Pete Lit

New Ward Just

One of my favorite writers, Ward Just, has a new novel out, Exiles in the Garden. His last two novels, Forgetfulness and An Unfinished Season, were nothing short of great. I expect the same from his latest. This notice from Powell's also reminds me that I need to pick up the pace on my Just reading - Echo House and The Weather in Berlin remain unread on my shelf, for which I will now slap myself on the back of the head.

Reimagining 1984

(Image created by Alex Charchar)

Having just finished 1984 this week, I was pleased to see this take on the various covers of the book from over the years, as well as Alex Charchar's own imaginative rendition of the cover. I agree that few of the official covers truly capture the spirit of the narrative, many of them lazily falling back on the eyeball/"Big Brother is watching you" theme. But Charchar's version strikes me for two reasons: first, the officious font and drab color scheme are faithful to the regimented and lifeless society depicted by Orwell; and second, the fact that the original title (as I mention in the comments) isn't perfectly eradicated, just as Orwell's totalitarian government could eradicate history from the official written records, but never completely from the memories of its citizens. Well done indeed.

(Via Coudal.)

National Book Awards show Algren some love

The National Book Awards are celebrating their sixtieth anniversary by posting tributes to each of the fiction award winners. First up is the debut winner from 1950, Nelson Algren's The Man With the Golden Arm, with appreciations from Rachel Kushner (from whom I'd have preferred to hear less about her personal life, and more about the book) and Harold Augenbraum, from whom I couldn't help admire the following:

But when you immerse yourself in Algren’s language you will see why so many other writers of his time and ours have appreciated him. He takes the American idiom and bends it all around. The tone and diction of his narrative leech into his dialogue, and vice versa, style so impressively written that it pushes the story itself to the background.

The entire series can be found here.

"the murmur of bees and helicopters"

Telling passage from Brave New World:

Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.

All that idyllic imagery, of naked children cavorting, roses blooming, nightingales and cuckoos singing, and then...helicopters. Considering the latter usually has negative assocations - think war, evacuation, surveillance - that's a very interesting ominous tone that Huxley has flung in there.

Following up on yesterday's post, it looks like Huxley's hero has indeed arrived. Or heroine, specifically - Lenina Crowne. She doesn't seem to have quite fully absorbed all of the society's dictates. Whether or not she actively resists or even outright rebels remains to be seen, but I see some promise in her.

Orwell to Huxley

My Summer of Classics continues on. Yesterday I finished reading George Orwell's 1984, and as of this morning I'm two chapters into Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Huxley's premise - that of a regimented, socially-engineered society in which science has triumphed over nature - has already been firmly established. But now Huxley really needs to humanize the narrative by introducing a hero (who still bears traces of humanity and resists the system) or at least an anti-hero (who has soullessly absorbed and internalized society's mandates, and thus represents what monstrosities such a system would produce). That's exactly what Orwell did, from the very first page, instantly immersing the reader into the everyday life of Winston Smith. Huxley needs to do the same, or otherwise this will turn out to be nothing more than a political treatise, and not a novel. Mind you, there's nothing wrong with political treatises - just treatises disguised as fiction, which I've never had much taste for.

Dim bulbs not quite so dim any longer

Gee, what do you know? Government regulation spurs innovation.

When Congress passed a new energy law two years ago, obituaries were written for the incandescent light bulb. The law set tough efficiency standards, due to take effect in 2012, that no traditional incandescent bulb on the market could meet, and a century-old technology that helped create the modern world seemed to be doomed.

But as it turns out, the obituaries were premature.

Left to the free market, the incandescent bulb industry would probably have just puttered along, selling century-old technology that wasted energy and indirectly generated air pollution from the power plants that supply electricity, because doing so was a slow-growth but high-cashflow business. But then, when the government toughens up energy efficiency standards, the industry suddenly realizes it has to do things differently in order to survive, and comes up with a vastly improved product. For the same reason, if the government finally gets tough with the coal industry and the power plants it feeds, the result won't be the death of those industries, but instead revitalized industries that do things better than they did before. Same thing with raising fuel efficiency and emissions standards for the auto industry - if those companies are smart enough to change, they'll survive and even thrive. And if they're not smart enough, they shouldn't be in business anyway.

Quote

"It doesn't seem interesting to be the same artist all your life, to have the same obsessions."
-Art Spiegelman, from his Be sketchbook (1979)

Karl Malden

For me, there's no greater testament to the greatness of Karl Malden than his quietly electrifying performance in On The Waterfront, and particularly the unforgettable scene in the video above, which moves me even more than Brando's famous "I coulda been a contender" scene.

A.O. Scott has written a fine appreciation of Malden (who died this week, at age 97) which is very much worth reading as well. I might just have to rent A Streetcar Named Desire today, on this rainy holiday.

"Steve"

 

Steve drove all night, thinking he was getting somewhere.

 

I'm quite delighted today to see the publication of my one-sentence story "Steve" (yes, that's it above, in its entirety), as illustrated on a Post-It Note by the cartoonist Arthur Jones. The premise is simple: write a one-sentence story, email it to Arthur, and he'll decide whether or not to illustrate it. As his illustrations tend to be more lighthearted in tone, I appreciate the dark edge he gave to mine. He did a great job.

So who's the judicial activist, exactly?

The well-worn refrain is that liberal judges are activists who are bent on dictating social policy, while conservative judges respect precedent and always defer to the decisions of elected officials who are accountable to the electorate. Wrong.

On another point, the (Ricci) ruling underscored the emptiness of the “judicial activist” label that Republicans like to use in debates over nominees to the federal courts, including Judge Sotomayor. In the firefighters’ case, she actually refused to second-guess the city’s decision — an act of judicial restraint. It was the court’s conservatives, including Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted to overturn the decision of an elected government.

Liberal or conservative, all judges are activists sometimes, and status-quo conservators at other times. Sotomayor may have often been an activist in her rulings, but that's not the case here. To dismiss her as a "judicial activist" is simple-minded and just plain wrong.