Momentary Language

Norman Mailer (1923-2007)

Norman Mailer, author of -- among other works -- "The Naked and the Dead," "The Armies of the Night," and "The Executioner's Song," died today at the age of 84. (The NY Times obit is here.)

I can't escape the feeling that I was born too late to appreciate Mailer's impact as a public figure adequately: one could make a compelling argument that, from the mid-1950's, when he was one of the co-founders of the Village Voice, until the late 1970's, when he championed the release of Jack Henry Abbott from prison, Mailer's life was at least as significant an outlet for his artistic expression as his writing, not least because his life so often found its way into his literary output during those years.

Rorty as the mirror of philosophy (1931-2007)

When I began reading analytic philosophy seriously in the early 1990's, my introduction to the contemporary scene was Richard Rorty -- particularly his books Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and, more importantly, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

His breezy, seemingly superficial conversational style ... and, perhaps more significantly, his hard-won hostility to what he perceived to be the aridity of philosophy in the analytic tradition ... made Rorty, in some ways, ill-suited to be a popularizer of contemporary work in philosophy, even of philosophers whom he admired, like Quine or Davidson. Nevertheless, those very traits made for work that was always engaging, unfailingly provocative, and often brilliant.

As reported by Todd Gitlin, Rorty died on Friday, June 8, 2007. His voice will be missed.

[See also the discussion of Rorty at Waggish, here. Now they tell me ... the NY Times has finally posted an obit here.]

Pulitzer Prizes 2007

The Pulitzer Prizes for 2007 have now been announced. Those for letters, drama, and music are:

FICTION: The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf)

DRAMA: Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire

HISTORY: The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Alfred A. Knopf)

BIOGRAPHY: The Most Famous Man in America by Debby Applegate (Doubleday)

POETRY: Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (Houghton Mifflin)

GENERAL NONFICTION: The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (Alfred A. Knopf)

MUSIC: Sound Grammar by Ornette Coleman

A Yiddishe Long Goodbye

Some people -- like The Elegant Variation -- get galley copies of hot forthcoming novels, such as Michael Chabon's latest, The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Since I am not one of those select few, I guess I'll have to content myself with pre-ordering the book on Amazon. I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, so I'm excited to get started on this one. (Over at Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito has a recap of Chabon's appearance at Cody's in the Bay Area in support of the little gem, The Final Solution, Chabon's last outing, in which Chabon also briefly discusses TYPU.)

There's some evidence that the ideas for TYPU have been gestating for a while. For example, in "A Yiddish Pale Fire," originally published in Civilization in June/July 1997, Chabon imagines an alternate reality in which people would buy a Yiddish phrasebook to visit

... Yisroel, the youngest nation on the North American continent, founded in the former Alaska Territory during World War II as a resettlement zone for the Jews of Europe. (For a brief while, I once read, Franklin Roosevelt was nearly sold on such a plan.) Perhaps after the war, in this Yisroel, the millions of immigrant Polish, Rumanian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Austrian, Czech and German Jews held a referendum, and chose independence over proferred statehood in the U.S. The resulting country is obviously a far different place than Israel. It is a cold, northern land of furs, paprika, samovars and one long, glorious day of summer. The portraits on those postage stamps we buy are of Walter Benjamin, Simon Dubnow, Janusz Korczak, and of a hundred Jews unknown to us, whose greatness was allowed to flower only here, in this world. It would be absurd to speak Hebrew, that tongue of spikenard and almonds, in such a place. This Yisroel--or maybe it would be called Alyeska--is a kind of Jewish Sweden, social-democratic, resource rich, prosperous, organizationally and temperamentally far more akin to its immediate neighbor, Canada, then to its more freewheeling benefactor far to the south. Perhaps, indeed, there has been some conflict, in the years since independence, between the United States and Alyeska. Perhaps oilfields have been seized, fishing vessels boarded. Perhaps not all of the native peoples were happy with the outcome of Roosevelt's humanitarian policies and the treaty of 1948. Lately there may have been a few problems assimilating the Jews of Quebec, in flight from the ongoing separatist battles there.

And the NBCC Awards go to ...

As reported on Critical Mass, the award winners are:

- Fiction: The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai (Atlantic Monthly Press)

- Autobiography: The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, by Daniel Mendelsohn (HarperCollins)

- Nonfiction: Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, by Simon Schama (Ecco)

- Biography: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips (St. Martin's Press)

- Poetry: Tom Thompson in Purgatory, by Troy Jollimore (Margie/Intuit House)

- Criticism: Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, by Lawrence Weschler (McSweeney's)

"Full many a flower ..."

As reported (here) in yesterday's Guardian, the excellent lit mag Granta has compiled a list of the best young US novelists under 35.

Here it is:

Daniel Alarcón
Kevin Brockmeier
Judy Budnitz
Christopher Coake
Anthony Doerr
Jonathan Safran Foer
Nell Freudenberger
Olga Grushin
Dara Horn
Gabe Hudson
Uzodinma Iweala
Nicole Krauss
Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Yiyun Li
Maile Meloy
ZZ Packer
Jess Row
Karen Russell
Akhil Sharma
Gary Shteyngart
John Wray

My first emotion upon seeing the list was dismay at how few of the authors' books I'd yet read -- or, in a few cases, even known.

Ok ... that's not entirely true. My first emotion was uncontrollable and all-consuming jealousy of Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss -- the first married couple to make one of these best younger author lists? Or perhaps it was disgust that Granta moved the marker on me while I wasn't looking -- the last time around anyone under 40 counted as younger; now, "younger" means under 35. At least with the under-40 marker, I could've consoled myself that, if I just started this summer, I could pound out a novel and just make the cut in time! How carelessly and callously Granta has dashed those hopes. Ah, well, "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

Some will, like the Guardian, note that "seven on this year's list ... have yet to publish a novel." Rather than criticizing them for that, I wish that Granta would instead just look at best young fiction writers under 35. Why marginalize excellent writers of short fiction? To take one example from their 1996 list, Lorrie Moore would've been a must-have, even had she never published Anagrams or Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

[Just to have some measure of Granta's prognosticatory ability, take a gander at the previous list, from 1996.]

“At least you got to say this for a liberal s.o.b. like Schlesinger — when his candidates go into action, he’s there writing speeches for them.”

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning historian and counselor to presidents, died yesterday in Manhattan at the age of 89. (The Times story is here.)

Traces of a many-hunekered soul

George Johnson is an exemplary science writer -- clear-headed, inquisitive, vivid, enthusiastic, and wide-ranging in his interests. Who better, then, to review a new book by Douglas Hofstadter, who exemplifies all of those traits as well -- and in spades!

Shabash, Vikram

Arre, beta, I just finished Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games. It was very-very long, full of upright policemen, filmi gangsters, street-smart apradhis, hungry taporis, sexy bar-balas, and randis of every nationality.

Chandra weaves a shandaar story, with plenty of hera-pheri, but part of me can't help feeling like a real chutiya for spending so much time on this maderchod book.

“It’s Ayn Rand people! Danielle Steele–style sex fantasies with the mind of Aristotle!”

Many thanks to Amy Benfer, in whose new essay one finds suggestions as to why many adolescents -- and particularly adolescent girls -- find Ayn Rand so damn interesting.

[Perhaps this is a sign of the intensity of the Randy mind, but it was impossible for me to find an even skeptical link to Rand in an -- admittedly cursory -- Google search. So here's a link to a dating service devoted to encouraging followers of Rand to procreate. That's one sentence I never thought I'd write.]

This puzzle is one I've never understood, so it helps when Benfer at least gives us some clues, such as when she quotes

a recent review [she] found on Amazon.com [that] reads : “It’s Ayn Rand people! Danielle Steele–style sex fantasies with the mind of Aristotle!”

All of which brings to mind, for me, the following exchange from "A Fish Called Wanda":

Wanda: To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people. I've known sheep who could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs, but you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?
Otto: Apes don't read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it.