Author: Mark Athitakis

Steinbeck’s Whitewash

by Mark Athitakis, posted in John Steinbeck, Louis Owens

Tony Ortega‘s feature “Louis Owens and John Steinbeck’s Ghosts” is something of a hybrid of personal essay and literary essay. Starting with the suicide of novelist Louis Owens six years ago, the Village Voice editor recalls his research of Steinbeck’s novel In Dubious Battle, which uses white Okies instead of the Mexicans who actually participated in the Great Cotton Strike of 1933. The entire piece is worth your time—it’s a nice tribute to Owens and an interesting exploration of Ortega’s own family ties to the strike. But this bit summarizes what’s at issue:

Making the workers all one ethnicity made sense in a couple of ways—not only was it easier to consider groupthink among a homogenous group, but by 1936, when the book was published, many more white Okies had poured into California as a result of the Dust Bowl in the Midwest. You could argue that Steinbeck wasn’t only “whitewashing” the details of the strike in his novel to keep his theme pure, but also to reflect the times.

Other things, however, weren’t so easy to reconcile—in particular, some troubling remarks that the author had made in newspaper articles at about the same time. More than once, Steinbeck made the point that it was time for the larger public to pay more attention to the plight of farm workers for the very reason that so many of them were now white. As he put it, “their blood was strong”; democracy, he argued, came more “naturally” to the white farm worker, who wasn’t going to put up with the kind of treatment that earlier workers had.

Although Steinbeck didn’t use the bigoted language that was so common at the time, he was nevertheless implying that the “blood” of the Mexican workers wasn’t “strong,” that democracy didn’t come naturally to them, when the opposite was true: Organizers found the Mexicans more willing to stand up for their rights.

Harlan Ellison Has Just About Had it With Kids These Days

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Harlan Ellison

The so-called millennials have been on my mind lately: Last weekend I spent a little time at an educators’ conference where Topic A often was the frustration of teaching to a new group of college students that (according to the anecdotes) has Dad call the prof when grades are subpar, thinks the best way to save a department is to remove everybody older than 30, and feels it’s OK to e-mail the prof to ask, “Are doing anything important in class today?” Whether this means that the Everybody-Gets-a-Trophy generation will be our ruin or that my generation is simply full of grumpy old coots is an open question, but Harlan Ellison knows what side he’s on. His interview with the Toronto Sun is ostensibly about the DVD release of Masters of Science Fiction, a series of films, originally aired on Starz last year, that includes the Ellison-scripted The Discarded. But the good stuff involves Ellison’s “splenetic rage” at the students he met at UCLA recently:

At a recent lecture in front of 27 students at UCLA, Ellison used a reference to “the emperor’s new clothes” as a metaphor. “And they all looked at me with a blank expression. I literally had to go back to the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale and explain to them the whole thing. And they still looked at me and they still didn’t get it. So I had to explain what the trope was and what it meant.”

By the end of the lecture, after hitting other dead ends in the conversation, “I launched into a splenetic rage about their cultural ignorance. And, of course, they were furious with me: ‘Who the hell do I think I am?’

“It is part of that automatic cultural response in this age of slackers, or Y generationals, or millennials, or whatever the f..k they’re calling themselves these days. Not only are they ignorant of everything — everything! — but they’re arrogant about their ignorance. They take great pride in not knowing or bestoying geezerdom on anything or anyone who achieved anything prior to their emergence.”

An Opera of One’s Own

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Amy Tan

My knowledge of opera is admittedly shaky, but there are more operas based on American novels than McTeague, yes? Maybe it’s a San Francisco thing: Next month marks the world premiere of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, an opera inspired by Amy Tan‘s S.F.-set novel. Tan’s comments about it to the Wall Street Journal in an interview shows that her responses are as airy as ever (“My role as a librettist was not words. It was story, and emotion within that story.”), but it’s an attitude that works:

I’m writing another novel. I’ve done a lot of the research. I have the structure in my mind. That’s a lot of it. Have I got a lot of pages? No, but that part is OK. In most things creatively you have to get these other things going. The most difficult part is finding the voice and the sense of what the story is.

Posting Will Be Light…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dept. of Self-Promotion, George Pelecanos

as I head out of town for a couple of days. In the meantime, I’m not so humble that I won’t recommend “A Pelecanos Dictionary,” my attempt to discuss George Pelecanos‘ new novel, The Turnaround, in terms of some of his most persistent themes, tics, settings, and so forth:

Pelecanos has spent more than 15 years writing 15 novels that, taken together, make for a panoramic story about Washington, D.C. That’s a lot of waterfronts, a lot of neglected corners, and—to pick just one of the writer’s hobby horses—a whole lot of references to Stax/Volt singles. But there’s an irony buried in this career path: As his study of the city has deepened, his writing has become more and more simplified. Read his books in chronological order—starting with 1992’s A Firing Offense up to the brand-new The Turnaround—and the change in Pelecanos’ writing mirrors the change in a typical Pelecanos character. There’s a youthful recklessness, then a growing wisdom about the world’s complexities, then a kind of essentialized understanding of it. As his characters have gone through a debullshitification process, so has he.

Back to the usual schedule on Monday.

War Stories

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Robert Stone, Tim O'Brien, William Faulkner

At the Oxford University Press blog, Keith Gandal writes something of a, er, call to arms to academic critics to engage more deeply with the subject of literature and war. Gandal is a Northern Illinois University English professor who’s written The Pen and the Gun, which has a great thesis: “Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner were motivated, in their famous postwar novels, not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences.”

Gandal figures he knows what’s created the dearth of war stories in academia:

We know why the subjects of war and the military have fallen out of favor, and why most professors in English, as well as history, prefer to oppose war and criticize the military rather than to study them. The Vietnam War changed the meaning of war and of the military in this country, at least on the left, and the cohort of professors that for the most part has dominated and set trends in these fields in the last twenty years is of the generation that came of age during the Vietnam era; most of these professors were students when the huge protest against the war took place, and most of them were against the war.

What struck me here is that thinking back to my high school and college days (late ’80s and early ’90s), I can recall that a great many novels about war were recommended to me, appearing on supplementary reading lists and the like, but I can’t think of an occasion when they were actually taught as part of the syllabus. I had to find Catch-22 and Going After Cacciato on my own; I never even heard of books like Dog Soldiers until I was out of college. This may speak more to the shortcomings of my schooling, but it’s interesting how rarely war literature made it to the discussion table.

The Killer Inside We

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy

In Esquire, Stephen Marche neatly connects our current obsession with violence to the bloodiness of Cormac McCarthy‘s novels. Marche’s evidence mainly sticks to Grand Theft Auto and mixed martial arts, but no matter, it’s still a good excuse to get a good quote in:

I hear my mother asking, “Why must our paradises be so violent?” Cormac McCarthy has an answer. From “Blood Meridian,” McCarthy’s masterpiece: “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. . . . That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.” We can choose to sublimate violence through sports or confront it through fiction or turn it into comedy through video games. Violence remains. Always.

Taking a tone that’s a little less up-in-arms, my Washington City Paper colleague Brent Burton wrote a fine piece a while back about metal musicians’ embrace of McCarthy’s corpus:

When asked why McCarthy makes such a strong impression on headbangers—especially those who eschew vocals—Dahlquist suggests that imagery might be just as important as structure. “If I get something in my head,” he says, “maybe someone else will, as well.” Dylan Carlson, the man behind drone-metal act Earth, a band that once featured Kurt Cobain, would no doubt agree. Sidelined for years by drugs—O’Malley claims Carlson “cheated death,” just like a character in a McCarthy novel—Carlson reemerged in late 2005 with the all-instrumental Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method, an album based on—you guessed it—Blood Meridian. “[T]his book was the strongest invocation of the real American West I had ever encountered outside of a straight historical text,” Carlson said in an interview with British webzine Metal Chaos.

A Drinking Life

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ethan Canin

Seattle’s new Words & Wine series still has a few kinks to work out, says Paul Constant, reporting on its Ethan Canin event in the Stranger: “Canin’s new novel is America America, so someone had decided that the thing to play was Neil Diamond’s ‘America.'” But cocktails do open an author up:

He talked at length about his career as a doctor, mentioning, for example, that “the only time I ever got sued” was a result of attempting to treat a gunshot victim, adding cryptically that “finding an entry wound is much harder than finding the exit wound.” He told aspiring authors to relax and let the subtext of their books remain in the unconscious and not to overanalyze: “Symbols are not symbols because Harold Bloom says they’re symbols.” He reflected on the positive side of America’s possible impending demise as a global superpower. It might be true that we won’t be the wealthiest people in the world, but on the other hand, “it could be a good thing. Italians don’t have to worry about their place in the world anymore, and they seem pretty relaxed.”

If Timmy Doesn’t Get His Finger Paints, the Terrorists Win

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Michael Chabon

Art increases the sense of our common humanity. The imagination of the artist is, therefore, a profoundly moral imagination: the easier it is for you to imagine walking in someone else’s shoes, the more difficult it then becomes to do that person harm. If you want to make a torturer, first kill his imagination. If you want to create a nation that will stand by and allow torture to be practiced in its name, then go ahead and kill its imagination, too. You could start by cutting school funding for art, music, creative writing and the performing arts.

— From Michael Chabon‘s introduction (PDF) to Barack Obama‘s arts policy statement (PDF). Apologies to those for whom this is old news. It’s only just now hit my radar. (via)

Elkin’s Early Days

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Bernard Malamud, Stanley Elkin

Writing in Nextbook, Sarah Almond takes a look at one of Stanley Elkin‘s lesser-known early novels, 1967’s A Bad Man. The novel, a surrealistic portrait of a half-Jewish man’s tenure in prison, has hint’s of Elkin’s own life in it (though he never did jail time). But the bigger influence may have been Bernard Malamud—as a sort of model of how not to write about Jewishness. Almond explains:

In the Spring 1967 issue of The Massachusetts Review, while still at work on A Bad Man, Elkin critiqued Malamud’s masterpiece [The Fixer] as “bringing about some telling stasis. . . . The Fixer is immensely moving, but this quality is at once its supreme achievement and part of its downfall.” Even Malamud’s most ardent supporters had noted the author’s frequent use of symbolism—in The Fixer as well as past works like The Assistant—to illustrate the moral implications of Jewishness. …. For Elkin, such allusions were too predictable. “It’s always seemed to me that the best kind of book is the open-ended book where anything can happen,” he later told Peter Bailey in an interview for Review of Contemporary Fiction. “I hate a book which has one premise and the writer sticks to that premise so tightly that . . . the reader has no room to breathe.”

The Hot 200

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dashiell Hammett, Paul West, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Berger, Tom Disch

I don’t envy the task that David Madden has before him: The California State University, Sacramento English professor is spending the rest of the year finishing the Encyclopedia of 20th Century American Fiction, which is set to be published in 2010. Not only are there going to be plenty of ingrates who’ll get similar info cheap and easy, he has to limit the book’s contents to about 200 authors. He bemoans his fate a little in the Sacramento Bee:

Who goes in? Who gets left out? “When you make selections, you are also deleting somebody,” Madden said. For example, Tom Disch won’t make it, even though his New York Times obituary this month quoted the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts as saying his work was “important” and “Swiftian.”… [But] he included authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They’re writers sometimes put in the pulp genre but who were hugely influential. Lesser-knowns like Paul West and Thomas Berger, author of “Little Big Man,” made it, too.