under a sign in front of a North Carolina lunch counter that says HAMBURGERS HOT DOGS LUNCHES FOR COLORED ONLY. Such fragments of life as it is lived are the stuff of which history is made, and Milt Hinton preserved more of them for us to ponder than any other jazz musician of his generation. Thanks to Playing the Changes, he will be remembered for that achievement at least as well as for his ever-tasteful, immaculately swinging bass playing.

Few terms make the professional book reviewer recoil like the term “first novel.” Am I to be subjected yet again to carefully measured, climate-controlled, Iowa Writers Workshopped prose in which not a word is wasted, everything is either vaguely sadness-washed or delicately precious, we build to a quietly devastating moment of clarity, and I am extravagantly bored?

A new first novel out of Australia being published by the fledgling imprint of Spiegel & Grau, though, made my soul tingle. It’s A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz, a busting bronco ride of philosophical jokes, outrageous crime sprees, unlikely schemes, and comic set pieces. At 530 pages, it’s a wrist-buster, but also a furiously entertaining adventure.

The plot is very much beside the point, but the story begins in prison, where Jasper Dean is being held as a riot percolates. Teasingly, Jasper begins to sketch out why he’s there (his cynical outcast father, Martin Dean, has disappeared, possibly because Jasper killed him) and then backs into a long, long backstory of who made Martin: his criminal mastermind brother, Jasper’s uncle Terry Dean. Terry became a national legend because of his viciously idealistic campaign to clean up sports by assassinating anyone caught cheating–everyone from steroid freaks to horse-race fixers. Martin chose an opposite path, becoming a national pariah by trying to help everyone in a series of starry-eyed schemes that backfire and sow chaos. At one point Martin gets an observatory built on a hill outside of town, uplifting everyone for a while, but its powerful telescope winds up disused and pointing back down into town, starting a fire that burns it down (and kills Terry).

The point to Toltz’s sweeping, madcap, continent-hopping tale of the human need for love, immortality and dirty jokes is his hilarious side riffing on, for instance, a master criminal’s definitive how-to book on crime (containing such chapters as “Motiveless Crimes–Why?’ and “Crime and Fashion: Balaclavas Are Always In”), a nutty love affair in Paris (”She had a lot of hair. It went down her back. It went into my mind. It covered her shoulders & my thoughts”), the downside of child-rearing (”To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility”) and vindictive females. You know you’re in trouble when you not only catch your girlfriend crying, but holding a jar under her face as she does so and confessing, in a reference to the guy she dated before you, “I’m collecting my tears because I’m going to make Brian drink them.”

• “A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, were they not?” Max Beerbohm once observed. No more so than the Wagners, a family whose head was the most fascinating and least likable great composer in the history of classical music. Even those who find Richard Wagner’s operas exasperating beyond endurance—a group that is legion and whose members include, more often than not, myself—are not infrequently willing to read just about anything about the man himself, provided that it’s sufficiently well-written and dislinclined to fawn over its subject. Jonathan Carr’s The Wagner Clan: The Saga of Germany’s Most Illustrious and Infamous Family (Atlantic Monthly, 409 pp., $27.50) hits the bull’s-eye on both counts.

A British journalist whose strangely sorted resume includes lives of Helmut Schmidt and Gustav Mahler, Carr clearly knows a fair amount about music, but The Wagner Clan is not primarily about the works of the composer of Die Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde, nor is it solely about his wildly tempestuous life. Carr’s main interest, rather, is in Wagner’s family and what they wrought, with and without him. Cosima, the mother of Wagner’s children, was the daughter of Franz Liszt and the wife of Hans von Bülow, the great German pianist and conductor, until Wagner stole her from Bülow (who had previously been one of his adoring acolytes). After Wagner’s death she ran the family business, the Bayreuth Festival, with an iron hand undisguised by the slightest trace of velvet. Siegfried, Richard’s youngest child, was a second-rate composer, a highly accomplished conductor, and a secret homosexual who struggled throughout his life to come to terms with the burden of his family heritage. Winifred, Siegfried’s wife, developed a lifelong crush on Adolf Hitler and delivered the festival into the hands of the Nazis after her husband’s death. Wieland and Wolfgang, their sons, dragged Bayreuth into the 20th century and made it a postwar center of up-to-date thinking on operatic production style. To this day members of the Wagner family continue to run the summer festival, which has long been one of Europe’s hottest tickets.

All this adds up to an immensely interesting tale that Carr tells with great skill, and anyone who wants to know what became of the Wagners will find it both informative and entertaining. As for those whose main interest is in Der Meister himself, The Wagner Clan offers readers unfamiliar with the vast Wagner literature an exceptionally accessible short introduction to the complicated subject of his life and personality. What I like best about Carr’s book is that it is even-handed but not bland: he takes a distinctly jaundiced view of Wagner the man without ever failing to acknowledge the genius of Wagner the artist, and he seems to have no axes of any kind to grind.

I was especially impressed by the section of The Wagner Clan in which Carr discusses Hitler’s consuming interest in Wagner, a famously difficult subject that the author plays straight down the center:

If Wagner’s works really were “the exact spiritual forerunner” of Nazism, surely the Führer of all people would have drummed that point home ad infinitum. But one looks to him in vain not only for fascist interpretation of the music dramas but, stranger still, for direct references to the [anti-Semitic] theoretical writings. There is, indeed, surprisingly little evidence that Hitler read Wagner’s prose works…Grotesque though it may seem, Wagner’s life and works were almost certainly mirrors in which the Führer thought he saw himself reflected—at least in broad and, to him, imposing outline.

I couldn’t have put it better.

Despite the consensus view that P.T. Anderson’s latest film is a searing, visionary work, numerous critics have complained about the final scene of There Will Be Blood. The New Yorker’s David Denby calls it “a mistake.” Ross Douthat writes in the most recent National Review that the film’s weakest part is its end. And Chris Orr, writing for The New Republic, argues that it “runs aground in its final act and, especially, its final scene.” But although the final scene is jarring, I think it’s a perfect close for both the director and the film’s central character. (As you might expect, spoilers lie ahead.)

A quick recap: After two and a half hours of quiet, tightly-controlled, poetic naturalism, in which Daniel Day Lewis’s fiercely independent oil baron Daniel Plainview manipulates and dominates everything and everyone around him, the film explodes into a wild—some might say unhinged—absurdism. He confronts Eli (Paul Dano), a wily spiritual huckster—and something of a competitor—who has come begging for help, and then, after growling and howling his way through a riveting, if borderline insane, monologue that features the line, “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE,” he begins hurling bowling balls at Eli and eventually kills him. It’s transfixing, brutal, uncomfortable, and defiantly weird.

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Peter, I’m no fan of the Oscars myself, and I think your post is spot-on. But I have to disagree with you about Michael Clayton. Tony Gilroy–the Bourne writer whose career has been pretty undistinguished except for the remarkable Dolores Claiborne–shocked me with his razor-sharp script: the corp-speak, Tom Wilkinson’s demented opening monologue, Tilda Swinton’s allusive, fear-choked vileness. And the direction was equally impressive: energetic but restrained. This is to say nothing of the fact that Gilroy coaxed a real performance out of George Clooney, who normally can’t act his way out a paper bag. And all this from a first-timer! I’d have to say it was the best American purebred thriller I’ve seen since the criminally underrated Spartan.

I’m on record as being an Oscar-cynic; as far as I’m concerned, the annual awards ceremony is, rather than a celebration of cinematic accomplishment, primarily an excuse for Hollywood to indulge in awesome displays of lavish narcissism. Everything about the night, from the $40,000 gift bags to the six-figure formal-wear to the clunky mechanical stage pieces, screams “Look at me! Look how wonderful I am! I deserve an award!“

But as often as not, those receiving the awards don’t deserve them. Any idea that the Academy is a reliable judge of cinematic merit should have gone out the window by the time the organization named Crash Best Picture.

Yet for movie fans, it’s nonetheless hard not to be swept up in the buzz and excitement. This year, that’s especially true, as the nominations are unusually strong, particularly in the Best Picture Category. There Will Be Blood, Juno, and No Country for Old Men are all worthy contenders, and even Michael Clayton was mildly enjoyable, if overrated. Only Atonement, the lackluster period picture based on Ian McEwan’s novel, stands out as a poor selection – and this was to be expected, as it was virtually assured it a slot by its literary pedigree.

A few people seem to be surprised by the nomination of Juno, a scrappy, sharp-witted film about teen pregnancy by Thank You for Smoking director Jason Reitman, but its nomination is in keeping with the Academy’s tradition of nominating one slightly edgy but successful indie-style (if not actually independent) film each year; think of Little Miss Sunshine, Fargo, Moulin Rouge, or Lost in Translation. Call it the Pulp Fiction nod.

Instead, the film that stands out as odd to me is Michael Clayton. Yes, it received generally favorable coverage, but beyond a marvelously dour star turn by George Clooney in the title role, there wasn’t much to it beyond dreary moodiness and a melancholy anti-corporatism, and neither the critical buzz nor the box-office returns were particularly notable. The only explanation I can come up with is that it was nominated as the token “political issue film” because none of the year’s hideous crop of Iraq-war movies could justifiably take the slot. But who knows what lurks in the minds of the Academy’s members.

The trouble with shock-horror revelations is that they can be made only once before they lose a good deal of their shock-horror quotient. For this reason I was surprised when, browsing in the current issue of The New Republic, I came across a piece by Ruth Franklin promising readers the “nasty truth about a new literary heroine.” Just how new? The hardcover edition of Suite Française, translated by Sandra Smith, was released by Knopf in Spring 2006. It was in Autumn of that year that Tess Lewis, writing in The Hudson Review, delivered most of the dirt piled up in Franklin’s essay on Némirovsky. Here’s Lewis:

By now most readers have heard the dramatic story of Irène Némirovsky’s unfinished epic, Suite Française. Against all odds, the manuscript, a leather-bound notebook, survived World War II hidden in a suitcase the author’s adolescent daughter, Denise Epstein, carried faithfully from one hiding place to another in tiny villages, convents, and cellars throughout occupied France. . . . As an adult, Denise had occasionally tried to decipher her mother’s miniscule handwriting—paper was hard to come by in Vichy France . . .

Here’s Franklin:

The writer: a Jew who had fled to the French countryside seeking refuge from occupied Paris, eventually deported to Auschwitz, where she would die in a typhus epidemic soon after her arrival. The book: scribbled in minuscule letters, so as to conserve paper and ink, in a leather-bound journal that would be carried into hiding by the writer’s eldest daughter. She would survive the war and keep it as a memento of her mother, once a well-known novelist, daring to read its contents only sixty years later.

Lewis:

Yet few readers outside of France are aware of a disturbing side to Irène Némirovsky’s story. The English translation of Suite Française . . . includes a shortened version of the scholar Myriam Anissimov’s preface to the French edition with Anissimov’s detailed account of Némirovsky’s tragedy, but not her discussion of the extent to which Némirovsky’s previous novels were riddled with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Jewish characters in her books are marked, with few exceptions, by hooked noses, flaring nostrils, flaccid hands, sallow complexions, dark, oily curls, hysteria, avarice, unscrupulous business practices, and an atavistic ability to trade in commodities and goods. The list goes on.

Franklin:

The real irony of the Suite Francaise sensation is not that a great work of literature was waiting unread in a notebook for sixty years before finally being brought to light. It is that this accomplished but unexceptional novel, having acquired the dark frame of Auschwitz, posthumously capped the career of a writer who made her name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes.

And so on. Both pieces are well worth reading. There’s no harm in bringing this unpleasant and complicating truth to new readers—I can’t imagine The Hudson Review has half the circulation of The New Republic—but Franklin ought to have acknowledged that Lewis beat her to this earth-shaking discovery by somewhere in the neighborhood of a year and a half.

• Distrust of eloquence has long been a chronic condition among Americans—or maybe it’s just that we’ve forgotten how to be eloquent. A land whose political leaders were capable once upon a time of unblinkingly uttering phrases like “the mystic chords of memory” and “a date which will live in infamy” can surely do better than Mike Huckabee. On the other hand, as Denis Donoghue, the author of On Eloquence (Yale, 199 pp., $27.50), points out, there are good reasons why we tend to distrust eloquent politicians: “The standard argument against eloquence is that it is morally indifferent, it shows one’s determination to speak vividly, whether what one is saying is true or false.” But Donoghue, whose new book is a brief in defense of literary eloquence, makes a further point worthy of careful consideration:

A speech or an essay may be eloquent, but if it is, the eloquence is incidental to its aim. Eloquence, as distinct from rhetoric, has no aim: it is a play of words or other expressive means. It is a gift to be enjoyed in appreciation and practice. The main attribute of eloquence is gratuitousness: its place in the world is to be without place or function, its mode is to be intrinsic. Like beauty, it claims only the privilege of being a grace note in the culture that permits it . . . . Eloquence therefore is exempt—or should be—from the imputations that hang over rhetorical acts and consequences. It puts rhetoric to shame—persuasion, propaganda, nudging, forcing—for its vulgarity of purpose, its forensic disgusts. Eloquence does not kill people.

Of such elegantly drawn distinctions is this fetchingly written essay made.

That it should be necessary to defend eloquence is, of course, a sign of the times. Though Donoghue is a professor of literature, he clearly despairs for his profession, having noted in recent years that most of his colleagues now care more for ideology (“The politics of Yeats’s last poems—was he a Fascist?”) than such lesser qualities as “aesthetic finesse, beauty, eloquence, style, form, imagination, fiction, the architecture of a sentence, the bearing of rhyme, pleasure.” In On Eloquence, by contrast, he revels in all these things, demonstrating how great literature acquires much of its force from the beauty of its expression.

Though Donoghue is an unabashed highbrow, he is quick to point out that eloquence does not inhere solely in aristocratic utterance. In a list of “eloquent moments” that have stuck permanently in his mind, he cites I coulda bin a contender and You talkin’ to me alongside Those are pearls that were his eyes and Thou art indeed just, Lord if I contend with thee. Eloquence, he further points out, is not merely a matter of honeyed words but of well-calculated silences, of crisply pointed understatement as well as operatic expansiveness.

In between these trenchant observations, Donoghue dishes up more than enough memorable passages from the masters to make us long for him to edit a dictionary of quotations. Rarely have I read a more charming teaser for an unwritten book than the end of the second chapter of On Eloquence:

Some years ago I thought of compiling an anthology, a commonplace book, in which every chosen item would drive readers into an altitudo of pleasure—to think that there could be such eloquence, sentences, cadences, in what seems otherwise an ordinary world . . . . Some of the items I quote with delight in the present book would have found a place in that one.

Get to it, man!

I hope I’m not alone in finding something amusing about Ron Rosenbaum’s article—his breathless, agonized, pleading, even a little self-aggrandizing article—about whether or not Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished novel The Original of Laura should be destroyed in accordance with Nabokov’s wishes. Here are the facts:

What we do know is that the Laura manuscript consists of approximately 50 index cards covered in V.N.’s handwriting. Dmitri has said in the past that the text amounts to some 30 conventional manuscript pages. (To those familiar with what is perhaps Nabokov’s greatest work, Pale Fire, the use of index cards as a draft medium will not seem strange. Indeed the parallels to Pale Fire’s account of a struggle over the disposition of an index-card manuscript border on the uncanny.) But in any case, before he died in 1977, Nabokov made clear that he wanted those cards destroyed.

I fail to see the “uncanny” in a parallel between Nabokov’s fictional creation and a real-life scenario that he himself engineered. Rosenbaum’s remark, which I’ll charitably call a stretch, is a red flag that we are in the gladiatorial arena of superfandom, where only the truly rabid survive. (Speaking of rabies, even Rosenbaum’s foray into catblogging was infected with Pale Fire fever.)

I intend no disrespect to Rosenbaum. We all have our obsessions, and Nabokov is a more praiseworthy one than, say, Dr. Who. Still, obsession can cloud judgment, and I don’t think the question at hand is much of a question at all. This isn’t a Linear B tablet or a lost Shakespeare play dredged from the Oak Island Money Pit. It’s a fragment by a literary giant who died within living memory. We shouldn’t pretend to be grateful for the finished, polished, perfect works he did give us without honoring his wishes as to this one.

As for Dmitri Nabokov, I’ll raise the possibility that Rosenbaum—who would cheerfully eat light bulbs for a peek at those thirty pages—cannot: Might not all Dmitri’s hemming and hawing and teasing and stalling be more about himself than about his father’s legacy? Just a thought. (Readers, consider this an open thread.)

The subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait, after centuries, been conclusively identified: she is Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, long considered the most likely candidate and now proven to be the one beyond a doubt. German academics have dug up a letter from one of da Vinci’s friends attesting to this. But her incomparable gaze remains as secretive as ever.

I’d like to confess a few literary sins. In high school, I read, along with usual suspects like The Dharma Bums, Naked Lunch, and A Coney Island of the Mind, certifiable nonsense like Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan and Ram Dass’s The Only Dance There Is. (I don’t mean that this is all I read, though to have read any of it is sufficiently embarrassing.) All the really zonked-out Mr. Natural stuff belonged to my parents (sorry, guys), the cringe-making detritus of college in the 1970s. I’m sure now they’d say they were only holding it for a friend.

Yes, I have read these terrible things—but I’ve never read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. I’ve browsed in copies of it, copies usually found sandwiched between Steppenwolf and the Kama Sutra on dorm-issue bookshelves; it strikes me as a kind of ecumenical “Footprints,” only longer and thus not so easily translated into needlepoint. According to Joan Acocella’s piece in The New Yorker, occasioned by the rerelease of Gibran’s works, such as they are, by the Everyman’s Library, he is the third best-selling poet of all time, after Shakespeare and Lao-tzu. Gibran was also a draftsman of sorts:

[The drawings] were products of their time, or a slightly earlier time, that of the European Symbolist painters: Puvis de Chavannes, Eugène Carrière, Gustave Moreau. Often, in the foreground, one saw a sort of pileup of faceless humanity, while in the background there hovered a Greater Power—an angel, perhaps, or just a sort of milky miasma, suggestive of mystery and the soul.

“Milky miasma” describes more than just his art, alas. If the reader thinks I’m being unkind, he should direct his attention to Theodore Dalrymple’s hilarious essay on Gibran from the December 2007 New Criterion. It focuses on The Prophet in particular, so those who want a peek at the biographical details of a fabricator, bloviator, and kept man par excellence should stick with Acocella, hilarious in her own right. She even writes, inviting the ire of millions of public-transit users: “Gibran’s closest counterpart today is the Brazilian sage Paulo Coelho, and his books have sold nearly a hundred million copies.”

What about Elizabeth Gilbert’s ubiquitous Eat, Pray, Love? Amazon.com tells me that its Statistically Improbable Phrases are “four spirit brothers, kundalini shakti, magic drawing, meditation cave, old medicine man.” Am I back with my former spirit guide, Carlos Castaneda? I’ll have to check it out, for old time’s sake. At any rate, Acocella writes:

[Gibran] had intuited the theory of relativity before Einstein; he just hadn’t written it down. Thousands of times, he said, he had been sucked up into the air as dew, and “risen into clouds, then fallen as rain. . . . I’ve been a rock too, but I’m more of an air person.”

Air of an extremely high temperature, no doubt.

• Everyone agrees that newspapers aren’t what they used to be—but what did they use to be? Fewer and fewer of us can remember a time when independently owned big-city newspapers, with their dictatorial proprietors and clean-up-this-town crusades, were a major cultural force in American life. For the most part, our understanding of these papers and their priorities now derives not from first-hand experience but from “Citizen Kane,” The Fountainhead and the half-nostalgic, half-jaundiced writings of A.J. Liebling and H.L. Mencken. Thus it was with great interest that I read Harry Haskell’s Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds: Kansas City and Its Star (University of Missouri Press, 450 pp., $34.95), a refreshingly well-written history of the Kansas City Star, which in its day was one of the most influential papers in the Midwest. I knew the Star well in my youth, and even wrote for it in the late 70’s and early 80’s, but by then it bore little resemblance to the paper founded by William Rockhill Nelson in 1880, and Haskell (whose grandfather, Henry Haskell, spent a half-century working for the paper) has done a sterling job of recreating the Star as it used to be.

Today Nelson is remembered, if at all, as the founder of Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, one of the greatest museums in the Midwest. In his lifetime, though, he ran the Star with an iron hand sans velvet glove. “I am publishing the Daily W.R. Nelson,” he said. “If people don’t like my paper they can buy another.” Nelson’s paper was known for clear, direct writing (Ernest Hemingway, who put in a brief stint there, claimed ever after to have been deeply influenced by its no-nonsense style) and a brand of politics that grew increasingly progressive over the years (the Star backed Theodore Roosevelt to the hilt). The Star played a key role in the transformation of Kansas City into a modern middle-class metropolis, and it was Nelson’s thinking that determined the paper’s editorial priorities until the day of his death in 1915, on which sad occasion it ran a two-page obituary that he had personally read and approved.

Like all such papers, the Star underwent great changes after its founder’s death, and by the 30’s it was a staunchly (if not rigidly) Republican paper whose editors looked upon the New Deal with dour skepticism but still retained a measure of their youthful idealism:

Believing personal liberty and private enterprise to be society’s greatest good, they viewed the rise of big government, interest-group politics, and self-governing nation-states with grave misgivings. Seeing an enlightened governing class as the surest bulwark against the “moronic underworld,” they nevertheless accepted the necessity for capitalist societies to reorganize themselves on a more equitable and sustainable basis, to forestall another disastrous slide into totalitarianism or complacency.

Harry Haskell writes about the early days of the Star in much the same way that Robert Caro writes about Lyndon Johnson, making no secret of his own liberal views:

The pages that follow tell the story of one great newspaper and of the compelling “power of purpose” it exerted during what might be called the long Progressive Era . . . Few, I suspect, would rush to turn back to turn back the clock to a time when it was said that “the Star is Kansas City and Kansas City is the Star.” But we may yet think again. If there is a more powerful engine for community building and civic renewal than a strong local newspaper, it has yet to be invented.

But like Caro’s Johnson biography, Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds can also be read in a somewhat different way than its author presumably intended. That papers like the Star were a force for good in turn-of-the-century America is certainly arguable. On the other hand, it was rare for a community as large as Kansas City to be dominated so totally by a single agenda-setting newspaper—the day of the one-newspaper town had not yet come—and one may take leave to doubt that Haskell would now look with equal favor on a paper whose proprietor had been more like Ronald Reagan than William Rockhill Nelson.

In any case, the emergence of the “ethereal Internet ‘communities’” of which he writes so skeptically in his preface was to a considerable extent stimulated by the increasing tendency of postwar newspaper editors and reporters to assume that their ideological points of view were unassailably right. Empowered by the disappearance of competing editorial voices, they succumbed to hubris and thereby lost their influence with much of the American reading public, in the process opening the way for the rise of Web-based journalism and the simultaneous decline of the traditional newspaper. That, too, is part of the ambiguous legacy of W.R. Nelson.

I suspect that it’s difficult for critics to assess “charity lit” as honestly as they ought to. I’m referring to books like Nick Hornby’s Speaking with the Angel, Dave Eggers’s What Is the What, and now Zadie Smith’s The Book of Other People, which benefit autism research, Sudanese refugees, and children’s literacy, respectively. I’ve heard good things about the first and have written good things about the second, despite a dislike of Eggers that I’ve cultivated like a Venus flytrap for just about a decade. Three’s a trend, however, and that trend may suggest that young writers are afraid to meet readers on their own terms, without hiding in the warm glow of good intentions.

Each time this gang produces new material, the result asymptotically approaches a flawless and devastating self-parody. Michiko Kakutani’s review of Smith’s new anthology—which includes “well-known writers like Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, and Nick Hornby”—is more enthusiastic than one might hope, but at least it’s forthright: “All the stories in this lively collection are portraits, mainly of human beings, though a monster with an identity crisis, a giant in search of love and a puppy in need of a home put in appearances as well.”

Pace John Gardner’s Grendel, Hilary Mantel’s The Giant O’Brien, and, er, John Grogan’s Marley and Me, Kakutani couldn’t have lit upon three better examples of the oddly childish preoccupations of this generation of writers. I don’t mean that I expect the stories themselves to be childish, but I won’t be surprised if many of them evince the sort of eccentricity-on-autopilot that characterizes many of these writers, talented though they may be. (Eggers wrote the “giant” story, by the way, having already done the “puppy” thing in a different book; come to think of it, though, he’s also already done the giant thing, too. Are these guys working from writing prompts?)

This review from Spiked Online is less generous than Kakutani’s, and hints at a problem: The clubbiness and congeniality of writing for a “good cause” can discourage judgment and encourage less than challenging, if not downright frivolous, material. When the “good cause” becomes literature itself—”saving the short story” or “getting people excited about reading again,” expect taste and artistry to go right out the window.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was original to a degree that should enchant and intimidate anyone who reads his stories and poems. Many authors have pondered the implications of infinity, time travel, parallel worlds, and the persistence or lack thereof of memory—Philip K. Dick creeps to mind—but few have done so as credibly, or as beautifully, as Borges.

New Directions has just rereleased Borges’s Labyrinths in a new paperback edition, with an introduction by William Gibson. In his story “The Library of Babel,” Borges posited a universe “(which others call the Library) . . . composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. . . . I say that the Library is unending. . . . Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact centre in any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.” Fans will recognize this definition, slightly deformed, from another Borges story, called “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal.” “In the sixteenth century,” he wrote, “the last chapter of the last book of Pantagruel referred to ‘that intellectual sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere and which we call God.’”

But . . . was Borges really describing the Internet? That’s the latest footling question mark from The New York Times:

[A] growing number of contemporary commentators—whether literature professors or cultural critics like Umberto Eco—have concluded that Borges uniquely, bizarrely, prefigured the World Wide Web. One recent book, “Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds” by Perla Sassón-Henry, explores the connections between the decentralized Internet of YouTube, blogs and Wikipedia—the so-called Internet 2.0—and Borges’s stories, which “make the reader an active participant.” Ms. Sassón-Henry, an associate professor in the language studies department of the United States Naval Academy, describes Borges as “from the Old World with a futuristic vision.” Another work, a collection of essays on the topic from Bucknell University Press, has the provocative title “Cy-Borges” and is expected to appear this year.

In fairness, it’s a potentially intriguing connection—but one can’t help thinking it diminishes Borges’s great achievement. He wasn’t an SF writer. It’s unlikely that he cared to see the future, even though the Aleph was supposed to let him see everything at once. Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia have turned out to be nothing but a load of faddish, privacy-invading trouble, and if you can’t see Borges sub specie aeternitatis, can you see him at all?

Walking away from the Coen Brothers film of No Country for Old Men, you may have a couple of questions. For instance, why is the film set in 1980? And what does it all mean? In Cormac McCarthy’s novel, it’s obvious why the story takes place in 1980. The reason is Vietnam. Most of the characters served there; it’s where they learned about the value of human life, or lack thereof.

The sheriff’s deputy, examining a crime scene that ended up in a shootout, says, “It must of sounded like Vietnam out here.” When Moss (played by Josh Brolin in the film) buys ammo, he thinks, “the box of shells contained almost exactly the firepower of a claymore mine.” The sheriff (the Tommy Lee Jones character) tells Moss’s wife that “he’s goin’ to wind up killin somebody,” to which the wife responds, “He never has.” The sheriff points out, “he was in Vietnam,” and the wife says, “I mean as a civilian.” That dry distinction—that killing in war doesn’t count—is ironic.

When Carson Wells (the Woody Harrelson character) is killed by Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem in the film), Chigurh thinks about “the body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country,” as well as all the people he has assassinated, which underlines the point that killing leads to more killing. The sheriff thinks about how “I was supposed to be a war hero and I lost a whole squad of men. They died and I got a medal.”

COMMENTARY Editorial Director John Podhoretz has castigated the film as nihilist. But if you measure McCarthy’s ironic tone in the book, you might come to another conclusion. Possibly McCarthy is taking the extreme, Catholic stance that all killing is wrong, from capital punishment to war to abortion. The book takes place seven years after Roe v. Wade, five years after the fall of Saigon, four years after the restoration of the death penalty by the Supreme Court. It’s a year when the idea that state could sanction killing has begun to take root. The sheriff, in the book as in the film the voice of wisdom and restraint, expresses a sad resignation toward the death penalty from page one on, and a portion of the book that isn’t referred to in the movie might be the key to understanding McCarthy’s moral.

Remembering a conference in Corpus Christi, the sheriff thinks, “Me and Loretta…got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I ain’t even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that’s a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I don’t like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I don’t think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.”

McCarthy has a vision of an America that fosters what Pope John Paul II called a “culture of death;” these men come back from Vietnam, where they learned to kill, then apply their killing skills on a country that is killing fetuses and condemned prisoners and will soon give the okay to killing old people and the weak. The remorseless assassin Anton Chigurh is the natural consequence of a culture of death: A harbinger of unchecked killing.

Yesterday, when Sam Munson related the sad news of George MacDonald Fraser’s death, he pointed readers to the Telegraph’s obituaries page. Fraser was memorialized in a number of British papers—here are the Independent and the Guardian—but I’m glad Sam settled on what is, for my money (or at least for my free online subscription), the most brilliant obit page that the dead beat has to offer on either side of the pond. With its taste for humor, its nose for the salacious, bizarre, or simply telling detail, and its scalpel-sharp yet utterly deadpan prose, it outshines all the competition, and I can’t think of a more fitting end to a memorable life. (I should also note that in her recent book The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West praises the page for honoring little-known but often jaw-droppingly daring war heroes. Those obituaries are, of course, more subdued and respectful, but they are every bit as spellbinding.)

Hugh Massingberd, the obituaries editor of the Telegraph from 1986 to 1994 and the man who made it what it iss, died on Christmas Day. He ought to be remembered as fondly as any of the great men and women whose lives he celebrated—or, if not celebrated, at least rendered with astonishing vividness.

Massingberd later wrote, “I determined to dedicate myself to chronicling what people were really like through informal anecdote, description and character sketch.” Laughter, he added, would be by no means out of place.

His ambition took many years to come to fruition. When, in 1979, during the strike at The Times, Massingberd sought to convince the Telegraph’s editor, Bill Deedes, to venture upon a more expansive obituaries section, he was given to understand that it would be rather poor form to exploit the difficulties of a rival publication.

Finally, in 1986, Max Hastings gave Massingberd his opportunity. Immediately, Telegraph readers found themselves regaled by such characters as Canon Edward Young, the first chaplain of a striptease club; the last Wali of Swat, who had a fondness for brown Windsor soup; and Judge Melford Stevenson, who considered that “a lot of my colleagues are just constipated Methodists.”

The holidays have come and gone, but there’s no excuse not to make yourself a present of one of these collections.

I would like to join my contentions colleague Sam Munson in hoisting a tumbler of single-malt to salute the passing of George MacDonald Fraser, the crusty old Scot who produced a brilliant dozen of the Flashman novels.

Fraser has never really gotten his due. Another historical novelist of 19th century warfare—Patrick O’Brian—has received far more critical huzzahs. That is because his Aubrey/Maturin novels are more self-consciously literary, with relatively little action and lots of introspection, dialogue, and description. By contrast, Fraser’s books gallop along at the pace of a runaway mustang, with incident piled atop incident to keep the reader’s attention, many of them violent or salacious. There is also a humorous, mocking tone to Fraser’s work, a bit reminiscent of Thackeray, which contrasts with the somewhat dour mood of the Aubrey/Maturin books.

This is by no means meant to be an indictment of O’Brian, who was undoubtedly a novelist of great merit. Probably greater merit, in fact, than Fraser. But Fraser was more fun to read. And he was no less meticulous in his reconstructions of the past. A reader interested in Victorian history could do a lot worse than to pick up the Flashman series, which contain detailed descriptions of conflicts ranging from the U.S. Civil War to the First Afghan War. Flashman was a Victorian Zelig or Forrest Gump who showed up conveniently enough at every important event between 1840 and 1900.

In some ways, Fraser actually outdid most historians (and I say that as a historian myself): He captured the conversation and perspective of various historical characters in a way that is almost impossible to do for a conventional historian, who can’t embellish on the limited sources available. If there is a modern writer with a better ear for Victorian slang, I have yet to read his or her work.

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No-one would mistake the Flashman books for great literature. They’re full of cheaply-imagined sex and more than a bit of jingoism. But it would be impossible to deny their serious attention to historical detail, their capture of something essential about the vanished life of the British Empire. George MacDonald Fraser, the man who brought us Flashman and his epxloits (as well as the screenplay for Octopussy) died today at the age of 82.

Flashman began life as a minor character in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a classic of the boy’s-school genre–a bully who gets expelled for getting drunk. But Fraser reinvented him as a fairly amoral soldier-adventurer in his twelve Flashman novels, the first of which appeared in 1969 and the last in 2005. The novels document Flashman’s doings all across the Empire. It’s a strange, unparalleled literary career: Fraser single-handedly resurrected and re-invented the figure whom George Orwell once called the “Englishman-of-infinite-resource-and-sagacity.” Orwell’s Englishman was usually dully moral; Flashman was most certainly not. For all his flaws as a character, it’s certain the we won’t see his like again, or Fraser’s.

Last night, my wife and I got around to seeing the acclaimed Away from Her, featuring sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated Julie Christie as a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s. Her husband is then forced to watch as she forms a loving bond with a male patient at her nursing home, and must find a way to reunite his wife with the object of her love when his rival is removed from the home. It features many images of snow, always a sign of deep meaning, as is the fact that the husband reads to his wife from W.H. Auden. There is a plaintive and whispery soundtrack. The writer and director is a very sensitive actress named Sarah Polley, who has made a habit of staring balefully into the camera to express her pain and anguish. Scene after scene in Away from Her features the husband receiving one body blow or another from his wife’s declining perceptual abilities. And not just his; at one point a fellow patient with Alzheimer’s forgets how to use sign language with her daughter, and she was the only person in the family who bothered to learn sign language, so now the daughter no longer has anyone to talk with. As my wife wept and sobbed and sobbed and wept, I found myself getting strangely angry. “Don’t worry,” I said after yet another agonizing moment. “In the next scene, the actors actually will reach through the screen and pull our toenails out one by one.” So if you want to see a film that tries very hard to depress you, I strongly recommend Away From Her. As for me, I just wanted to get Away From Her.

The New York Times has a bittersweet piece today about a smoking ban in France which has been expanded to include cafés: “Even France, Haven of Smokers, Is Clearing the Air.” The ban, “following the spread of Starbucks and the election of pro-American, fitness-friendly President Nicolas Sarkozy,” has occasioned a small identity-crisis for café-wallflowers and everyday French (there are 12 million French smokers). To many, the coffee-and-cigarette combo is an important communal ritual, the way NFL Sunday and religion are for Americans. The Times piece is accompanied by a terrific, five-minute video showing café-owners and patrons decrying the nanny-state—“we want to live, we want to have fun . . . they’re taking that pleasure away from us,”—while engaging in another French pastime: nostalgic self-regard. Like I said, it’s bittersweet.