Goodreads Inferno

In a longish state-of-the-publishing-world essay on Substack, independent publisher Sam Jordison gives special consideration to the disappearance of the negative book review—the hatchet job—as a symptom of decline. He notes that author and critic DJ Taylor, whose excellent guide to Orwell I wrote about here last year, described the disappearance of “tough-minded” reviews, criticism that “often bordered on outright cruelty,” ten years ago. According to Jordison, the tepid positivity of book review pages has only worsened since then.

What caught my attention was Jordison’s second mention of Taylor’s phrase “outright cruelty,” which Jordison notes we shouldn’t want or need to come back: “We have Goodreads for that.” This observation is glossed with the following footnote:

Goodreads has risen just as professional book pages have declined. The nastiness and ignorance on display there is a reflection of internet culture, and the way everything Jeff Bezos touches is infected with his mean spirit. But I do also wonder if some people think they are restoring some kind of balance?

The nastiness on Goodreads is well known. Goodreads users mob and harrass authors over single lines, engage in character assassination, try to preemptively get books canceled before they’re even published, and even the authors who use Goodreads join in the bad behavior. Imagine the vitriol of Twitter, the politics of Tumblr, and the righteous self-assurance of a school librarian in a Subaru and you have the predominant tone of Goodreads today.

Thanks to the nastiness the profound ignorance on Goodreads is perhaps less visible. But as it happens, it was fresh on my mind because this morning, as I searched for a brand new one-volume edition of The Divine Comedy that I’m about to start reading, I made the mistake of looking at its top review.

According to the user responsible, Dante has written this “OG” “self-insert bible [sic] fanfiction” because he “thanks he is very special” (stated twice), “has a bit of a crush . . . on both Beatrice,” “his dead girlfriend,” and “his poetry man crush” Virgil, and wants “to brag about Italy and dunk on the current pope.” All of this is wrong, for what it’s worth, but here’s the closing paragraph:

TLDR: Do I think everyone should read this? No, it’s veryyyyy dense. But I think everyone should watch a recap video or something to understand a lot of famous literary tropes that become established here.

Read The Divine Comedy for the tropes. Or better yet, “watch a recap video.”

This is a five-star review, by the way.

I wish this were the exception on Goodreads, but it’s not. Here’s a person with the capacity and the patience—perhaps? the review is short on details of anything beyond Inferno—to read the Comedy but who is utterly unprepared to receive and understand it, presumably having lost the good of intellect. This review reads like those parody book review videos that were popular a decade ago, except Thug Notes actually offered legitimate insight as well as laughs.

I have a love-hate relationship with Goodreads. I signed up fourteen years ago and still use it every day. But I can only do so and maintain my sanity by sticking to my tiny corner of online acquaintances and people I actually know and avoiding the hellscape of popular fiction, where the fights that can break out in review comment sections resemble nothing so much as Dante’s damned striving against each other even in death. Finding a legitimate, thoughtful, accurate review is harder than ever. One must dig, sometimes through hundreds of reviews like the one above, to find something helpful. And it’s even harder if you’re interested in older books, for which the temptation toward glibness or snark—omg so outdated! so racist! so sexist!—is for many irresistible.

And, for authors whose books are on Goodreads, it’s hard not to let a latent anxiety build up. Sometimes it feels like, inevitably, it’ll be your turn in the crosshairs.

Jordison blames Jeff Bezos, whom he correctly points out—as I just did in my Tech & Culture class last week—started selling books not because he loves them but because they’re easy to catalog and ship. I’m sure that’s a factor, but it’s not sufficient to explain the whole problem. His other culprit, “internet culture,” that broad and protean devil, plays a crucial role as well. Regardless, Jordison ends his essay on a note of hope:

But I don’t counsel despair. Because the truth is that there is still good work being done. There are a few decent book sections left. Writers are producing fine books. Publishers are bringing them into the world. People are reading them.

At least some of those books will endure.

Truly encouraging to remember. But that this must happen despite rather than because of the technologies we’ve created from an ostensible love of books is a judgment on our culture.

Me and the Southern accent

Last month on his microblog, Alan Jacobs linked to this short Atlantic piece—now paywalled—about the slow extinction of the Southern accent. Quoting the author of the essay on the decline of distinctive Southern accents among the young and the eventual reality that the accents will only survive among the old in out-of-the-way places, Jacobs noted, “I’m part of the trend too: I certainly have a Southern accent, but it’s not as pronounced as it was when I was younger, and I profoundly regret that.”

Likewise and likewise. The regret is painful.

My speech, like Jacobs’s, is identifiably Southern to outsiders, but largely through syntax (e.g. double modals), vocabulary (e.g. y’all, fixing to), and peculiarities of emphasis (e.g. saying umbrella instead of umbrella). My accent, in terms of pronunciation, is limited to ineradicable features like the long I noted in that Atlantic essay, yod-dropping, hanging on to the H in wh- words, and the occasional dropped G. I have neither a drawl nor a twang.

This is a regret to me because I feel it severs me from previous generations and the place I come from in one of the most fundamental ways. We learn speech at our mother’s breast and from those closest to us, not only in terms of family but in physical proximity. Gradually losing that means losing a part of me that participates in them and in home.

And I cherish those accents—of which The Atlantic rightly notes there are many. I learned two kinds of Georgia accent growing up. My dad’s parents, natives of Clarke County and the Athens area, spoke a lot like Flannery O’Connor—a Savannah native with her own peculiarities of pronunciation—does in this recording, a soft, non-rhotic accent that outsiders read as genteel. My maternal grandparents, Rabun County natives, spoke in a strongly rhotic accent with heavy Appalachian features. Both of these are from “north Georgia,” broadly speaking, but couldn’t be more different. Southern accents have immense county-by-county variety.

Generation adds more variation. My parents’ accents, both still marked by their parents’ roots, nevertheless grew toward each other, and my own is a yet finer blend—dominated by my maternal side’s Appalachian terseness. It comes out when I try to say iron (arn) or Florida oranges (Flarda arnjes).

In old home movies I have a shrill, squeaky, very country little voice. I’m not sure when the most obvious marks of family and home began to fall away, but it must have been around middle or high school. Unlike the writer in The Atlantic, it was never intentional. I never wanted to blend in, was never ashamed of being Southern—far from it, I grew a sizable chip on my shoulder during an undergrad career surrounded by Yankees and Midwesterners who thought nothing of moving South and mocking the locals for saying umbrella—and, if anything, I wanted more of an accent than what I ended up with.

Faking it is not, I decided long ago, an option. Better to let it emerge occasionally, a nice surprise. (I’ve noticed myself, in the classroom, pronouncing opportunity without the R lately, a real surprise.) I try to comfort myself with examples of other provincials who unintentionally lost their accents—namely CS Lewis, a Belfast native who, quite unconsciously, slowly conformed to the speech of whomever surrounded him and ended up sounding like this.

But when I remember my grandparents’ voices, and talk to my parents and aunts and uncles and siblings, and think about those home movies, and then recall my own kids’ sweet speech—in which very little Southern remains—all I can do is regret. Time isn’t the only thing that gets away from us. And this, the Ubi sunt? sense of loss, is perhaps the only thing more Southern than the accent I used to have.

Elegy for the mass market paperback

Some of my oldest and most cherished mass market paperbacks

It’s been a busy week both recovering from last weekend’s ice-storm and two lost days of school and preparing for this weekend’s snow, but not so busy that I didn’t catch a tempest in the Substack teapot: the apparent extinction of the mass market paperback.

In actual fact, Publisher’s Weekly reported last month that the country’s largest book distributor had decided not to bother shipping mass market paperbacks anymore, citing a steep decline in sales over the last few decades and profit margins that were already thin. This will naturally have an effect on how many of them are available and where, but the news was being misunderstood on Substack as either 1) mass market paperbacks will no longer be produced by publishers at all or, more egregiously, 2) paperbacks in general are being discontinued.

In the middle of his hubbub a not insignificant number of voices were raised crying “Good riddance!” Mass market paperbacks, they said, are cheap, badly designed, have small print and margins so narrow your thumbs cover the words, and their spines fall apart almost immediately. A lot of the same people paired their condemnation of the mass market paperback with praise for the hardback.

The mass market paperback may not, in fact, be extinct quite yet, but I can’t tolerate hatred for it.

Let me start with the crassly material. Cheapness is a feature, not a bug. The hardback aficionados seem to forget the kids who want to read but can’t stomach getting only one book for $30 they worked hard for or saved until the day they could visit a good bookstore. The money is just a facilitator, not the point; How much reading will my $20 get me? is the question I asked over and over as a teenager. I still do paperback math in my head—for most modern hardbacks I could have gotten at least six mass market paperbacks back in the day.

As for flimsiness, that’s just the nature of paper and glue. Even the $20—and more and more often $22 or $25—trade paperbacks dominating bookstores today will eventually fall apart from rough use or shoddy binding. Even hardbacks are not bound like they used to be. In my experience, if one takes even a little care of one’s books—not getting them wet, not just throwing them around, not intentionally breaking the spine like a barbarian—they’ll last a long time, and a mass market paperback from a decent publisher will likely be as sturdy as any other size.

And regarding design, a small book will necessarily have smaller print. Adapt. And just how big are your thumbs?

So much for that. Why do I feel so strongly about this?

My affection for the mass market paperback runs deep. I was a country boy without a lot of spare cash for books, so from quite early on, when I got a book, I got a mass market paperback. Many of the books my parents ordered for me at a discount from the God’s World Book Club in elementary school—Rifles for Watie and Across Five Aprils come to mind, as well as things like World’s Strangest Baseball Stories—were mass market paperbacks. I still have many of these.

The Hallmark store on St Simons Island where my mom shopped for gifts and ornaments every summer had an entire wall of these books. It was here that I first found a copy of The Killer Angels, which I knew as the source of Gettysburg, my favorite movie. My parents bought it for me and I just about wore it out reading it in the condo, by the pool, even at supper while a Japanese hibachi chef lit onion volcanoes on fire. Look at the photo at the top of this post—that’s the same copy. Cheap, yes—$5.99 is printed on the spine—but still serviceable.

When I started reading seriously in high school, the mass market paperback made entire literatures available to me for five or six dollars apiece. Signet Classics, which was repackaging their line in nicely designed matte-finish covers as I finished high school and started college, became my go-to. I’d pick up as many as I could with my birthday money during summer trips to St Simons—by this time blessed with a Books-a-Million, which always had a huge inventory of them—or at the Greenville Barnes & Noble when I didn’t have to be in class and had a little money. Burton Raffel’s Beowulf and Sir Gawain, Ovid, Virgil, Boccaccio, Euripides, Malory, Shakespeare, O Henry, David Copperfield, The Song of Roland—just this partial list is an introduction to a whole civilization for about $50.

The most important of all of these was a Signet Classics mass market paperback of Inferno, translated by John Ciardi, which I got sometime in 2001, a quarter century ago. And I can precisely date another important mass market paperback acquisition thanks to Amazon, where my very first order was a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front—in a metallic bronze cover I can still picture—on February 8, 2000.

Again, these are two books that transformed my life and I got both for about $10. (Amazon records the price of my copy of All Quiet as $4.79.) But much more important than the cost effectiveness is what I got out of these books, and the memories I have of them.

I’ve already mentioned a few of these. I also remember reading Inferno on the bus as a high school junior, canto by canto and reading every one of Ciardi’s notes both to uncover more of this amazing book and to block out the chaos around me. I first read Sir Gawain in a single Sunday afternoon as a college freshman, and plowed through The Bonfire of the Vanities over several weeks of lunch in the campus snack shop the same year. I carried my copy of Raffel’s Beowulf in my jacket pocket as I graduated from Clemson sixteen years ago. It was August and it got sweaty but it’s still here on my shelf. And of course there’s the drive to Atlanta in 2000 that I’ve mentioned before, when I read a chapter called “Riddles in the Dark” and realized I loved The Hobbit (purchased at Walmart) and would forever.

The mass market paperback met an important need for me at a specific time. Maturing as a reader, wanting to read a lot, but not having much money or space, and being limited to what was widely available in big bookstores, mass market paperbacks were an intermediate step between the $1 and $2 books in the Dover Thrift catalog I pored over in high school and the Penguin Classics I began collecting in college. Good books, readily available, in workmanlike binding, inexpensive—anything more strikes me as luxury.

I don’t begrudge anyone their hardback library—far from it—but I hate to see the mass market paperback impugned. It’s done humble and honorable service making entertainment and learning available to millions. I’m one of them.

I hope the mass market paperback’s death has been greatly exaggerated and that it will have many years left. But even if not, I’m grateful, and I’ll still enjoy mine.

Kubrick, conspiracism, and what happens when we assume

Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson on set. The miniature hedgemaze in the foreground is an accidental metaphor for the subject of this post.

YouTuber Man Carrying Thing posted a funny and thought-provoking video yesterday concerning a strange emergent pop culture conspiracy theory. Apparently some disappointed fans of “Stranger Things” decided that secret new episodes are on their way, a fact signaled through elaborate visual codes in the final season. (I have no dog in this fight. I saw the first season when it first appeared and have not bothered with any of it since.) These fans have compiled huge numbers of minor details as “evidence” but the date of the supposed release of these surprise episodes has already come and gone. Undeterred, they continue with the predictions.

Jake (Man Carrying Thing) has some thoughtful things to say about this weird story, the most important of which, I think, is the role of bad storytelling in creating false assumptions and the way those assumptions fuel the mad conclusions these fans have come to. In the process he makes a brief comparison to Stanley Kubrick and The Shining, which is what I really want to write about here.

The Shining is the subject of several bizarre but elaborately worked out theories, the two most prominent of which are that the film functions as a hidden-in-plain-sight confession by Kubrick that he faked the moon landings for NASA and that the film has something to say about the fate of American Indians.

The latter is more easily disposed with along the lines Jake uses for some of the “evidence” of the “Stranger Things” theory. Why does the Overlook Hotel have so many Native American decorations? Because that’s what a Western hotel in that era would decorate with. Next question.

The NASA stuff goes deeper, though, and this is where Jake’s comments on the assumptions behind such theories are pertinent. The conspiracy theory interpretations of The Shining lean heavily on several assumptions, the most important of which is that Stanley Kubrick meticulously planned everything about his films down to the last item in every frame. Every detail, the argument goes, is intentional and meaningful, and so the film can and has, as Jake notes, been analyzed frame by frame for “evidence” of these theories. But is this assumption correct?

No. Kubrick was meticulous, yes, but not that meticulous. Or not that kind of meticulous. He was, in fact, too good an artist for that.

I encourage everyone to watch “The Making of The Shining,” a documentary shot by Kubrick’s 17-year old daughter Vivian and included as a special feature on the DVD and Blu-ray. (You can also watch it online here.) While the myth of Kubrick is of the chilly visionary with a perfect movie in his head that he brutally forces into reality, Vivian Kubrick captures her father changing and adapting on the fly, picking the ballroom music at the last minute, discussing the different versions—plural—of the script, and even coming up with the iconic floor-level angle of Jack Nicholson in the storage locker as they’re shooting the scene. She presents us the collaborative mess of filmmaking.

Kubrick knew what he wanted, but he had to work his way there, improvising and improving. This both rubbishes the conspiracist assumption about Kubrick, that The Shining presents some utterly controlled pre-planned message, and also functions as broadly applicable insight into creative work and human nature.

Any good artist in whatever medium will have a clear goal and an idea of how to accomplish it but will also adapt as they go, even the meticulous ones. That’s because every plan is subject to the combined friction of creative work and reality, which test the artist. The later illusion of coherence and completeness is part of the art. A great artist like Kubrick can disguise it well, because thanks to his gifts the final product is better than what he set out to make. But the Duffer brothers? Jake—and audience reaction to the conclusion of “Stranger Things”—suggests otherwise.

As for human nature, conspiracy theories, whose protagonists are often hypercompetent if not omnipotent, fail to take account of the messy, improvisatory quality of reality, especially when they presume to encompass a larger slice of it than that available on a film set. They are, as German scholar Michael Butter puts it in The Nature of Conspiracy Theories, “based on the assumption that human beings can direct the course of history according to their own intentions . . . that history is plannable.” Or in Jake’s words, “So many conspiracy theories would lose their convincing quality if those who believed them acknowledged human fallibility.”

Recognizing this can make us less susceptible to falsehood—because we all know what happens when we assume—and better creators. A strange but heartening intersection.

In Dilbert memoriam

A childhood favorite. some of my interests have never changed.

I’m late to the game in memorializing Scott Adams, who died a week ago today, and can offer only a personal appreciation. I hadn’t kept up with him consistently for about twenty years and heard of him just often enough to be amused at what he was getting up to. When I heard of his terminal illness last year and his plans to seek assisted suicide, I was grieved.

But to begin in the proper place. I was a comics-loving kid and while I was aware of Dilbert, which came packaged with all my favorites in my grandparents’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Anderson Independent, I don’t know how often I actually read it. My fundamental sense of what comic strips were came from Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and—for one-panel high strangeness—The Far Side. These are still the three highest peaks in my estimation of the form. Dilbert was of a different world and valence than these, and its subjects and artwork probably didn’t immediately appeal.

But sometime in the mid-90s I got a new classmate at my small Christian school. I already owe one lifelong debt to Clint because he told me about this short story he had read at his previous school, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and accidentally introduced me to Poe, but he was also a huge fan of Dilbert. I remember him bringing a copy of Fugitive from the Cubicle Police—the politically correct title for what in the strip itself is referred to as the Cubicle Gestapo—to read between classes. His enthusiasm and the specific strips he shared with me from this book led me to look closer at Dilbert. It was soon a favorite.

It’s a testament to Adams’s genius that a couple of twelve-year olds could have found Dilbert’s workplace humor so funny. For us Dilbert was essentially fantasy literature, full of strange races and the vocabulary of forbidden tongues. I had no idea what HR was (those were the days) or what a consultant or software engineer did or what any of the office-specific jargon and tech lingo of the mid-90s actually meant, but we floated along on the vibes and characterization, inferring the meaning and import of jokes. Adams was very good at this. His skill with story, characterization, and the crucial timing of written humor meant our lack of experience of this world posed no obstacle to understanding—and laughing. We got the point even when we didn’t get the reference.

The chapter on office pranks was not especially helpful job preparation for a middle-schooler

Soon I had a respectable stack of Dilbert books, including one that worked as a key to Dilbert’s world and appealed to my Aristotelian love of taxonomy: Seven Years of Highly Defective People, a best-of sorted by character with notes by Adams in the margins. These were informative and funny and his personality came through clearly.

I got to know that better by signing up—again, this is still the mid or late 90s—for his e-mail newsletter, which automatically made me part of the DNRC: Dogbert’s New Ruling Class, the intellectual elite of his forthcoming new world order. Here Adams offered updates and commentary and responded to reader e-mails with a brimful serving of his wry snark. It was here, I think, or perhaps in The Joy of Work, one of his non-cartoon books on business culture, that I learned the word cynical.

I was in middle school by then (I remember reading The Dilbert Future on my first trip to Europe in 1998, not quite fourteen) and that’s a heady moment to be introduced to cynicism. Not that it wouldn’t naturally have occurred about that time, but I’m not sure learning that one could adopt a self-aware, sardonic, Olympian aloofness about one’s environment was helpful to me. I’m already bent, in Malacandran terms, in these directions anyway, and Dilbert encouraged me to adopt a more self-conscious and ironic posture strictly because it was funny. This cynicism was, ironically, quite naive.

Perhaps this would have been fine in a Sisyphean office environment, but at fourteen my environments were family, church, and school, fields where earnestness is actually warranted—most of the time. Because I learned cynicism as a way of humor about the same time I learned that, as a true believer, I would often be let down, I learned to use wry humor as a shield. I don’t think Dilbert did me any long-term damage but I’ve had to mature past these attitudes and habits.

Back to Adams himself and the DNRC. The Dilbert newsletter was probably my first experience of a writer opening up his mind to his readers. In addition to cartooning, the business world, and the vast intellectual superiority of his subscribers, Adams unironically flogged his vegetarian taco brand and his thought experiments—another phrase I learned from him. He shared a lot of the ideas he’d eventually package as God’s Debris. I may have been naive but I wasn’t suggestible and wouldn’t follow the funny man into woo-woo agnosticism. I had accidentally learned how to observe proper boundaries with people I liked but couldn’t agree with on the important stuff, a lesson I can take no credit for. It also won’t be the last appearance of grace in this story.

I kept up with Dilbert online through college—it was one of several strips I checked daily—but Adams himself, whom I admired as the off-kilter mind behind the cartoon, fell out of my awareness and I was content simply to read the strip. Somewhere between my undergrad and grad school years I lost the habit even of this, so it was a shock to run across it occasionally and see updates. Dilbert in polo and lanyard? That would have been unthinkable in 1998. (But guess what I wear to work every day.)

I have no opinion on Adams and politics. When he popped up on my radar over the last ten years saying contrarian things to the great consternation of a lot of people, I was unsurprised. Hadn’t y’all met him? He was a contrarian. If he hadn’t been, Dilbert would never have had the edge and absurdity that made it great. It would have been Cathy in a software company.

But to return to where I started, when Adams announced his imminent death from pancreatic cancer and his plans to end his own life, I was grieved. I remembered my mixed feelings about his dorm room-style philosophizing, his know-it-all pandeism, his air of superiority—in a word, his arrogance, a trait that attracts middle schoolers like a whirlpool attracts flotsam—and worried that his gifts would end in a final act of nihilism as dark as anything in Catbert’s HR department. What I did not do was hope or pray for him.

I am in no position to weigh the merit of Adams’s announcement of his conversion to Christianity just before he died last week. The various algorithms have tried to feed me a lot of videos—all with thumbnails of frantic, outraged people mugging in front of microphones—arguing yea or nay on his reasons. What I do know is that Adams was facing death, the ultimate argument-ender, and these podcasters are not, and that God is not willing that any should perish. In a history replete with sinners converting in the most miserable of conditions, how is God diminished by saving one more? What I felt when I learned of his decision, a Pascal’s Wager deathbed conversion, was relief and gratitude.

Again, these are my observations as an old fan who, after childhood, held Adams at arm’s length but always appreciated him. Dilbert’s peculiar sense of humor is a key middle-layer of the development of my own sensibilities, and Adams’s genius was the same as that that made Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Far Side great—the ability to heighten the ordinary while keeping it familiar, to people his imaginary landscape with characters we recognize as our friends, family, coworkers, and ourselves, to make this hilarious, and to do it seemingly effortlessly. Also like Schulz, Watterson, and Larson, he was, for better or worse, uncompromising. That his complicated story and difficult personality ended with not just a turn toward grace but a casting of himself on God makes it all the more poignant.

Adams’s story seems to me one of eucatastrophe, of grace snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. It is not a story Adams would have written. Is there any better end for the cynic than redemption?

Weimar notes

Militants of the Communist Spartacist Uprising in Berlin, January 1919

When I finished Frank McDonough’s book The Weimar Years last month I had hoped to write a full review, but time, sickness, and a host of other complications meant I had to be content with a long paragraph in my non-fiction reading year-in-review. Unfortunately, the single-paragraph summation I hold myself to for those posts meant I could only raise a few issues that I had a lot of thoughts about, gesture toward them, and move on.

Here are two—both more or less about terminology or rhetoric—that I’ve been mulling anew under the influence of McDonough’s book and a few unrelated factors.

Right and left

After finishing The Weimar Years and celebrating Christmas, I caught up on some club episode of The Rest is History. The one I was most excited for was a live show Holland and Sandbrook presented at Royal Albert Hall last spring. The subject: Wagner.

Holland and Sandbrook begin their discussion by asking the audience to reconsider what they think they know about Wagner—a smart move. But this problem of terminology popped up immediately. You have heard it said, they essentially say, that Wagner is a right-wing figure, but I say unto you… he’s more of a left-winger. In their actual words, “a hippie.” But Wagner had “some right-wing opinions,” namely anti-Semitism. So: a leftie who is right-wing à la carte?

There’s an argument to be made for Wagner’s place on the left, given his role in the 1848 revolutions and his support for the overthrow of the Saxon monarchy as well as his generally bohemian lifestyle. But what precisely makes his anti-Semitism right-wing? And, from a certain kind of chest-thumping American view, supporting the overthrow of monarchies and seeking to create an all-encompassing national artform out of national myth could be spun as right-wing.

This was a great episode—and I especially appreciated Holland’s argument that Wagner’s music is not in itself anti-Semitic—but that left-right business neatly encapsulated much of my problem with this political frame.

Back to McDonough’s book. McDonough uses the language of left and right throughout but also, importantly, makes it clear what each of the dozen or so major German political parties of the 1920s wanted and stood for. Focusing on 1) goals, 2) methods, and 3) how these changed depending on circumstances explains much more, especially when it comes to the elephant in the room: the National Socialists—and yes, the Socialist part absolutely matters—who were themselves starkly divided along several political axes throughout the Weimar period. This is also considerably more helpful than a simple left-right spectrum when one reads of instances in which supposed opposites like the Nazis and the German Communist Party collaborated against the national government.

The terminology of right and left is rooted in a specific historical moment and the specific problems parties in that place and time argued and fought over. Unmoored from those specifics, I find it unserious. It’s a time-honored way to argue about vibes. I avoid it as much as possible when I teach modern history, invoking it only to give the point of view of people within the narrative I’m telling but not as neutral description.

“Democracy” vs this democracy

I didn’t get into the left-right thing in my paragraph on The Weimar Years but I did raise this question. Here’s what I wrote there:

But the epilogue, in which McDonough specifically blames Paul von Hindenburg for the death of “Weimar democracy,” is a bit of a fumble, as it is abundantly clear from McDonough’s own narrative—and even the earlier parts of the epilogue—that the Weimar Constitution had built-in weaknesses that were bound to weaken and undermine it. McDonough essentially faults Hindenburg for not believing in democracy hard enough. But if “democracy” in the abstract gave Germany this democracy in concrete, stubborn reality, it deserved to go.

Since finishing McDonough’s book I’ve browsed two new histories of Weimar from German historians: Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany, by Harald Jähner and Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, by Volker Ullrich. (In the course of writing this I’ve also learned of a history of Weimar by Katja Hoyer, due out this summer.)

All of these (minus Hoyer’s book, for obvious reasons) do a bit of two-step around the concept of democracy: when the authors write about “democracy,” they sometimes mean the specific constitutional arrangements of the Weimar Republic—who voted, how, under what circumstances, how the Reichstag was constituted, who became chancellor and what authority they had, etc—and sometimes the concept of Democracy, in the abstract. The defeat and destruction of Weimar democracy is a tragedy for them because it means a defeat of Democracy.

But to paraphrase Burke, abstract democracy is not to be found; it inheres in sensible objects. It is useless to talk about Democracy without talking about the specifics of a given democracy, and a given democracy is only as valuable as its institutions and—one ought to add—the people who are using it. And as I wrote above, Weimar democracy was flawed from its inception because of the specifics of how it was designed and functioned and what options it made possible. Unstable, ineffective, hamstrung both by the outcome of a war it wasn’t responsible for and diplomatic agreements to which it consented, and—in the hands of feckless and corrupt politicians of all parties including the supposedly egalitarian socialists—unable to represent the people, it was a failure as a democracy long before Hitler seized power.

As I finished reading McDonough’s account and looked through those two other books—one more obviously leftist-oriented but both moaning and lamenting for Democracy throughout—I had a strange realization. The effect of switching from the collapse of actual Weimar democracy to a lament or apologia for Democracy in the abstract is suspiciously similar to “Real socialism has never been tried.” Democracy attracts the same mulish defensiveness as socialism. Both are the object of unwarranted faith. Neither can be blamed when they fail.

A confession

I started The Weimar Years shortly after the Charlie Kirk murder. Political violence openly celebrated by one side of the culture seemed like a good reason to familiarize myself with the broader narrative of Weimar.

That was a mistake, as looking for a useable, “relevant” past almost always is. Unfortunately historians of Weimar are just as prone to it. In both Jähner’s and Ullrich’s books I did a quick search for “Trump, Donald” in the index and guess what I found? Dumb parallels to the present, mentions of a specific political bugbear that will date their books as badly as a book I have on Mussolini that keeps bringing up George W Bush.

But McDonough doesn’t make this mistake, which is one of the great values of The Weimar Years. Throughout he emphasizes contingency and particularity: that things could have turned out other than how they did, something he makes clear through his detailed political narrative, and that Weimar Germany was a unique time and place offering no easy comparisons to our own. Pretending that Weimar tells us something or gives us insight into our enemies because there was political violence and politicians said mean things about their opponents is glib and misleading—for both the past and the present. The specifics matter.

So I confess to beginning McDonough’s book for the wrong reasons, but am glad I read it and for the sensibility of his approach, which brought me back to my senses. The closer I looked at Weimar, the less I saw of us, now. Which is as it should be. Not that we can’t learn anything from it, but we won’t until we understand it on its own terms.

More to come

I’m still trying to strengthen my grasp of Weimar. Of the two other books I’ve looked at, I may read Ullrich’s on the basis of his two-volume Hitler biography. He intones the ritual laments for Democracy in the portions I’ve read but his treatment of some of the specific topics and people I looked up struck me as more balanced than Jähner’s, which celebrates the hedonism and decay of the time. I may end up holding out for Hoyer this summer, as her book on the German Empire, Blood and Iron, was exceptionally good.

1970s comment sections

See what this passage from Dave Barry’s recent memoir Class Clown in which he recounts his experiences working at a local daily newspaper as a young reporter in the early 1970s reminds you of:

“I also learned a lot about what readers of a local newspaper are, and are not, interested in. You could make a major mistake in a story about a meeting of a zoning board and never hear a peep from the readers about it. But if you, in writing a photo caption, misidentified a goose as a duck (I did this), you would hear about it from literally dozens of readers, some of them quite irate. And if the newspaper should ever—God forbid—leave out the daily horoscope, the phones would not stop ringing.”

I’ve given it away in the title of this post, of course, but this reminds me of nothing so much as trying to communicate on the internet. Majoring on the minors, mindlessly angry criticism, even astrology—there is nothing new under the sun. And there’s that famous bit of internet advice that, if in need of information, you shouldn’t directly ask for it, but instead make an incorrect assertion on the topic and watch the corrections pour in from the Actually guys.

Just in case we forget that technology seldom introduces entirely new bad behavior, it just amplifies it. And Barry has tons and tons of these stories.

Class Clown is a great read, by the way—funny throughout, often moving, it offers both a fun capsule overview of Barry’s life and about fifty years of journalism and culture.

Cosmic horror and commercialized Christmas

Last week at The Critic, Sebastian Milbank published an excellent essay on MR James and the English tradition of celebrating Christmas with ghost stories. The most famous is A Christmas Carol, of course, but the “scary ghost stories” of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” used to be much more common. James’s are still the gold standard—atmospheric, spooky, and presented with a sober believability that only enhances their terror. But this tradition has mostly disappeared, leaving some people wondering why ghost stories would ever have been an appropriate way to celebrate the Nativity in the first place.

Milbank makes a strong case that the ghost story in fact complements the Nativity story, which is already a story of a dark world under the sway of violent forces human and otherwise, of a battle of good and evil waged on both the mortal and immortal planes, and of the intrusion of the supernatural and the revelation and overthrow of the hidden workings of the world. This is cosmic horror pre-Lovecraft, a horror made all too real in the mundane acts of destruction carried out by the enemies of the newborn Christ: “God incarnate is smuggled out of a homeland rendered a slaughterhouse of children by a corrupt puppet of a foreign power.”

Milbank’s entire essay is good, so please read it. But this mention of the massacre of the innocents—commemorated today, December 28, as the Feast of Holy Innocents—as well as a point Milbank raises a few times in his essay brought to mind an old but often overlooked Christmas carol that never fails to move me: “The Coventry Carol.”

“The Coventry Carol” was originally performed in late medieval England as part of a mystery play about the Nativity. A short, simple song of four stanzas, it is a lullaby sung by the mothers of Bethlehem to their children, slaughtered on Herod’s orders. Here are the lyrics in both Middle and Modern English, and here’s an excellent a capella performance. Here’s the final stanza:

That woe is me, poor child, for thee,
and ever mourn and may
for thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully lullay.”

Gentle and plaintive, it is written as both the lament of a specific mother (mourning “this child” and “this poor youngling”) and of every mother of one of the innocents (“we” beg for help in protecting a child, “for whom we do sing”). The song is both individual and communal—and deeply sad.

Or, as we might put it now, “depressing” or even “traumatizing.” You’ll likely not have heard it a single time on the radio or store PA systems this shopping season. If our sanitized, secularized version of Christmas only grudgingly acknowledges the role of the birth of Christ in this annual cash cow, it certainly doesn’t want you complicating even that with something like the Massacre of the Innocents. Grief is not commercial.

To bring it back to Milbank, he notes the simplifying, emotionally foreshortening effect of commercialism several times in his essay, and that the ghost story is a way of embracing the fulness of the Nativity and pushing back against the age. Not only this, but it makes room for those who enter Christmas in moods or circumstances for which the maniacally upbeat tinsel and sleighbells version proves ill-fitting: “Reflecting on Christmas’s shadow is helpful not just as a sign of seriousness, but because it offers a real consolation to those for whom Christmas is not easy, and a touch of chill that adds to the warmth of the festivities.”

He comes back to this point at the end of the essay:

When we return home for Christmas, many of us will be wrestling with sudden loss, family conflict, or the disappointments of the past year. Rather than uncomfortably nursing these feelings in the artificial radiance of the modern Christmas, we should make sense of them through the deeper and more ancient rhythms of the turning of the year, in which light and shadow are the interplay of an unseen harmony. We should embrace Christmas as a season to mourn our sorrows and embrace our joys with equal passion.

Occasionally I’ll play “The Coventry Carol” in class and invite the students to consider 1) that this is a Christmas song, 2) what kind of baggage we bring to that concept, and 3) this song’s original audience. The Massacre of the Innocents was a common subject of medieval art, and quite likely everyone who poured into Coventry to crowd around the mobile stages to watch the play and hear the songs had lost people before their time—husbands or wives, siblings, parents, and most especially children. They participated in a lament like “The Coventry Carol” in a way most of us can only imagine. The grief of the mothers of Bethlehem encompasses them, including them in Christmas, too.

I find my students respond to this. They’ll have heard complaints about the commercialism of Christmas at least since the time they were old enough to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (just in case we’re tempted to think this is a new problem). The Christians among them may have felt uncomfortable before with the mismatch they’ve felt between their own season of life and either the uniform, phony, lunatic merriment being pumped at them by the culture or the static, comfortable image of peace implied by the manger scene. They may have even complained about it.

What the Victorian ghost story with its supernatural horror and “The Coventry Carol” with its human loss show us is that our Christmas is the aberration, and if we want to incorporate grief—which, after all, Christ was born to conquer—we don’t have to come up with new ways of inclusion, we just have to recover the old.

Dispatches from the butt-covering trenches

Earlier this week I received an exciting curiosity: a paperback of The Maltese Falcon in a simulated Armed Services Edition design from Field Notes, my favorite notebook company. Armed Services Editions were pocket-sized paperback books made available for free to GIs during World War II. Over a hundred million ASEs were handed out over the course of the war, and servicemen could enjoy any one of 1300 titles—not including The Maltese Falcon, which Field Notes is belatedly adding to the corpus.

Field Notes’s Maltese Falcon. So cool I can’t stand it.

So this is a cool, fun project at the intersection of several of my interests—history, literature, World War II, and crime fiction—from a company I’ve patronized a long time (my oldest Field Notes are full of sketches and notes for my books, both old and forthcoming). And I’m glad to say the final product is mostly great.

I have no complaints about the quality, the design—which is indistinguishable from a real ASE—and the editorial choices in preparing the text of Hammett’s book, namely the original serialized magazine version. But Field Notes includes an introduction from a novelist who, after explaining the greatness of Hammett’s novel, its place in American crime and mystery fiction, and those editorial choices, drops in the dread one-line paragraph: “It is also a product of its time.”

From two pages of praise he turns to three and a half of apologizing for Sam Spade’s “misogyny,” for Hammett’s “century-old gender stereotypes,” that a villain is portrayed as Middle Eastern and that other characters speculate that he is a homosexual—both aggressions thus “other[ing] him”—and so forth. The novelist tries to muster some feeble goodwill for Hammett by assuring the right-thinking reader that Hammett “was a dedicated anti-fascist* and leftwing activist” and argues that Hammett was actually trying to subvert the benighted standards under which he labored.

It’s tiresome. Like that new edition of The Martian Chronicles I wrote about earlier this year, this is butt-covering on the part of the publisher, a cringing posture of “Don’t be mad at me!” Either introduce a great novel with an argument for its greatness—placing the burden of being a ninny upon the reader, who must decide whether or not to reject it at the first sign of disagreement—or don’t bother at all.

By all means, get yourself a copy of Field Notes’ ASE Maltese Falcon, but skip the introduction. It’s tedious but predictable—a known quantity—and at least the book isn’t censored (as far as I can tell). The other item I noted this week is more sinister.

While picking up some gifts for the kids at Barnes & Noble I stumbled across brand new Vintage editions of James Ellroy’s LA Quartet. Having read The Black Dahlia in college I’ve been meaning to read LA Confidential and the others for years, and considered seizing this opportunity to pick one up. But then I stumbled across this note on the copyright page:

While this book is an outstanding work in the genre, it is also firmly of the time and place—the American 1950s. This book may contain outdated cultural representations and language.

Not only does that first sentence make no grammatical sense—great job, Vintage—it somehow elides Ellroy’s historical fiction with reality, implying that the grungy, lurid world he evokes was the norm.

While this was a fairly standard butt-covering publisher’s note of the kind I’ve looked at here before, it raised my suspicions. After a minute of browsing I spotted a censored slur in an early chapter—rendered with the first letter and a dash—and a few others on adjacent pages. And it was only specific slurs; every other vile word typical of Ellroy’s dialogue was rendered intact.** As it happens, there was an old movie tie-in paperback of LA Confidential on the shelf nearby. I checked the new edition against the old one. Not a word in the original, no matter how offensive, is obscured in this way.

Vintage has censored Ellroy’s books. Further, they have censored them without indicating that they have done so.

I’ve been griping about this happening to long-dead authors for a while—Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, et al—but Ellroy is still alive, still publishing, still giving his manic interviews. And I couldn’t help wondering—is there any other author who would be less cool with this? Part of the point of Ellroy’s fiction, like it or not, is confrontation. His work is in-your-face, gritty and grimy and disturbing to a punishing degree. Softening even part of it for some sensitive suburbanite who picked up an Ellroy novel not knowing what she (and it’s definitely she) is getting into doesn’t just betray Ellroy, it undermines his artistic purpose.

I checked Ellroy’s official website. I don’t know how personally involved he is with it, but he is either fine with the censorship—which seems out of character—or unaware of it. In an announcement for the new Vintage paperbacks, his site declares: “Same great books, great new look inside and out!”

Except that they aren’t the same.

An interesting and frustrating new wrinkle in this story. We’re not out of the woods yet. (Addendum: much like the Fleming estate did with the Bond novels, Ellroy’s audiobooks have been rereleased in censored versions, too.) In the meantime, continue to favor older, unexpurgated editions where you can find them, and always be alert to publisher meddling—even for living authors.

* Indeed, Hammett was such an honest, hardworking anti-fascist that his Stalinist lover Lillian Hellman publicly wished for the Russian conquest of Finland. If we’re worried about an author’s problematic views, why doesn’t that enter the picture?

** This is itself revealing of vast taboos that lie well beyond the scope of a blog post but are worth thinking about.

Sehnsucht and flying

This week while running Christmas errands—including a couple trips to urgent care—I listened to the latest episode of The Rewatchables, a 100-minute conversation about F1, which was great entertainment both in the theatre and at home.

The movie is bookended with scenes in which the main character, skilled “never-was” driver Sonny Hayes, is asked about the money involved in racing. Both times he says, “It’s not about the money.” Both times he’s asked in response, “So what is it about?” The answer comes just past the midpoint of the movie, when Sonny opens up to Kate, his romantic interest. After explaining his past—early promise, a near-fatal crash, anger, resentment—he describes realizing that what he’d lost in his youth was his “love for racing.” That’s what it’s really about. And that love is both rooted, sustained, and occasionally manifested in a specific experience. Sonny:

“It’s rare, but sometimes there’s a moment in the car where everything goes quiet, my heartbeat slows, it’s peaceful, and I can see everything. And no one, no one can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t know when I’ll find it again, but man, I want to. I want to. Because in that moment—I’m flying.”

Kudos to Brad Pitt for selling this speech. I felt it.

What the discussion on The Rewatchables made me realize, in reflecting on this expression of longing and its fulfillment at the climax of the movie for the nth time since watching F1, is that Sonny is describing a sensation for which we actually have a word: Sehnsucht.

Sehnsucht is a loanword from German meaning “longing” or “yearning” or, in the prosaic translation possible, “desire,” but implies much more than these. Far from a rational want or need or a simple appetite which can be gratified materially, Sehnsucht is sharp, long-lasting, oriented toward something far-off, rare, but obtainable, and is as sweet to endure as it is to fulfil. It was an important concept to the German Romantics and—the point of this post—CS Lewis.

Lewis wrote about Sehnsucht explicitly in a few places (and there’s an academic journal dedicated to Lewis’s work by this name), but his most memorable and poignant descriptions of it some from his memoir Surprised by Joy, in which Sehnsucht plays the title role. In the first chapter, Lewis describes three childhood incidents that awakened in him a sense of and permanent desire for “joy.” This aching desire proved yet more poignant by breaking in unexpectedly—while peering into his brother’s toy garden, when reading Squirrel Nutkin, when reading an English translation of skaldic poetry—and unpredictably. Lewis:

The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to all three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is the kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.

As Sonny Hayes might put it, “It’s not about the money.”

F1 is satisfying because it makes us feel Sonny’s Sehnsucht, a source and object of desire worth orienting one’s entire life around, and the joy, too deep for words, that comes with its satisfaction. This speaks to people—look at the climactic scene on YouTube and browse the comments. I’m not going to pretend that F1 is high drama, but it’s exquisitely crafted entertainment and, in the person of Sonny and his sweet, unsatisfied desire to “fly,” dramatizes beautifully an aspect of the human heart that is all too easy to ignore or, in our age, simply smother.

But of course Lewis would remind us that even Sehnsucht is not desire itself, but a pointer beyond: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. . . . Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”

Tellingly, despite getting the girl, saving his friend’s team, raising a younger driver to maturity, and winning the big race, F1 ends with Sonny back on the road, chasing that feeling of flying.