David Wallace - Both Flesh and Not - Essays

5 Be warned that much of the mom-based psychologizing seems right out of Oprah, e.g., “However, by urging her son to realize the ambitions she had defined for herself, she unwittingly induced a sense of unworthiness in him that became the chief obstacle to his self-assertion.”

6 Williamson’s chapters on Borges’s sudden world fame will be of special interest to those American readers who weren’t yet alive or reading in the mid-1960s. I was lucky enough to discover Borges as a kid, but only because I happened to find Labyrinths, an early English-language collection of his most famous stories, on my father’s bookshelves in 1974. I believed that the book was there only because of my parents’ unusually fine literary taste and discernment — which verily they do possess — but what I didn’t know was that by 1974 Labyrinths was also on tens of thousands of other U.S. homes’ shelves, that Borges had actually been a sensation on the order of Tolkien and Gibran among hip readers of the previous decade.

7 Labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, doubles — so many of the elements that appear over and over in Borges’s fiction are symbols of the psyche turned inward.

1 A subcorollary here is that it’s a bit odd that Houghton Mifflin and the Best American series tend to pick professional writers to be their guest editors. There are, after all, highly expert professional readers among the industry’s editors, critics, scholars, etc., and the guest editor’s job here is really 95 percent readerly. Underlying the series’ preference for writers appears to be one or both of the following: (a) the belief that someone’s being a good writer makes her eo ipso a good reader — which is the same reasoning that undergirds most blurbs and MFA programs, and is both logically invalid and empirically false (trust me); or (b) the fact that the writers the series pick tend to have comparatively high name recognition, which the publishers figure will translate into wider attention and better sales. Premise (b) involves marketing and revenue and is thus probably backed up by hard data and thought in a way that (a) isn’t.

2 (usage sic, in honor of the term’s source)

3 For example, from the perspective of Information Theory, the bulk of the Decider’s labor actually consists of excluding nominees from the final prize collection, which puts the Decider in exactly the position of Maxwell’s Demon or any other kind of entropy-reducing info processor, since the really expensive, energy-intensive part of such processing is always deleting/discarding/resetting.

4 It’s true that I got to lobby for essays that weren’t in his 100, but there ended up being only one such outside piece in the collection. A couple of others that I’d suggested were nixed by Mr. Atwan — well, not nixed so much as counseled against, for what emerged as good reasons. In general, though, you can see who had the real power. However much I strutted around in my aviator suit and codpiece calling myself the Decider for BAE ’07, I knew that it was Mr. Atwan who delimited the field of possibilities from which I was choosing… in rather the same way that many Americans are worried that what appears to be the reality we’re experiencing and making choices about is maybe actually just a small, skewed section of reality that’s been pre-chosen for us by shadowy entities and forces, whether these be left-leaning media, corporate cabals, government disinformers, our own unconscious prejudices, etc. At least Mr. Atwan was explicit about the whole pre-selection thing, though, and appeared to be fair and balanced, and of course he’d had years of hard experience on the front lines of Decidering; and in general I found myself trusting him and his judgments more and more throughout the whole long process, and there were finally only maybe about 10 percent of his forwarded choices where I just had no idea what he might have been seeing or thinking when he picked them.

5 I believe this is what is known in the nonfiction industry as a transition. We are now starting to poke tentatively at “Best,” which is the most obviously fraught and bias-prone word on the cover.

6 Can I assume that some readers are as tired as I am of this word as a kneejerd a coverk derogative? Or, rather, tired of the legerdemain of collapsing the word’s neutral meaning—“preference, inclination”—into the pejorative one of “unfairness stemming from prejudice”? It’s the same thing that’s happened with “discrimination,” which started as a good and valuable word, but now no one can even hear it without seeming to lose their mind.

7 Example: Roger Scruton is an academic, and his “A Carnivore’s Credo” is a model of limpid and all-business compression, which is actually one reason why his argument is so valuable and prizeworthy, even though parts of that argument strike me as either odd or just plain wrong (e.g., just how much humane and bucolic “traditional livestock farming” does he believe still goes on in this country?). Out on the other end of the ethicopolitical spectrum, there’s a weirdly similar example in Prof. Peter Singer’s “What Should a Billionaire Give?” which is not exactly belletristic but certainly isn’t written in aureate academese, and is salient and unforgettable and unexcludable not despite but in some ways because of the questions and criticisms it invites. May I assume that you’ve already read it? If not, please return to the main text. If you have, though, do some of Singer’s summaries and obligation-formulas seem unrealistically simple? What if a person in the top 10 percent of U.S. earners already gives 10 percent of his income to different, non-UN-type charities — does this reduce his moral obligation, for Singer? Should it? Exactly which charities and forms of giving have the most efficacy and/or moral value — and how does one find out which these are? Should a family of nine making $132,000 a year really have the same 10 percent moral obligation as the childless bachelor making $132K a year? What about a $132K family where one family member has cancer and their health insurance has a 20 percent deductible — is this family’s failure to cough up 10 percent after spending $40,000 on medical bills really still the moral equivalent of valuing one’s new shoes over the life of a drowning child? Is Singer’s whole analogy of the drowning kid(s) too simple, or at least too simple in some cases? Umm, might my own case be one of the ones where the analogy and giving-formula are too simple or inflexible? Is it OK that I think it might be, or am I just trying to rationalize my way out of discomfort and obligation as so many of us (according to Singer) are wont to do? And so on… but of course you’ll notice how hard the reader’s induced to think about all this. Can you see why a Decider might regard Singer’s essay as brilliant and valuable precisely because its prose is so mainstream and its formulas so (arguably) crude or harsh? Or is this kind of “value a stupid, PC-ish criterion to use in Decidering about essays’ literary worth? What exactly are the connections between literary aesthetics and moral value supposed to be? Whose moral values ought to get used in determining what those connections should be? Does anyone even read Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” anymore?

8 Hence, by the way, the seduction of partisan dogma. You can drown in dogmatism now, too — radio, Internet, cable, commercial and scholarly print — but this kind of drowning is more like sweet release. Whether hard right or new left or whatever, the seduction and mentality are the same. You don’t have to feel confused or inundated or ignorant. You don’t even have to think, for you already Know, and whatever you choose to learn confirms what you Know. This dogmatic lockstep is not the kind of inevitable dependence I’m talking about — or rather it’s only the most extreme and frightened form of that dependence.