Month: September 2013

Bruce Bawer has damning words for the work of Jack Kerouac and his fellow Beats:

Objectively speaking, Kerouac and his pals were little more than a bunch of unprepossessing misfits. And yet—with their glib contempt for capitalism and mainstream society, their romanticization of criminality, drug abuse, and the tragedy of mental illness, and their narcissistic rebranding as virtues of their own shiftlessness and dissolution—they would turn out to be, to an amazing extent, the seed of pretty much everything that was rotten about the American 1960s and their aftermath.

Echoing Burroughs’s dictum that “the only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do,” Kerouac—who viewed himself as one of history’s “great ravaged spirits,” along with Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Hitler (yes, Hitler)—justified his colossal selfishness by pretending it was a philosophy of life, which he called “self-ultimacy.” It’s hard to decide which is more of a miracle—that all these self-regarding pseudo-intellectuals managed to find one another, or that they then managed to spark a cultural revolution that transformed the Western world. …

In the end, perhaps the most complimentary thing one can say about Kerouac is that he was the only Beat who wavered in his commitment to their facile rejection of responsibility and embrace of eternal childishness. He had, [biographer Joyce] Johnson writes, a “love affair with decadence,” but also “railed against [his fellow Beats’] decadence”—now and then making an effort, at least, to find and keep a job, be a good husband, make his father proud, scrape together some cash for Mom. It’s too bad he never made a comparable attempt to lift his poetry above the level of drivel, but then again, contemporaries of his who spent their adult lives producing luminous, powerful, and brilliantly crafted poems—among them Louis Simpson, Donald Justice, and Frederick Morgan—have yet to be immortalized by the Library of America.

Previous Dish on Kerouac here, here, and here.

Ben Lerner perceives a peculiar energy in the work of Robert Walser:

The force of Walser’s writing derives from this simultaneous valorization of irreducible individuality and of sameness, smallness, interchangeability. In the most various terms, Walser praises monotony; it makes it wonderfully difficult to read his tone. When is he serious? When is he mocking the will to conform?

Susan Sontag wrote that “the moral core of Walser’s art is the refusal of power; of domination.” And yet, paradoxically, part of the power of Walser’s art lies in how that refusal of domination interacts with his narrators’ demands to be dominated. Walser’s voice is a strange mix of exuberance and submission, lyrical abandon and self-abnegation. His refusals are anti-heroic, wavering; they reveal—sometimes comically, sometimes tragically—how the desire to be ruled enters the subject, the son, the servant, the pupil.

How can a writer refuse even the power of refusal, preserve his freedom while falling all over himself to give it away? Maybe the answer has to do with how Walser’s singular sentences themselves “step aside”: one of the most notable effects of his prose is how it seems to evaporate as you read. Walter Benjamin said of Walser’s “garlands of language” that “each sentence has the sole purpose of rendering the previous one forgotten.” This is not to say there aren’t depths of meaning and memorable passages, but Walser’s genius often involves a kind of disappearing act.

Previous Dish on Walser here.

Joseph Epstein assesses the question in a review of Darrin M. McMahon’s Divine Fury:

[G]eniuses tend to emerge in those areas of life dominant in specific cultures at specific times. For the Greeks, the main games were philosophy and art. For the Romans, it was military exploits and administration, and the only two Romans up for genius whom McMahon mentions prominently are Julius and Augustus Caesar. During the Middle Ages, devotion and piety, with an emphasis on asceticism and personal sacrifice, won the genius laurels, and the genius that occupied the souls of men and women was thought to be imbued by angels. Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas were both made saints. (“Genius,” wrote the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, “is another kind of sainthood.”) For the Renaissance, it was art, chiefly visual art, painting and sculpture and architecture, that rang the gong. For the modern age, beginning with the 18th century, scientific geniuses predominate.

For our own age, the main game, once thought to be invention—Thomas Edison and Henry Ford held genius status for a while—has yet to be determined, especially with so much science now being done not individually but in teams. Hence the paucity of agreed-upon geniuses in our day. Those master marketeers of the digital age, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, need not apply.

Malcolm Gladwell examines the use of performance-enhancing drugs, quoting from cyclist Tyler Hamilton’s The Secret Race:

“Dope is not really a magical boost as much as it is a way to control against declines,” Hamilton writes. Doping meant that cyclists finally could train as hard as they wanted. It was the means by which pudgy underdogs could compete with natural wonders. “People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work,” Hamilton writes. For many riders, the opposite was true:

EPO [erythropoietin, a hormone that boosts production of red blood cells] granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you’d ever imagined, in both training and racing. It rewarded precisely what I was good at: having a great work ethic, pushing myself to the limit and past it. I felt almost giddy: this was a new landscape. I began to see races differently. They weren’t rolls of the genetic dice, or who happened to be on form that day. They didn’t depend on who you were. They depended on what you did—how hard you worked, how attentive and professional you were in your preparation.

Charles Kenny examines it:

Of the world’s population, about 7 out of 10 live in a country where pretty much every child completes primary school. The proportion of secondary-school-aged kids who are in classes has climbed from about half to two-thirds over the past 15 years. The trouble is, a lot of those enrolled appear to be learning very little. In India only a little more than a quarter of the children who complete primary school can read a simple passage, perform division, tell time, and handle money—all skills that should be mastered by the end of second grade. And while eighth-grade enrollment increased to 87 percent from 82 percent of school-aged children in the country from 2006 to 2011, the fraction of enrolled children who could do long division fell to 57 percent from 70 percent—suggesting that despite more of them going to school, fewer kids actually learned basic math over that time.