Why Marlowe is still the chief of detectives
Fifty years after Raymond Chandler died, we need his ‘shop-soiled’ Galahad Philip Marlowe as much as ever to put our mixed-up world to rights.
Mick Hume

‘But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.’ Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

Cover illustration by
Jan Bowman

For some of us there may be no such thing as a bad detective novel, but there are none as good as Raymond Chandler’s. Even if you are unfamiliar with Chandler and have not read his Philip Marlowe novels, such is the shadow he cast that you will recognise his universe: a dark corrupt world where men are weak-hearted tough guys, women are available vixens and Hollywood dreams are dashed by ugly reality, while a wisecracking, chain-smoking detective hero stands up for what’s right. ‘I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country’, says Marlowe in a crisis: ‘What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and left the room.’

When Chandler died 50 years ago on 26 March 1959, The Timesobituary said that ‘in working the common vein of crime fiction, [he] mined the gold of literature’. Today John Sutherland, emeritus professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, tells me that ‘Ray Chandler qualifies as the Proust of the hard-boiled detective novel. For Chandler literary style was all that mattered.’

Standing on the shoulders of Dashiel Hammett – author of Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon– Chandler established the ‘realistic’ detective novel that still fills bookshops and websites today. And in Marlowe, a self-styled ‘shop-soiled Galahad’, Chandler set the standard for the detective hero as a flawed ‘man of honour’ in a bad world. In so doing he turned the common murder mystery into a moral tale of modern life. Our still-rapacious appetite for crime novels suggests that we still need Marlowe as much as ever to set our mixed-up world to rights.

Chandler’s own life was as complex as his more incomprehensible plots. Born in Chicago in 1888, he came to England with his divorced mother and was educated at Dulwich College. After a brief London career in the civil service - for which he took British nationality - and as a journalist, Chandler returned to America in 1912. In the First World War he enlisted with the Canadian Gordon Highlanders before joining the new Royal Flying Corps. After the war he became an executive in the oil business, but was fired for drinking and absenteeism.

Chandler started writing detective noir stories in his forties, during the Depression, and had his first novel, The Big Sleep, published at the age of 51. He completed six more Marlowe novels - Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, The Little Sister, The Lady in the Lake, The Long Goodbyeand Playback - and wrote film scripts for Hollywood - notably The Blue Dahlia and Double Indemnity - while living in California. He was married for 34 years to Kitty, 18 years his senior. She died in 1954, and a heartbroken Chandler died five years later of pneumonia linked to his drinking.

Chandler was a self-confessed cultural snob whose ‘hardboiled’ writing was sneered at by literary critics, though he insisted that the Bard would have written for Hollywood, too. He was an educated Edwardian gentleman who gave voice to people from the wrong side of the tracks in pre- and postwar Los Angeles.

Chandler led the final charge in the American revolution, begun by pulp magazines such asBlack Mask, that overthrew the old English-dominated order in the mystery novel. He had no time for the phoney plot twists and cardboard characters deployed by the likes of Agatha Christie in country house murders, and acknowledged Hammett as the writer who first ‘gave murder back to the people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse’. By the time George Orwell’s 1946 essay was bemoaning the ‘Decline of the English Murder’, Chandler had already buried that tired genre. As Marlowe says, ‘It’s not that kind of story… It’s just dark and full of blood.’

Barry Forshaw, whose books include The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction and British Crime Writing: an Encyclopaedia, says ‘Chandler is the master. Hammett may have been the original progenitor of the hardboiled private eye novel, but Chandler refined the form to its nth degree.’ Mark Billingham, whose Tom Thorne novels have marked him out as a rising star of crime writing, thinks that without Chandler, British detective writers ‘would still be writing crime novels set in vicarages, in which the murder would be nice and bloodless and the culprit would almost certainly be lower-class or worse, foreign.’

The revolution in content was reflected in one of style. Chandler had little interest in plotting. When The Big Sleep was turned into a Hollywood movie, director Bill Wilder and star Humphrey Bogart could not agree if one character, the family chauffeur, had been murdered or committed suicide. They wrote to Chandler for clarification of the plot, ‘and dammit’, he later recalled, ‘I didn’t know either’. His interest was in human drama, character and emotion, and he brought them to life through simile-loaded description and dialogue as sharp as an ice pick in the back of the neck that has often been imitated but never bettered.

Ian Rankin, whose Rebus novels top many lists of detective writing, says that: ‘The opening paragraph of The Big Sleep is one of my favourite openings in all literature. Chandler famously saw his task as bringing crime fiction back to the mean streets from the stately homes of the English whodunit. But he did so with style and elegance, as befits a man with a classical English education.’

Chandler did more than update the detective novel. Most importantly he turned it into a moral mirror held up to American society. Despite famously advising aspiring writers that ‘when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns’, little of Chandler fits that simple stereotype. As American crime writer Jeffrey Deaver has noted, ‘There are conflicts aplenty in Philip Marlowe’s world, but they’re usually not the sort that can be solved with a bullet from a .38 or roundhouse punch to a thug’s chin.’

It was through his investigation of those human conflicts that Chandler’s work rose above other traditions in crime writing. Protesting about literary snobbishness towards crime writing, Chandler lashed out against the elitist categorisation of ‘significant literature’: ‘If you have to have significance… it is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.’

This is the deeper enduring appeal of the Chandler crime novel: as a never-exhausted form for investigating the moral tensions and contradictions in the modern city and society, and for resolving them in a way that real life rarely allows.

Although Chandler did not share the Red sympathies of Hammett (believing that there was ‘hardly a hair’s breadth’ between capitalism and communism), his novels assume that little is as it appears on the surface (something which always appealed to an old Marxist such as me), probing the conflicts between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, love and hate, passion and power that shape our lives.

At the centre is Marlowe, a man who is not himself mean, a ‘common man and yet an unusual man’, often lost and alone but never defeated, making a stand against ‘this strange corrupt world in which we live’, run by crooks, crooked cops and rich parasites. Chandler wrote that ‘P Marlowe has as much social conscience as a horse. He has a personal conscience, which is an entirely different matter’, and that Marlowe and he ‘do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and have money; we despise them because they are phoney’. (Chandler also observed that Marlowe is a fantasy figure because in real life no such man would be a private detective, a job done by an ‘ex-policeman with the brains of a turtle or a shabby little hack’.)

Marlowe - the definitive detective - has a strong sense of morality, though his morals are not those found in the Bible or the Bill of Rights. His personal conscience believes that law and justice are not necessarily the same thing – a distinction he shares with Sherlock Holmes, and has bequeathed to many imitators such as Robert Crais’ cracking Elvis Cole – and that violence and law-breaking can be the right thing to do. Chandler established the detective as a very human hero. As Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse novels, has noted, Marlowe has ‘a big streak of integrity down his spine and a moral code of his own. But he is no super-hero, acknowledging as he does his fallibility and his fears’. Chandler was clear that while Marlowe was a moral public man, ‘I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honour in one thing, he is that in all things.’

Marlowe helped to shape generations of fictional detectives on both sides of the Atlantic. Crime writer Val McDermid says the ‘slumped figure of Raymond Chandler still casts a big scary shadow over contemporary crime fiction. Young writers such as Alan Guthrie, Megan Abbott and Charlie Huston are writing extraordinary books that wouldn’t be possible without Chandler’s dark brilliance.’ Mark Billingham notes that Marlowe’s ‘legacy is enormous. Lew Archer, Dave Robicheaux, Matt Scudder, Harry Bosch, John Rebus and my own Tom Thorne are but a few of the “tarnished knights” who owe a debt to Chandler’s original “shop-soiled Galahad”.’ One other thing Marlowe passed down was the detective’s cultural and intellectual idiosyncrasies - for Marlowe’s private poetry-reading and solo replaying of classic chess matches, see the focus on the musical tastes and foibles of today’s fictional detectives, from Morse’s classical Oxford erudite snobbishness to Harry Bosch’s identification with the lonely jazz sax.

Yet just as Chandler moved the detective novel into the modern age, the fictional detectives of today have evolved – and not always for the better. Reflecting the moral uncertainties of our times, many appear less sure of where they stand. For all his self-deprecating wisecracks it is hard to imagine Marlowe self-consciously wondering, as Henning Mankell’s Swedish detective Kurt Wallander does, whether today’s hard cases require ‘policemen who don’t suffer from my uncertainty and anguish’, while worrying that some local atrocity signals the end of an entire civilisation.

Today’s detectives often seem more depressed than hardbitten, the drinking that was part of Marlowe’s macho persona now depicted as a problem, even an addiction, in line with contemporary concerns. And those who still smoke are always trying to give up. The detectives are still flawed heroes, still trying to resolve the conflicts and contradictions in society, but the ground appears to have shifted beneath them, taking the line between right and wrong with it. Maybe somebody should write a crime novel called ‘The Case of the Missing Moral Compass’.

It seems particularly ironic now to recall that Chandler’s work was once criticised for being too dark. He responded that his depiction of the underbelly of LA was a ‘burlesque’, a deliberate exaggeration of the truth for dramatic effect. Yet the darkest of Chandler appears clean-cut compared to some crime writing today. Chandler evoked the spirit of noir through mood-setting and language, not cheap graphic gore. Now work that is hailed as ‘dark’ often seems close to putrid, almost unreadable, while some top crime writers such as Patricia Cornwell have abandoned the detective dissecting a body of evidence altogether and focus instead on a pathologist dissecting a corpse.

Despite his cynicism and misanthropic streak, as a solitary drinker who claimed to prefer talking to his cat rather than fellow humans, some of these writers make Chandler almost seem like an optimistic humanist. In a rare sympathetic remark about the brutish LA cops, Marlowe observes that their inhumane behaviour is in a sense understandable: ‘Civilisation had no meaning for them. All they saw of it was the failures, the dirt, the dregs, the aberrations and the disgust.’ You might say much the same of some mystery writers these days, only without the excuse of experience. And unlike too many of them, Chandler’s mysteries did not end up inevitably focusing on a history of child abuse as the secret behind every tragedy.

Chandler’s own prejudices, however, would not mark so highly today. From the 1980s he was caught in a retrospective backlash against literary political incorrectness. It is true that Marlowe sometimes employs language - nigger, shine, pansy - that no hero would use now. Yet that seems little more than a realistic representation of a man of his time. More serious accusations of anti-Semitism have been countered by Chandler’s recent biographers. Those who accuse Chandler of misogyny, however, might appear on stronger ground: the worst villains in his novels often turn out to be women. The crime writer Natasha Cooper, author of the Trish Maguire mysteries, says that ‘his novels generally appeal more to men than to women, perhaps because he romanticises the figure of the brave, sad, honest loner, tormented by wicked, manipulative women and usually seeing the world through the bottom of a bottle. But the language is fun.’

Yet Chandler should not be seen as an outdated reactionary like Mickey Spillane, whose comic book ‘Commie-whupping’ detective Mike Hammer fought the Cold War. Chandler did not self-consciously tackle ‘ishoos’ as many crime writers attempt to do today. But nevertheless his detective novels produced a cutting indictment of what lay beneath the brittle veneer of Hollywood and La-la land before and after the war; as Ian Rankin has it, ‘he took a scalpel and sliced open the shiny surface of modern America to show a society whose insides were sclerotic’.

As a private detective, an un-mean man alone, Marlowe belongs to the old school of American individualism. Today almost all fictional detectives are serving policemen, especially in Britain but increasingly in the US. Perhaps that, too, is a reflection of changing realities, as the power of the state machinery has spread in Britain, Europe and America. Working from the inside of the machine, fictional detectives now find themselves hampered by the system rather than beaten up by the police, few worse than Chief Inspector Chen, Que Xiaolong’s Shanghai detective trapped within the bureaucracy of the post-Communist state.

Andy Hayman, former anti-terrorism commander at Scotland Yard, tells me that while British cops have often dismissed crime fiction as ‘too exaggerated and hyper-critical’, more have been brought round as fictional detectives such as Morse or Jane Tennison in Prime Suspectpresent a more realistic view of police procedures that has ‘the ring of authority, less pie-in-the-sky’. He was impressed with a recent address on the future of policing by veteran crime writer Dame PD James, who had senior officers ‘spellbound’. It is hard to imagine policemen speaking so highly of Chandler.

While every detective on TV or in film owes him a debt, many today might only know Marlowe through the movies of the books (Chandler considered Humphrey Bogart ‘the genuine article’ in the part, while Alan Ladd was ‘a small boy’s idea of a tough guy’), or through affectionate send-ups such as Steve Martin’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. The fiftieth anniversary of Chandler’s death seems a timely excuse for introducing them to ‘P Marlowe, a simple alcoholic vulgarian who never sleeps with his clients while on duty’ and ‘marks high on insubordination’. Hamish Hamilton have marked the half century by reissuing five of his novels with stylish reproduction early-edition hardback covers.

Chandler’s conclusion about the hero detective in his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ might sound a touch corny to modern ears, but it rings true down the years: ‘If there were enough like him, the world would be a safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.’ Meanwhile we still await the definitive London detective to walk the mean streets of Dulwich or Westminster or Walthamstow.

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

I recently received an email from a friend asking if I would contribute to a book he’s editing entitled What Matters Now: prescriptions for a simpler life. ‘A new genre of literature is emerging about the roots of happiness,’ it began. ‘Authors like Alain de Botton, Oliver James and Naomi Klein argue that the materialist/celebrity culture has left people unhappier than ever. They argue that older and simpler pleasures — a walk in the country, the companionship of family and friends, a beautiful view — provide better oxygen for the soul than the acquisition of more branded goods or the pursuit of money, fame and status.’

I told him I would be happy to contribute provided I was allowed to take a slightly different tack: ‘If you want an essay rebutting your central thesis, saying people like Naomi Klein are talking rot and that the keys to happiness are money, fame and status, I’m in.’

I suspect that these bad-tempered attacks on ‘materialist/celebrity culture’ will become more and more commonplace over the next 12 months. Indeed, it is ironic that the new decade should be called ‘the Teens’, given how middle-aged and curmudgeonly the zeitgeist is at present. Britain appears to be going through one of its perennial bouts of romanticism in which the modern world, with its Tesco superstores and dumbed-down reality shows, is compared unfavourably to a mythical past in which people spent their days growing vegetables and their evenings reading poetry. I blame Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Come to think of it, maybe we would be better off in a pre-industrial society — even if, as one historian pointed out, the most salient fact about the 18th century is that people were in pain 50 per cent of the time. At least in the 18th century it is hard to imagine Alain de Botton being considered an intellectual. I cannot take seriously a man who lectures me on the unimportance of money while sitting on a pile of over £300 million. He may be right in asserting that money can’t buy happiness, but the reason most of us are obsessed with the stuff is not because we’re labouring under any such illusion. It’s because we need to keep earning it in order to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads.

I also find it a bit rich when de Botton and his anti-capitalist comrades chastise us for being preoccupied with status. Are they really unaware that this criticism is a way of advertising their own superior social standing? For at least 200 years, Britain’s public schools have been teaching their pupils to avoid the conspicuous pursuit of fame and money for the simple reason that engaging in such activity is a low status indicator. Whenever I hear a liberal intellectual bemoaning the vulgarity of ‘celebrity culture’ and expressing contempt for anyone unworldly enough to be impressed by designer goods, I am reminded of a conversation I once had with a Scottish earl in which he condemned snobbery on the grounds that it was ‘common’.

Such paradoxical thinking was on full display in a recent newspaper feature entitled ‘The Enriched List’. The idea was to identify ways in which you could lead a full and meaningful life without being wealthy. One suggestion was to take up basket-weaving, but the argument for doing so was less than convincing: ‘According to fashionable sources, contemporary basket-weaving is the craft du jour.’ The notion that we shouldn’t be guided in our lifestyle choices by shallow notions of what’s ‘in’ and what’s ‘out’ because a more broadminded perspective is now ‘in’ is a little self-defeating. Either you slavishly follow the latest trend or you don’t. But it’s a bit much to look down your noses at people who do so on the grounds that it’s no longer trendy.

My friend’s main argument for why I should contribute to his book is that thinking about alternative sources of happiness is very au courant. His email continued: ‘The current recession, the bankers’ bonus row, the MPs’ expenses debate have all spurred questioning our society’s values and discussion of the desire for something better.’ No doubt that’s true, but if the yearning for more deep-rooted forms of satisfaction is linked to Britain’s faltering economy, won’t it disappear as soon as we start to recover? My advice to anyone thinking of jumping on this anti-capitalist bandwagon is to do so quickly because it will shortly grind to an abrupt halt.

Dave Eggers

There was a time not so long ago when Dave Eggers didn’t do interviews. Or rather, he would only do them by email. This was after a row with a New York Times journalist that ended with Eggers calling him a ‘bitter little b-----d’. All of which makes me feel rather nervous as I wait outside the office at his British publishers, where Eggers is waiting.

He turns out to be a chunky, outdoorsy-looking man of 39, wearing hiking boots and with dark, curly hair that’s only partially tamed by a centre parting. But he seems in a thoroughly affable mood – even if this will later be punctured by long bursts of frowning introspection.


Related Articles
Where The Wild Things Are
Wild Things scene clash
Where The Wild Things Are, review
The Wild Things by Dave Eggers: review For all his affability, Eggers, you suspect, has a pretty dark side – which will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who has read his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In the book, Eggers described how, aged 21, he brought up his eight-year-old brother Christopher – ‘Toph’. This was after their parents both died of cancer within weeks of one another.

Ten years after it was published, Eggers is a literary star. He’s written a novel, film scripts, two non-fiction novels and numerous short stories.

He’s also founded the most influential literary magazine in the United States, McSweeney’s. But childhood – his own childhood – still churns away inside him, which is why he teamed up with film director Spike Jonze to make the recent film version of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. As well as writing the script, Eggers has also written a novel, The Wild Things, a kind of companion piece to the movie, but very different from it.

Eggers remembers first reading Where the Wild Things Are when he was five and being absolutely terrified. What scared him so much? ‘Argh…’ he says, throwing up his hands. ‘I just reacted with pure terror. But then I used to hide under the couch during The Wizard of Oz. I think what frightened me the most was that I couldn’t work out if the Wild Things were nice or nasty. There was a moral ambiguity to them which really disturbed me.’

His own upbringing was much less riven with uncertainty – at least on the surface. Eggers grew up in a prosperous Chicago suburb where his father was an attorney and his mother a schoolteacher. But behind the happy façade, all was not well: his father drank and spent long periods out of work.

‘I can remember very clearly being seven or eight, which is the age the boy, Max, is in the book. And when I was raising my brother, that started off when he was eight – so it’s a very vivid moment that I’ve thought about a lot. I can remember feeling responsible for my mother’s happiness. If she was sad, I would think: “Can I do my robot manoeuvre and make her happy?” And slowly you come to realise that there’s only so much you can do.’

Eggers’s childhood was also weirdly cloistered. In all the time he was growing up, his parents never went out in the evening. ‘Not once. Isn’t that extraordinary? But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it’s like to internalise all that chaos.

'For years, I resisted keeping any kind of schedule. Because my parents were very rigid and everything happened at a set time every day, I really fought against that. I mean, I didn’t even have a wallet until I was 27.’

When Eggers wrote The Wild Things, he basically turned himself into Max – except that the young Dave Eggers was much, much wilder than his fictional counterpart. ‘I think I was pretty crazy, looking back. For instance, when I was a kid we used to do stuff like soaking tennis balls in kerosene and playing football with them. At the same time, though, I remember being quite good in school and also fairly docile. So there are all these weird contradictions that are hard to reconcile.’

But he probably wouldn’t have written the book had he not got a phone call from Sendak, now 81, the original creator of Where the Wild Things Are. ‘Maurice was very involved in the film and he told me that people had been talking about a novel based on the screenplay. He asked me if I’d do it. I had to think about it, but I thought it might be a good place to explore all those thoughts that I’ve had about childhood.’

Eggers has a breathy, laconic way of talking that gives everything he says a carefully measured air, a sense of being repeatedly pored over. He’s plainly pored over Where the Wild Things Are in microscopic detail – first as a terrified child and now as a father. He and his wife, the writer Vendela Vida, have two small children, a girl and a boy.

‘I wrote it between our two children being born. I wanted to write something that might have the same sort of effect on a kid as the books I read when I was young had on me. I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach. It’s like the cement is still wet when you’re that age; every little mark can become permanent.’

Fatherhood has brought other changes, too. When Eggers first started writing, he used to do so between midnight and 5am – always in what he calls a desperate, over-caffeinated, blood-strewn, tear-your-own-ear-off sort of way. ‘I had this romantic idea that I had to be at the end of my rope. But now with kids, I have to work bankers’ hours. Believe me, it’s hard to think of anything less romantic – or more sedentary.’

Given the success Eggers has had – President Barack Obama recently recommended his 2006 book, What is the What, to his cabinet – it comes as quite a surprise to hear him say that he’s never had any confidence in his work.

‘Even now, when I start something, I never think I’ll ever be able to get to the end, or that it will make any sense,’ he says. ‘Actually, The Wild Things is the first book I’ve ever written where I enjoyed it. Normally, there’ll be about one day a month where I think: “Wow, I had a good time today.” But with this, I just sat there chortling away.’

Eggers was in his mid-twenties when he started on A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and if his confidence remains shaky now, it was in a far worse state then. ‘I remember turning in some chapters to an editor and when he said he liked them, I said: “What are you talking about?” I even accused him of not doing his job properly.

'Then when it came out, I felt so conflicted – partly because the title was so ironic. I just thought it would be funny to give the book this grandiose title when, of course, it’s a disaster. I thought about three people would read it and that would be the end of it.’

Except it didn’t quite work out like that. Even now, Eggers says, barely a day goes by without someone coming up and saying how much the book means to them. Not that this makes him feel much better.

‘I’ve had a really complicated relationship with it for some years. In a lot of ways the guy in it is me, but also he isn’t. We were very private people, my family, and that kind of self-revelation is something that was not in any way native to them. In a lot of ways, writing it was an act of rebellion.’

One of the reasons Eggers feels so ambivalent about A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is because of what subsequently happened to his sister, Beth. When the book was published, she accused him of downplaying her role in their brother’s upbringing and beefing up his own. She later recanted saying she’d made a dreadful mistake – ‘I’m so embarrassed. I was having a terrible LaToya Jackson moment.’ Then, in November 2001, Beth Eggers committed suicide.

Eggers has never talked about his sister’s death. But it seems telling that he’s opted to write two books since in which trust has played the key role. In both What is the What and Zeitoun – out here next March – he is telling someone else’s story.

What is the What is the autobiography – albeit written by Eggers – of a real life Sudanese refugee who was separated from his parents, trekked across large swathes of Sudan and eventually came to the US.

Zeitoun is the story of a Muslim family from Syria. Abdulrahman Zeitoun stayed in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, after which he saved the lives of several survivors, only to be interned as a suspected terrorist.

‘As far as I was concerned, I was there to tell their stories,’ Eggers says. ‘But if there was something they didn’t want in, then obviously I’d respect that. I suppose the most important thing with both books was to do no harm – unless it was harm to the Bush administration, which I was absolutely fine with.’

When he’s not sitting on his couch being sedentary, Eggers leads an extremely busy life. He’s the founder of 826 Valencia, a tutoring centre in San Francisco where children between the ages of six and 18 can go to develop their writing skills. He also has a shop in San Francisco that sells nothing but pirate gear.

Then there’s McSweeney’s, which publishes a quarterly literary magazine, a website, a monthly magazine called The Believer and a quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. All Eggers’s proceeds from What is the What went to Sudanese refugees in the US, while those from Zeitoun are going to the Zeitoun Foundation, which is helping in the rebuilding of New Orleans.

Eggers has also become a tireless campaigner for the power of the printed word in an internet age. His magazines aren’t afraid of publishing novella-length stories and his books luxuriate in the kind of playful design that could never be reproduced on a screen.

To hammer the point home, Eggers recently published the San Francisco Panorama, a 320-page, full-colour broadsheet newspaper; it sold out immediately.

He’s clearly seeking to do as much good as possible and I wondered how much his faith in human nature fluctuates between optimism and despair. ‘I think I’m far too hopeful and trusting. That’s something I got from my mum. Because I grew up with this naïve expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation. But however naïve I might be, I do feel that books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: “Let’s not forget this.”’

He breaks off. Our time is up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m babbling again. That’s the thing with me, you see. I never end tidily. I just kind of trail off…'

ON THINKING AND DRINKING

Drinking wine is a serious business, according to Roger Scruton, an academic philosopher. Anthony Gottlieb reviews his book "I Drink Therefore I Am" ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

A minor travail for anyone involved in the world of philosophy is having to endure snatches of Monty Python’s “Philosophers’ Drinking Song” when you are introduced at a party. One must try to smile politely upon learning for the hundredth time that “Socrates himself was permanently pissed", that “Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel”, and that the correct parsing of Descartes’ famous cogito is “I drink, therefore I am”. One might expect a book that takes this slogan as its title to be an embarrassing bore. But Roger Scruton’s "I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine" is never that.

Scruton has written a mostly light-hearted book about a pleasure that he takes very earnestly—indeed his insistence that wine is historically and morally one of the foundations of civilisation gives a new meaning to the term “serious drinker”. He is primarily an academic philosopher, specialising in musical aesthetics, and the author of several excellent accounts of modern thought for the layman. Scruton is also a composer, a conservative pundit, a memoirist, and latterly a devotee of the traditional pastimes of the English country gentleman, especially fox-hunting (of which one of his more than 30 non-fiction books is a passionate defence). "I Drink Therefore I Am" combines many of the ingredients of late-vintage Scruton: social conservativism, a love of the land, philosophical curiosity, and a fondness for uncorking dusty bottles from the cellar of his memory.

A more fitting subtitle might have been “Reflections In Wine”, since the book aims to show how deep facts about the human condition—how, for example, we flourish when rooted in a place and in a culture—can be seen mirrored in the way that wine is made and best appreciated. In addition, the book not infrequently shows signs of having been written by a man in his cups.

Scruton can turn a lovely phrase, especially when sporting his laurels as a prose-poet of nostalgia, and he is an adept expositor of abstract ideas. But in these pages we also read that Cicero was “a jolly good bloke”; that the great medieval Islamic philosopher, Avicenna, “shagged himself to death”; and that Jean-Paul Sartre was “crazy”. We must leaf through Blimpish rants and chauvinist sneers about the “ghastly” clothes of tourists in Italy, the awfulness of anything in plastic bottles, the “sterilizing gaze of American scholars", and the “nonsense prattled out by Richard Dawkins” (I suspect that Scruton is one of those who does not himself believe in God, but thinks it is best for the rest of us to do so). We learn that in the case of wine, “as with women and horses, the real best is second best”.

Scruton can do better than this, and usually does when his tongue has not been inordinately loosened. The trouble with his thesis that wine can make better thinkers of us is that it is equally true that it can make worse thinkers of us, too; and since Scruton seems unable to tell the difference in his own case, he may not be the right person to go to for a theory about the matter.

Still, it is impossible to dislike a man who mixes rosé? into the oats of his beloved horse. (“Sam the Horse” has six entries in the index—more than most philosophers.) "I Drink Therefore I Am" is not only a stimulating read in itself but also has useful tips for those with illiquid finances who are in search of liquid stimulation. Go for little-known vineyards next to famous properties, he counsels, and the second wines of august chateaus—such as, for a very good Pomerol, Branaire Ducru’s Ch. Mazeyres.

The book’s light-hearted appendix, in which Scruton suggests what to drink when reading various philosophical texts, is probably destined for a wide circulation in college bars, at least at Oxford and Cambridge. Some of the tips are philosophical in-jokes (drink tar-water when reading Bishop Berkeley, who eccentrically advocated it as a cure-all) and some are agreeably weak (Heidegger, who wrote copiously about “nothing”, should be toasted with an empty glass). Sartre should be read with a 1964 Burgundy, since that was the year of publication of "Les mots", which Scruton judges to be his best book. Because Scruton regards Sartre as, on balance, a bad man, he is relieved to report that it will probably be impossible to find a 1964 Burgundy.

Descartes, though deserving of recognition, is “the most over-rated philosopher in history”, according to Scruton, and he recommends “a Chateauneuf-du-Pape from old vines, with the smooth velvet finish and liquorice and thyme aromas of the Provencal hillsides. Such a wine will compensate for the thinness of the 'Meditations' and give you rather more to talk about.” Other recommendations are convoluted rather than cheeky, as in the case of Plato: “The sugar in a refined Vouvray is fully integrated into the structure, like the ornaments into a classical façade. Its fluted mineral columns, with their flower-filled capitals, call out for a firm base of argument, of the kind that Plato hoped always to provide.” For Leibniz, we are to try a Crianza or Reserva Rioja, though I would like to know why, and—most bafflingly of all—while Aristotle’s drier works should be accompanied by plain water, the "Prior Analytics" (his treatise on the syllogism) needs to be preceded by a ginger biscuit.

Scruton’s publisher tells us in a blurb that this book is an “antidote to the pretentious clap-trap that is written about wine today.” Perhaps his aim is, in part, to drown out one form of pretentiousness with another, more high-falutin' one.

"I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine" (Continuum), by Roger Scruton, out now

Percussionists Go From Background to Podium
By ALLAN KOZINN
I have been thinking a lot lately about percussion and percussionists. It is not so much because I’m fascinated with the kaleidoscopic array of noises and textures they create — though I am. I’ve been pondering the way percussion has gradually grabbed the spotlight over the last century, and how percussionists have been asserting themselves in the broader musical scene as composers and conductors.
Where a 19th-century orchestral percussionist mostly provided emphasis at cadential points and occasional painterly sound effects — the thunderstorm in the Beethoven“Pastoral” Symphony, for example — his modern descendant oversees a huge array of pitched and unpitched instruments, and from Stravinsky, Varèse and Bartok forward, his work could make or break a performance.
And that’s to say nothing of the expansion of the percussionist’s presence in chamber music. Contemporary chamber ensembles almost always have at least one percussionist on hand, often more, each with more paraphernalia than the rest of the group combined. Soloists like Evelyn Glennie, Steven Schick, Jonathan Haas and Michael Pugliese and groups like So Percussion, the Kroumata Percussion Ensemble and Nexus can fill a stage with a truckload of vibraphones, marimbas, tubular bells, gongs, rattles, drums and assorted items to be hit, struck or whaled on.
Flipping through a stack of program books from recent new-music concerts devoted to chamber works by John Adams, Pierre Boulez, Mario Davidovsky, Kaija Saariaho, Julia Wolfe and Iannis Xenakis, I see that the only ones that don’t involve percussionists are an Arditti Quartet performance and an evening of recent works for violin and cello (by composers who write plentifully for percussion in other contexts). And that’s not counting “Imaginary City,” an inventive production written and performed by the four members of So Percussion.
If you think about it, drums are the new violins.
This is a realization I have come to relatively slowly, given the prominence of percussion in contemporary music, not to mention the number of performances by solo percussionists and percussion ensembles I’ve reviewed over the last two decades. As someone who misspent part of his youth putting together rock bands, I always had the hardest times with the drummers. They were the egotists who wanted their names, rather than the group’s, on their bass drums, and they were the ones who thought that the intricate acoustic number would be a great place for a 20-minute drum solo.
My attitude probably began to change in college, when I sat next to a percussionist in my music-theory class and asked him for advice about a chamber piece (with a percussion part) that I was writing. My problem was that I wanted an effect that used a fairly unwieldy gong, and I planned to use it only once in the entire three-movement piece. “So what’s the problem?” he asked. I told him that as much as I wanted the sound of the gong in that one bar of music, I thought it seemed silly to have the instrument dragged to a concert hall for just one stroke. He laughed and said, “But that’s what we do.”
Of course it is. If you keep a close eye on soloists like Ms. Glennie or groups like So Percussion, when they do their thing, you will not only be satisfied that all the hundreds of items in their stage setups were used at some point in the performance but also that a great many of them were touched only sparingly. If efficiency were the ideal, percussionists would record samples of these items (they are often not actually instruments, but rather tin cans, teapots, brake drums and other found objects) and load them onto a laptop or an electronic keyboard. A composer might do just that. But no self-respecting percussionist would.
Having established their centrality to the sound of contemporary music, percussionists are beginning to make themselves heard in other ways; for example, by composing and conducting. Again the contrast with the 19th century and even the first part of the 20th century is enormous.
Time was when the great composers of the classical canon were overwhelmingly pianists and violinists. So were the most important conductors. It made sense: pianists are trained to deal with varied, often dense polyphonic textures and have cultivated a discipline that lets them control the strands within these textures with a startling independence. That is a skill conductors need. And for composers, there is nothing like a keyboard for trying out passages with complicated rhythmic or harmonic combinations.
Violinists have thrived as conductors for different reasons. One is historical: Before the rise of the nonplaying conductor, orchestras were led by their concertmasters. And given that strings make up the largest part of an orchestra, and their sound is often a crucial part of its sonic personality, it is useful for a conductor to know about string tone and technique from the inside.
But as the music has changed, from string-, wind- and brass-driven Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler and even Schoenberg to modern works of all stripes, in which the percussion lines are frequently in the spotlight, percussionists have moved out of the background. This change was well under way by the mid-1960s. John Cage, though principally a pianist, was drawn toward percussion in the 1930s and ’40s, and organized ensembles for which he wrote his “Constructions” and other works.
Steve Reich began his musical life as a percussionist, and a seminal part of his training was his study of traditional drum techniques in Ghana. When he assembled his own ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, vibraphones and marimbas were central, and the magnum opus of his early years was “Drumming.”
Skip a generation, and you’ve got composing percussionists everywhere: Lukas Ligeti composes works in styles that skirt classical, jazz and world music; Glenn Kotche, the drummer for Wilco, writes percussion music that sounds at home at a new-music concert. (He performed some with the Bang on a Can All-Stars at Alice Tully Hall in March. Ms. Glennie, though a vigorous commissioner of new works by established composers, has written plenty of music herself, and the So Percussion ensemble is as likely to perform its own music (particularly that of Jason Treuting, its principal composer) as that of Mr. Reich or anyone else.
Conducting is the final frontier, and percussionists have been quietly trading one form of stick technique for another. The incursion began at least 41 years ago when Jean-Claude Casadesus, a percussionist in new-music circles in the 1960s, was appointed resident conductor at the Opéra de Paris and the Opéra Comique; he later founded the National Orchestra of Lille.
But though Mr. Casadesus conducts a reasonable amount of contemporary music, his repertory is generally mainstream. Perhaps a better example of a percussionist bringing the skills he forged on his instrument to the podium is Jeffrey Milarsky. Once a regular percussionist on New York’s new-music circuit, Mr. Milarsky performs mostly as a conductor now, and he specializes in contemporary works for which an ability to sort out rhythmic complexities is vital. He has filled in for James Levine with the Met Chamber Ensemble in a Milton Babbitt program, and as the director of the Juilliard School’s new Axiom ensemble, he has conducted programs of Elliott Carter and, a few weeks ago, Mr. Adams.
When conductors with Mr. Milarsky’s skills and interests begin to be taken seriously by the major orchestras, things might get interesting. It may take a musician with a percussionist’s ear for polyrhythms to make complex works sound eloquent and expressive to listeners who currently resist them. And maybe a generation of percussionists turned conductors will accomplish the renovation of the orchestral canon that is now nearly a century overdue.

'00's

Top o' the '00s: A hypertextual decennial abecedary extravaganza!
Anthony Lane on Her Majesty in "Battle Royal," a review of The Queen in The New Yorker, Oct. 9, 2006.Hot Brit-on-Brit action. Probably the greatest critic-on-movie match-up of all time. (It surpasses James Agee's review of The Lost Weekend, an appropriately evasive lush-on-lush spectacle.) Themes include the aristocracy of taste and the English way of death, the facade of Tony Blair, and the carriage of Helen Mirren. Divine, right?
"BLAK IZ BLAK" in Bamboozled, a film by Spike Lee, released Oct. 20, 2000.The three important big-screen media critiques of the 20th century were A Face in the Crowd, Network, and Spike's blackface fantasia—a terrifically bracing and terribly uneven nightmare about the racial politics of American entertainment. The terrorist group at the mic—called the Mau Maus and led by Mos Def's Big Blak Afrika—is fiercer than the stars of UBS's Mao Tse-Tung Hour.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in Andrea Lee's "Pennsylvania" in the anthology State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. Edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, published Sept. 16, 2008.I defy you to name a coming-of-age story riper or lusher than this. See also Philip Roth's blurb for the short-story collection Interesting Women (2002): "Andrea Lee is the real thing. There is nothing else to say."
The design of the jacket of the 2006 Penguin Classics edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker. Executed by Seth.Do buy a copy even if you own an earlier edition. You might as well live well. Vicious graphic elegance.
The end titles of Inland Empire, a film directed by David Lynch that premiered in the United States at the New York Film Festival, October 2006.After a press screening of the best film I have ever taken two distinct naps in, the director and his stars took the stage for a Q and A. A reporter tried to probe Lynch's very special pulsing mass of gelatinous weirdness by asking him about Luis Buñuel. Lynch was sorry that he couldn't be of help: "Welp, I'm not much of a film buff."
You probably don't want to sit through the whole movie, so zip to the end. This spectacular features the amazing face of Laura Dern (also fabulous in 2008's Recount), the witchy allure of Laura Elena Harring (also fabulous as Rita and/or/and Camilla in 2001's Mulholland Dr., the best film of the decade), and, further, a monkey. Nina Simone provides the music, but there is no band.
The F-word in Burn After Reading, a film directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, released Sept. 12, 2008.Let me sleep on A Serious Man for a few more weeks. Speaking of sleep, let me wonder one more time whether No Country for Old Men shoots itself in the foot or knee or forehead at the very end with Tommy Lee Jones' dream recap. Let me propose the misanthropic hilarity of Burn After Reading as the Coens' great achievement of the decade, a cookie laced with radioactive polonium.
Gershkin in The Russian Debutante's Handbook, a novel by Gary Shteyngart, published June 6, 2002."The story of Vladimir Gershkin—part P.T. Barnum, part V.I. Lenin, the man who would conquer half of Europe (albeit the wrong half)—begins the way so many other things begin. On a Monday morning. In an office. With the first cup of instant coffee gurgling to life in the common lounge." It ends in Cleveland, Ohio, with the hero looking like Plucky Jim or Russian-berry Finn.
Further reading: Daniel Zalewski's portrait of the artist.
"Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs," an exhibit conceived by Alice Rose George, Gilles Peress, Michael Shulan, and Charles Traub. Opened at 116 Prince Street on Sept. 25, 2001.It endures between the covers of a superlative book, which will itself endure as a heartrending monument long after most Sept. 11 books have been pulped.
In-flight Television. JetBlue started operations on Feb. 11, 2000.Travel broadens the mind.
Jude in I'm Not There, a film directed by Todd Haynes, released Nov. 21, 2007.Vocals by Stephen Malkmus, vibes by Cate Blanchett. I know that something's happening here, and I doubt that Dylan himself knows what it is. Moreover: After Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love," the single of the decade was Malkmus' "Baby, C'mon" (2005). The song is a come-on, of course, a plea. The scream at the end sounds like the wail of a newborn, as if the seduction came off flawlessly.
The kiss blown by Beyoncé at the 1:40 mark in "Crazy in Love," a video directed by Jake Nava, released May 2003.Bubblegum pop will eat itself.
Leggings. Going on and on.1. See here.2. See Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up (2000): "If anything, 'sexual revolution' was rather a prim term for the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000." Wolfe, whose I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004) ranks among the decade's most underrated novels, here riffs on sartorial decorum, cultural decadence, and good old Friedrich N.: "Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century 'on the mere pittance' of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of 'the total eclipse of all values.' "
3. Whatevs. Here is some video of, by, and for chicks who know their way around Godard.
Maria Elena in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a film directed by Woody Allen, released Aug. 15, 2008.Penélope Cruz is the real thing.
For your further consideration: Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces (2009), Jake Paltrow's The Good Night (2006) and Joachim Rønning & Espen Sandberg's Bandidas (2006), the finest south-of-the-border wild-West comedy since Three Amigos!
"The Nightmare of Consumption" in The Corrections, a novel by Jonathan Franzen, published Sept. 14, 2001. Hysterical and supra-real in the high-art literary tradition, the passage beginning on Page 93 of The Corrections finds poor, hapless Chip Lambert going to buy a piece of salmon at a downtown Manhattan supermarket, one of the Dean & Deluca look-a-likes: "The supergentry of SoHo and Tribeca were streaming through the Nightmare's brushed-steel portals. The men came in various shapes and sizes, but all the women were slim and thirty-six; many were both slim and pregnant." Turns out that the fish costs $78.40. Poor hapless Chip, shoplifting, puts the fillet in his pants, where it spreads "like a wide, warm slug." This is serious comedy—Jenny Holzer meets Harpo Marx.
On the topic of sticky fingers, summon a moment of nostalgia for The Free Winona Movement (criminal complaint filed Feb. 1, 2002).
Oscar Night with the Apatow Company. The Kodak Theatre, Feb. 22, 2009.Remembered—or, preferably, forgotten—as the Slumdog Millionaire year, the 81st Annual Academy Awards brought us a tour de force stoner-comedy metatext. It's better than Slumdog—duh—but also Pineapple Express itself, maybe, and even Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.
Prince at the Super Bowl XLI Halftime Show. Dolphin Stadium, Feb. 4, 2007.I do not know which to prefer, the squalling inflections of the "All Along the Watchtower" cover or the rolling innuendos of "Proud Mary." But I am sure that the serendipitous finale amounted to a sublime argument for old-time big-tent network television as the Caribbean drizzle fell from the clouds and we went bathing in "Purple Rain." The greatest halftime show of all time and the most dearly beloved.
Quentin Tarantino's speech at the New York premiere of Inglourious Basterds, SVA Theatre, Aug. 17, 2009."Vulture Presents the Complete Transcript …"
"Relationshipism," the New Republic, Nov. 18, 2002.Say what you will about Lee Siegel, but in his Sex and the City piece—a hall-of-fame takedown—he works it like SJP sashaying down Charles Street for the paparazzi. "Carrie is really dating the idea of New York purveyed by Sex and the City; she is really dating her television."
Sofia Single Mini Blanc de Blancs, available from Francis Ford Coppola Winery in Geyserville, Calif., since 2004."A distinctive blend as unconventional as the woman who inspired it"—Pinot Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc, and Muscat in a can. The sales pitch continues: "Effervescent. Revolutionary. Cool. Poetic. Sparkling. Petulant."
Even tastier: "I Want Candy" in Marie Antoinette (2006), "écrit et réalisé par SOFIA COPPOLA." The film's soundtrack features the Gang of Four's "Natural's Not in It," which rhymes pleasure with leisure; the chimes of horse bells, for that disquieting Belle du Jour jangle; and the Strokes, because Sofia says they're cool. But this set pièce de résistance takes the cake that it would have let the people eat. It's tough to sort out the gaming chips from the petit fours. Sparkling. Petulant.
TK
"Unweaving the Rainbow, or Spencer Finch's Optics," an essay by Suzanne Hudson in Spencer Finch: What Time Is It on the Sun?, published by MASS MoCA, Aug. 1, 2007."Conceived not as resemblance but as sublime phenomenological effect, Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004) (2004) forsakes iconicity for hallucinatory indexicality. Finch assembled one hundred flourescent tubes that together re-create the precise quality of the light he experienced in the poet's yard until a cloud passed overhead. A makeshift Mylar cloud—a big mess of murkily brilliant, theatrical filters held together with clothespins—refracts the intense evanescence into a complementary pallid haze."
See also: The River That Flows Both Ways at the High Line.
Virginia Heffernan on "Seven-minute Sopranos" on her old New York Times blog.April 3, 2007: "Matt Weiner, one of the executive producers of The Sopranos, says that Mr. Guylas and Mr. Sabia might be the only two viewers to ever really understand the complexities of Billy Leotardo. Not to mention the whole series!"
April 18, 2007: "Semi-sabotage is how good online video often gets made."
"Watergate Squat" in My Life in CIA, a novel by Harry Mathews, published by Dalkey Archive Press, May 2005.A word game in a cult-classic spy spoof where an Oulipo all-star teaches the youngsters a thing or two about postmodern horseplay and geopolitical paranoia. (Statistically improbable phrases: squat squat squat, cell secretary.)
Zendol put on an LP. The tune he chose turned out to be "Watergate Squat" from Air America's last album. I took my time clearing away the rugs. When I'd finished, I had the tune down pat. "Can we start over?"
I danced through the opening instrumental introduction and started singing as soon as the vocal began:
Not bitch fascist (squat!) with swastikaAnd bumper (squat!) double-cross stickerLet's anagram (squat!) and acrostic herLet's lock her in a paddockIn six feet of rotten haddockSing high (squat!), speak low (squat!)Ho heigh (squat!), heigh ho (squat!)Then we'll go play chess (squat!) life-size in Marostica!.........Squat squat squat,.........Squat squat
But girl as fair (squat!) as spring jonquilTurns me on (squat!) more than plonk willWithout her I'll (squat!) never be tronquilI drink to her in select rumPluck her sweet chords with my plectrumSing high (squat!), speak low (squat!)Ho heigh (squat!), heigh ho (squat!)I'll write her fine praises (squat!) with my feathery long quill.........Squat squat squat.........Squat squat
The squatting was taking the breath out of me. Every time I turned, my head sprayed sweat. But Florence was watching me with the sweetest smile.
Maybe seen from far (squat!) or maybe seen nearSo sweetly (squat!) sweetly teeny herFace as disputed (squat!) as RutheniaNo other's worth a farthingNot in painting or in carvingSing high (squat!), speak low (squat!)Ho heigh (squat!), heigh ho (squat!)For her I'll hide my heart (squat!), my heart in this gardenia.........Squat squat squat,.........Squat squatIn this gardenia.........Squat squat squat,.........Squat squatIn this gardenia.........Squat squat squat squat squat squat squat squat
.........Squat.
See also "The Art of Fiction No. 191" in The Paris Review, spring 2007.
And speaking of central intelligence, take a gander at Hal Hartley's great Fay Grim (2006)—a crackpot indie-rock espionage thriller amounting to the real Syriana.
Xclamation pointe in The Informant!, a film directed by Steven Soderbergh, released Sept. 18, 2009.The finest punctuation of its kind since Three Amigos! What a way to punctuate a decade! What transforming ambition! Soderbergh, who ended the last decade with a fun book on the director of Help!, began this one recording a classic DVD commentary track for The Limey, that hard-scrambled masterpiece. Then he made a dozen features—riddles about factorial intrigues, epics about exploding fragments, exclamatory digital splinters. Each one of these diverse pictures is a heist film, and he's getting away with a brilliant career. Soderbergh lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Jules Asner, formerly a reporter for the cable channel E!.
Further viewing: The revolutionary battle scenes in Che (2008); The Girlfriend Experience (2009) one-sheet.
"You're Gonna Frey" and "A Different Tack," Nealpollack.com, April 29, 2003, and Jan. 8, 2006, respectively.A matched set of bitch slaps. First, prescient Pollack (who was then deeply into his mock-pomposity shtick) challenged the minorly literate James Frey (who had been talking unsupportable trash at an unpleasant volume) to a duel, which Pollack won before his gauntlet had hit the ground. In the second—a wet kiss goodnight to a freshly proven fraud—Pollack slips into the counterfeit confessionalist's soft leather shoes: "It's been a hard life because the cops won't start—I mean stop—beating me up. … I'm sorry about all the bad things I've done. Now buy my books."
See also: The punk album Never Mind the Pollacks (2003) by the Neal Pollack Invasion, especially its lead single, "I Wipe My Ass on Your Novel."
Zadie Smith.Was the decade's best young American novelist a British essayist? Exhibit A—"Speaking in Tongues" in the New York Review of Books, Feb. 26, 2009, about Barack Obama's talent for doing the populace in different voices. Exhibit B—In conversation in Cambridge, Mass., Sept. 17, 2002, about David Foster Wallace's talent for prose: "Wheee!"

OPERA

This consistently entertaining and stimulating history of opera gets off to cracking start with a quotation from a doleful letter to The Times written in 1853 by a gentleman identifying himself only as 'C T'. Although in possession of a ticket for which he had paid the princely sum of seven shillings, he was denied entry to the Royal Opera House 'because the cut of my dress coat was not what it ought to be according to the ideas of the doorkeeper'. Neither prolonged protests nor subsequent attempts to obtain a refund got him anywhere. This episode neatly illustrates the dual themes of continuity and change that run through Daniel Snowman's book. On the one hand, the abrasive approach to customer relations has not changed; on the other hand, 'C T' would certainly not be denied entry on sartorial grounds today.
Drawing on a knowledge of musical history distinguished by both depth and breadth, Snowman manages to keep four kinds of analysis going in a mutually supportive way: political, social, cultural and financial. Here, too, everything has changed but everything has stayed the same. François Mitterand's motive in building the Opéra Bastille was essentially the same as the Duke of Mantua's motive in staging Monteverdi's operas, namely the representation of power. If the social composition of audiences has changed over the centuries, their desire to see and be seen has not. Styles of composition, production and performance may come and go but the core combination of music, text, drama and spectacle remains. Financial pressure has also been a constant, for opera is unusual if not unique among the arts in that its production costs invariably outrun income.
One thing that has certainly changed for the better has been behaviour in the auditorium. Until deep into the nineteenth century, the opera house was more a social centre than a temple of the arts. Its visitors chatted, flirted, smoked, drank, gambled and - behind the drawn curtains of the boxes - made love. Every now and again they even turned their attention to the stage, when a favourite performer was singing a favourite aria. Using one of the many original but apposite similes that enliven his narrative, Snowman compares a night at the opera to a night at a jazz club: 'somewhere sophisticated to go with friends, while away a long evening and, in passing, enjoy the highlights of whatever entertainment was on offer'.
Until the technological advances that brought cinema, gramophone recordings and radio, opera enjoyed something of a monopoly of entertainment in many towns, especially in Germany and Italy. This is revealed not only by the many travellers' tales cited here, but also by a number of statistics, none more arresting than the information that the 2,100 seats of the new National Theatre in Munich, opened in 1818, could accommodate 4 per cent of the city's population. An equivalent theatre in London or New York today would require a seating capacity of 400,000.
The ever-sensitive antennae of politicians were not slow to detect the opportunities offered by such a popular art form. Their most thorough-going exploiter was, characteristically, Napoleon. The Paris Opéra cost him nearly a million francs a year, he commented, but it was money well spent, because it 'flattered national vanity', something that has never been in short supply in France. It represented, he believed, everything he was trying to foster: hierarchy, power, continuity, stability and affluence. It was through his carefully stage-managed appearances at the Opéra that he celebrated military victories, presented his new Habsburg wife to Parisian high society and gloried in the birth of his son and heir.
It was another Napoleon - his nephew - who commissioned the great new opera house in Paris now known as the Palais Garnier, whose construction required the demolition of a whole city quarter. Alas, by the time it was ready for its opening night in 1875, Napoleon III was long gone. Having abdicated after defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, he died in exile in England in 1873. So sumptuous was his creation and so much does it tell us about the relationship between power and culture that more detail would have been welcome than the rather perfunctory account offered here.
More space is found for an almost exactly simultaneous project - Richard Wagner's festival theatre at Bayreuth, which opened in 1876, having cost seventy times less than the Paris Opéra. Snowman writes with real insight and understanding about Wagner ('the most protean of artists'), even managing to resist the temptation to tell us yet again what a horrid person he was. Rather he observes that Wagner had created what by any standards was 'one of the greatest single artistic achievements of any single human being'.
If the first part of the book is of necessity concerned exclusively with Europe, due attention is paid to the rest of world in the second, as opera gradually went global in the nineteenth century. Indeed, perhaps the attention paid to the American or Australian scene is a little overdone. A page or two fewer on the admittedly highly entertaining excesses of the New York millionaires might have allowed a page or two more on, say, the achievements of English National Opera, which comes off rather lightly by comparison with its more prestigious, better subsidised but often less distinguished rival at Covent Garden.
Nor will everyone agree with the rather downbeat note on which the book ends. Although Snowman does manage the odd flicker of optimism, the main thrust of his conclusion is that he has been charting 'the rise, ascendancy, decline and fall of an old-fashioned, elite art form whose time has come and (nearly) gone'. In particular, he does not pay sufficient attention to the technological advances that have made it possible to enjoy superlative operatic performances on DVD any time and anywhere. Three-dimensional reproduction can only be just round the corner. These cavils aside, this book is a mighty achievement, by far and away the best history of opera available.
Tim Blanning is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His most recent book is 'The Triumph of Music' (Penguin, 2008).

CHRISTMAS

It is ironic that Christmas, the season of goodwill to all, is so often fraught with tension. Indeed, Christmas seems to make us even more conscious than usual of our differences and the things that divide us. Mindful of the atheists who complain about the Christmas tree in the town hall, and anxious not to offend people of other faiths, we nervously avoid mentioning "Christmas" too frequently during "the holidays."

And what does it all mean? In the malls, temples of consumerism, carols alternate incongruously with jingles about Santa and reindeer. Increasingly the story of Jesus' birth seems pushed to the margins, an unhistorical, sentimental anachronism that has little to say to our troubled world. I believe, however, that it has something crucial to tell us. But first, we have to understand what kind of narrative it is.

The Christmas story is told only in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in the Bible. None of the other New Testament writers seem to have heard of Jesus' miraculous conception or the spectacular events that occurred at his birth. But Matthew and Luke were not writing factual biographies. Their Gospels were composed in the 80s, some 50 years after Jesus' death, and would have been immediately recognized as innovative meditations upon Hebrew scripture, similar to the Midrashic commentaries that the rabbis of Palestine were developing at this time.

The rabbis did not regard revelation from God as something that had happened once in the distant past. It was a continuous process, because every time a Jew confronted the sacred text it meant something different. Instead of concentrating on the original intentions of the biblical authors, they looked for something new that would speak directly to the current needs of their community. So they felt no qualms about changing the sacred words when they wanted to make a point and regularly brought together wholly unrelated texts in a "chain" (horoz) that, in this new juxtaposition, gave them an entirely different meaning.

Christian evangelists used similar methods, seeing the ancient biblical prophecies as cryptic references to the Messiah (Greek: Christos). Indeed, they treat Hebrew scripture almost as one of their sources for his life story. Matthew, for example, models his account of Jesus' birth on the early life of Moses, who escaped Pharaoh's massacre of Israelite children, just as Jesus escaped King Herod's slaughter of the babies in Bethlehem by fleeing to Egypt, whence, like Moses, he would return to save his people.

Unconcerned about historical accuracy, therefore, Matthew and Luke tell entirely different stories. Placed at the beginning of their Gospels, the infancy narratives act as a preface, giving the reader a foretaste of how each evangelist understood Jesus' mission. Matthew wants to show that Jesus was a messiah for Gentiles as well as for Jews, so he tells us that the Magi from the east were the first to recognize him. Luke, however, always emphasizes Jesus' concern for the poor and marginalized, so he makes a group of shepherds (who were sometimes regarded as sinners by the pious Jewish establishment because they did not observe the purity laws) the first to hear the good news.

For the rabbis, scripture was not an arcane message from the past but a miqra, a summons to action in the present. Similarly, Matthew and Luke designed the Christmas story as a program of action for their mixed congregations of Jews and Gentiles, who were attempting the difficult task of living and worshiping with people hitherto regarded as alien. Their Gospels make it a tale of inclusion: From the very beginning, Jesus broke down the barriers that divided people, so Jesus' followers must gladly welcome outsiders into their midst.

If, therefore, we read the Christmas story as commentary, as Midrash, it becomes a miqra for our own time, and for circumstances the evangelists would recognize. We might, for example, reflect on the fact that Matthew's Magi probably came from Iran. Or note that in our multicultural societies, we must come to terms with people who are different from ourselves and whose presence in our lives may challenge us at a profound level. Moreover, as a species, we are bound tightly to one another -- electronically, financially and politically. Unless we manage together to create a just and equitable global society, in which we treat all nations with respect and consideration, we are unlikely to have a viable world to pass on to the next generation.



The Gospels paint a picture that is very different from the cozy stable scene on the Christmas cards. They speak of deprivation and displacement. The Messiah himself is an outsider. There is no room in the inn, so Mary has to give birth in the 1st-century equivalent of an urban alleyway. As victims of Herod's tyranny, the Holy Family become refugees; other innocents are slaughtered. If we attend carefully to these parts of the story, the specter of contemporary suffering -- within our own society and worldwide -- will haunt our festivities. And we are left with the disturbing suggestion that the future, for good or ill, may lie with those who are currently excluded.

For Luke, the pregnant Mary becomes a prophetess, proclaiming a new order in which the lowly will be exalted and the mighty pulled down from their thrones. At the beginning of his story, he reminds his readers of Caesar Augustus, who, like the Roman emperors who succeeded him, described himself as "God," "Son of God," the "Savior" and "Lord" who would bring peace to the world. Official proclamations and inscriptions throughout the empire announced "the good news" (Greek: euvaggelion) of Roman rule to the subject peoples. Luke's readers would have noticed that the angel who proclaims "good news" to the shepherds applies all those imperial titles to a child born in a hovel.

For the faithful and nonbelievers, for Christmas celebrators and skeptics, this is how to answer the question of what the season means: Religion has often been used to endorse an iniquitous status quo. But the Christmas story is a salutary reminder that faith has also encouraged radical visions for a more compassionate world. We need such a vision now.

Karen Armstrong is the author of many books on religion, most recently "The Case for God." In November, she launched the Charter for Compassion, a global initiative to bring compassion back to the center of religious, moral, public and private life. charterforcompassion.org