The New York Times Book Review has John F. Kennedy and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the subject of One Minute To Midnight by Michael Dobbs, on the cover today. Reviewer Richard Holbrooke correctly asks why we need “another recapitulation” of this familiar tale, but I’m barely convinced when he concludes that Dobbs’ book justifies itself with “sobering new information about the world’s only superpower nuclear confrontation — as well as contemporary relevance.”

This may be a very good ...]]> Not Arthur Schlesinger Jr. again.

The New York Times Book Review has John F. Kennedy and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the subject of One Minute To Midnight by Michael Dobbs, on the cover today. Reviewer Richard Holbrooke correctly asks why we need “another recapitulation” of this familiar tale, but I’m barely convinced when he concludes that Dobbs’ book justifies itself with “sobering new information about the world’s only superpower nuclear confrontation — as well as contemporary relevance.”

This may be a very good book, but I sense from Holbrooke’s review that what’s most “new” about it is not the information but the packaging and the sales opportunity. Like so many books about the Civil War or World War II that get published every year, this one fels like another work of military nostalgia. It’s feel-good history: America is strong, our causes are highly moral, our leaders are heroic, and the good guys win. I’m sure this book will be valuable to readers who don’t already know the story of the Kennedy/Khrushchev showdown, but if anything new is actually revealed in these pages, Holbrooke fails to say so. Instead, he summarizes the plot with the breathless cadences of a Tom Clancy novel:

In Washington, the Joint Chiefs, whose members include several World War II giants, push for action. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the brutal, cigar-chomping Air Force chief of staff, with 3,000 nuclear weapons under his command, barks at Kennedy that his blockade of Cuba is “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” In a dramatic confrontation in a Pentagon war room, the chief of naval operations tells Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara that the Navy will handle any engagement with the Soviets in accordance with long-standing Navy procedures and tradition, and needs no supervision from civilians. Furious, McNamara puts new procedures into place that give him and the president greater direct operational control — or so they think.

Pardon me if I’m not at the edge of my seat. Honestly, I don’t find it exciting or inspiring that in October 1962 a handsome politician from Massachusetts and a grimy Communist boss in Moscow brought the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe before “Khrushchev blinked”. I find it despicable.

Along with this front-cover celebration of America’s military and strategic greatness, there’s a truly nasty essay by Jacob Heilbrunn in which former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan gets bitch-slapped for writing the surprise tell-all hit What Happened?, which is currently #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. More nostalgia here; apparently McClellan is dwarfed by the great political-insider prose stylists from America’s “golden age”:

The eulogistic memoirs of an earlier time were consequential, partly because their authors drew on their own notes and diaries, which very few officials dare to keep in the scandal- and subpoena-driven Washington of our time. Raw material of this kind enabled officials to wait before telling stories that still arrived with a sense of immediacy. Henry L. Stimson’s 1948 doorstop, “On Active Service in Peace and War,” published several years after he ended his tenure as secretary of war, drew copiously on Stimson’s personal papers. “A Thousand Days,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s retrospective account of the Kennedy White House, relied heavily on Schlesinger’s diaries. Dean Acheson’s masterly “Present at the Creation” was published in 1969, almost two decades after he left office. And the first volume of Henry Kissinger’s invaluable memoirs, “The White House Years,” did not appear until 1979, when he was well out of government.

How did we go from these cigar-and-brandy tomes — often intended to burnish the reputations of their authors and also those of the presidents they served — to sensationalistic trifles like “What Happened”?

Not Henry Kissinger again …

For the second week in a row, the NYTBR makes up for its utterly conventional and predictable political analysis with some better fiction and poetry coverage. Jay McInerney manages to maintain a light, sardonic tone when reviewing (and, mainly, passing on) Andre Dubus III’s 9/11 novel The Garden of Last Days, which portentously places an angry Saudi citizen in a Florida strip club to set the plot spinning:

Even those who never heard about the penchant of some of the 9/11 hijackers for strip clubs will probably find themselves engaged in some pretty serious racial profiling.

There’s no way to tell what either the angry terrorist or the strippers in this novel might think about a good Bourdeaux, but even though McInerney is out of his element here, he keeps me entertained.

I really like Joel Brouwer’s introduction to the opinion-packed poetry of C. D. Wright, whose Rising, Falling, Hovering gets a strong full page.

I’m not sure the first serious full-length biography of Axl Rose doesn’t also deserve a full page review, but at least Mike Wall’s W. A. R.: The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose gets respectful treatment from Dave Itzkoff, as does Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, edited by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.

Roxana Robinson’s family tableau Cost is getting some good attention, though it’s probably a bad sign for my future encounter with this book that I read Leah Hager Cohen’s review two hours ago and can’t remember a thing it said.

John Carey asserts that the English literary intelligentsia of this era made a conscious effort to segregate literary fiction from the newly literate (or semi-literate) mass culture produced by the late nineteenth century educational reforms to which many of the intelligentsia opposed. The Education Act of 1871 ...]]> Why is literary fiction inevitably a poor seller? This question is at the core of John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939.

John Carey asserts that the English literary intelligentsia of this era made a conscious effort to segregate literary fiction from the newly literate (or semi-literate) mass culture produced by the late nineteenth century educational reforms to which many of the intelligentsia opposed. The Education Act of 1871 introduced universal elementary education in England. When a newspaper called the Daily Mail emerged in 1896 it carried the slogan ‘The Busy Man’s Paper’ and announced its intention to ‘give the public what it wants’ This was in direct conflict to the belief that the public should be given what the intellectuals say they should be given. T.S. Eliot wrote in an essay:

There is no doubt that our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards…destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.

The 1879 novel Immaturity by George Bernard Shaw was turned down by nearly every London publisher, and he concluded that the reason for its rejection was the newly adopted Education Act, which he proclaimed ‘was producing readers who have never before bought books.’

Publishers of the time also did not want the ‘excessively literary’ George Eliot, but preferred the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde).

As populist newspapers like the Daily Mail prospered, European intellectual hostility to newspapers grew. In The Criterion in 1938, T.S Eliot declared that the effect of the daily newspapers on their readers was to ‘affirm them as a complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass’. Extensive campaigns against newspapers were abound. Critic F.R. Leavis wrote in Scrutiny of the mass media ‘arousing the cheapest emotional responses,’ declaring that ‘Films, newspapers, publicity in all forms, commercially-catered fiction — all offer satisfaction at the lowest level.’ Evelyn Waugh satirised the new trend in popular culture in his novels Scoop and Vile Bodies.

To the highbrows of the time, it seemed that the masses were not fully alive. Many of the predominate literary icons of this period expressed clear hostility towards the explosive over-population of the third-world; and the triumph of hyperdemocracy and social power created by this newly created state. Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun’s anti-democratic views are epitomized by his character Ivar Kareno, hero of the Kareno trilogy:

I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, the master, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be the ruler over the masses. I believe in and hope for one thing, and that is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar.

Thomas Hardy wrote in 1887:

You may regard a throng of people as containing a certain small minority who have sensitive souls; these, and the aspects of these, being what is worth observing. So you divide them into the mentally unquickened, mechanical soulless; and the living, throbbing, suffering, vital, in other words into souls and machines, ether and clay.

D.H. Lawrence argues that only the elite truly live, while the proletariat merely survives:

Life is more vivid in the dandelion than in the green fern, or

than in the palm tree,
Life is more vivid in the snake than in the butterfly.
Life is more vivid in the wren than in the alligator…
Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me.

Ezra Pound’s complex Cantos are a good illustration of the fashion for obscurity in literature, a style that itself expressed contempt for the common man. In Pound’s Cantos the multitudes and democratically elected leaders were a torrent of human excrement. The illustration of ‘the great arse-hole’ Pound contends, was a portrait of contemporary England.

A body of esoteric doctrine “defended from the herd” was adopted by a group of intellectuals who created a secret society called ‘The Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn’ in 1890. This secret society fed the craving for power and distinction to soar the intellectual above the masses.

The contempt for the masses expressed by the literary icons of this period not only opposed universal education, but many also supported the ever-growing concept of eugenics as a means to control the overpopulation of inferior beings. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection inadvertently led a new ethics most expressed in H. G. Wells’ New Republic. Wells writes:

The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalor dishonor, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through the sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence.

The entirety of John Carey’s study is overwhelming, enlightening and extremely disturbing, especially as literary elitist tendencies may be an inevitable part of many intellectual communities, even today.

2. Here’s an even better idea: a truce between Israel and Hamas. ...]]>

2. Here’s an even better idea: a truce between Israel and Hamas. Many of my friends don’t support this, saying that a truce can’t possibly last. I say if it lasts one week with no rockets and no tanks, then that’s one week with no rockets and no tanks. I’m pretty sure both sides will remain highly vigilant, so I think critics of this difficult truce are mistaking hope (and common sense) for weakness.

3. A sunset on Mars.

4. Caryn and I were at this very wet R.E.M. concert at Jones Beach, Long Island Saturday night. The funny thing you won’t read in any of these articles, though, is that before all the thunder and lightning the opening act The National stole the show. R.E.M. did a fun and crazy set too, though. I liked it near the end when, mindful of the fact that everybody involved in this concert was risking their life and needed to eventually get home, they said “okay, pretend we just left for the encore and came back”.

5. Sara Nelson of Publisher’s Weekly taking a wider view of the industry:

it does seem that we’re at a crossroads, reaching critical mass, name your cliche here. Something, in other words, is going on in the book business, and while the overall mood of its practitioners must be described as nervous, there also may be some — dare I say it? — hopefulness underneath. Is it just me, or is the hunger for change we see growing in the political world actually trickling down to l’il ol’ publishing?

6. New York has a new literary-minded travel bookstore, excellently named Idlewild.

7. Artist (and Jack Kerouac’s good friend) Stanley Twardowicz died on June 12 in Huntington, Long Island. A couple of years ago I got the chance to play in a Jack Kerouac tribute softball game with Stanley Twardowicz (on Kerouac’s own favorite baseball field in Northport, Long Island). I remember him as a quiet and sturdy guy, proud to represent the memory of Jack.