Dave's As Long As Life Endures

Dave's latest effort, As Long As Life Endures, is starkly simple—in fact, it was reportedly shot in under a day.  The film lasts only 10 minutes, it is set entirely inside a New York City subway car, and includes no dialogue apart from the conductor's announcements.  For the first few minutes there are few indications that anything is out of the ordinary, as the camera turns from person to person, some of them reading, some of them occupied with their own thoughts.

Then a muffled explosion sounds, and the subway car rocks slightly from side to side.  Its power goes out and it slowly rolls to a halt.  When the lights come back on, the conductor tries to make an announcement, but there is too much static for her words to be comprehensible.  For the most part the passengers remain strangely calm, as though an attack was not unexpected, but we can see the fear on their faces.  Another explosion sounds.  The lights flicker.  The conductor tries again, her voice rising with panic, but it's still impossible to make out her words.  The passengers look around, as if to take stock of who might lose it and become dangerous.

Then we hear a quavering voice:  "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound..."  The camera searches from face to face, looking for the passenger who has started the song.  A few more voices join in.  The hymn is ragged, but it begins to swell as more and more people start singing, and it keeps going strong even as the explosions resume outside the car.  A black man holding an umbrella starts shouting out the lyrics ahead of each line, so that everyone can sing the less well known verses.  Still they stumble over the words, but enough people know the lyrics to keep the thread.  Many others just hum the melody, creating a strange, other-worldly effect.  The lights go out again, but the music continues.

Critics have argued that As Long As Life Endures derives its power from Trump's election, and that it will be soon forgotten with the ephemera created by the literary opposition.  But the movie need not be read in such a literal way, and I predict that it will retain its power after Trump is gone, assuming anyone survives to watch it.

Translating The Carriers

When Dave published The Carriers in the middle of 2015, he received his usual plaudits from the leading lights of the literary world (you can read my review here).  But the book was published in translation, having been written in a private language of Dave's invention called Üxtil.  When Calista read the book in its original Üxtil, she identified scores of errors in the hastily-prepared English translation, some of which have serious implications for the way the book has been analyzed and understood.

Calista's discovery drew the attention of practically every major writer and unleashed a flood of academic papers re-appraising the book.  As new translations have appeared, writers have been forced to take sides, and at this point partisans of one translation can scarcely bring themselves to talk to partisans of another, much less collaborate or share a stage at a literary conference.  The resulting chaos makes the perennial Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky argument look like child's play.

The main contenders for "best translation" are Alan's, Nora's, and Calista's, while Pevear and Volokhonsky's is the most commercially successful.  The book was originally translated by Dave's longtime collaborator Akina Uehara, who in fairness was operating under severe time constraints, as well as having to learn Üxtil from scratch based on Dave's fragmentary instructions.  Despite all this, and despite the errors that Calista has identified, Uehara's translation is still the favorite of a small but committed minority of writers, who regard her mistakes as more than compensated by her natural, poetic sensibility.

Notably absent from this list, of course, is Dave's translation, which was published earlier this year.  The dearth of critical support for the author's own translation has sparked a heated discussion of how "authoritative" the author is, particularly in a case like this one, where the author created the language from which the work is being translated.  Alan has made much of this "novel" situation, but it is not my concern at the moment.  Instead I will take a close look at a few passages from The Carriers, and I'll explain how the translators handled the interpretive issues that they present.

The first passage is a playful one.  A sailor teases a woman selling tea cakes by the dock, and she chastely responds.  Here's Uehara's original translation:

"That certainly looks tasty," the sailor called out, leaning nonchalantly against the rail. Katie turned to face him, wrinkling her nose.

"The blue ones are a day old—still good, and half the price!" she replied.

"What about the pink ones?"

"Too expensive for you!" the captain bellowed, clapping the sailor on the back. Katie giggled.

In her original paper, Calista questioned whether this passage should be so sexualized.  One problem is that "tasty" is much more specific than the Üxtil word used in the original, a memoridt, which simply means "pleasing" or "sufficient."  It seems likelier that the sailor is commenting on the entire scene, not the cakes or the woman.  Moreover, "What about the pink ones?" is a bit of a reach—in the original, Dave uses the term nuori pestel'e, which literally means "this dawn's harvest" or "this dawn's catch" and only connotes pink inasmuch as that is the color of the dawn.  Here is how Calista translates it:

"This is a fine scene!" the sailor exclaimed, gesturing from the main deck, his hand on the rail. Katie looked up at him and squinted.

"The blue cakes are from yesterday. Half price!" Katie sang out.

"And what about this morning's batch?"

"You have no money to spare for cakes at any price. Back to work!" the captain shouted, with a hearty back-slap. Katie laughed gaily and turned back to her customers.

But there is another difficulty here, one that Uehara and Calista both avoid.  Where is the captain during the first part of the dialogue?  Has he come up behind the sailor during the exchange, or has he been there the whole time?  In this case, the word for "captain" includes a particle that indicates the writer is gesturing toward someone the reader is already acquainted with.  (The closest English approximation would be something like, "the cat appeared" vs. "a cat appeared."  The former indicates that we the readers have already met the cat.)

Conveying this information in English is difficult.  Here is Nora's effort:

The sailor stood on the deck next to the captain and surveyed the scene before them. "A fine day!" the sailor exclaimed, indicating the bustling docks. Katie squinted at him in the bright sunlight.

"Cakes for sale! The blue ones are a bargain, day-old but still good!"

"What about the ones you baked this morning?"

"Enough banter! We have work to do," the captain grumbled, clapping his hand to the sailor's back. Katie's merry laugh rang out as she turned back to her cart.

Nora preserves a sense that the sailor and Katie are flirting, but resists the over-sexualized reading given by Uehara.  However, she also omits the captain's slightly insulting remark regarding the sailor's finances.

After this relatively low-stakes warm-up, let's turn to a much more difficult passage.  By way of background, Clara Newgate has learned that her husband's lover is displaying symptoms of the disease, but Charles Newgate himself is asymptomatic.  Again we'll start with Uehara:

"When did the symptoms appear?" Clara asked, her voice clipped.

Charles turned from her and examined the books on the wall. "In the middle of January," he said. "You were in the north."

Clara quickly calculated while Charles pretended to read. "Charles, in January!" Clara gasped. "But we—"

Charles grabbed her by the elbow and spun her around. "As if you're so innocent!" he snarled.

This is not one of the passages that Calista flagged in her initial paper, but her translation is markedly different from Uehara's:

"When did you begin to fight?" Clara asked sharply.

Charles examined the books on the shelves. "In the middle of January, when you were visiting the north."

Clara did the math in her head while Charles pretended to read. "January, Charles!" Clara said with surprise. "So you and I—"

Charles took her by the elbow and brought her into an embrace. "You're safe," he said.

In Uehara's version, Clara is asking when Charles's lover started displaying symptoms, and she seems to indicate that she and Charles have had sex since January.  Charles then accuses her of adultery.

In Calista's version, by contrast, Clara is asking when Charles and his lover fought, that is, when they stopped having sex.  January, it appears, was early enough that Charles probably wasn't exposed to the disease.  Clara realizes that they can have sex, and Charles responds that Clara will be safe.

It's a remarkable thing that each of these interpretations is viable!  Dialogue in Üxtil can be extremely elliptical, allowing Clara and Charles to circumnavigate delicate subjects, but leaving us with little idea of what is going on.  Alan's translation mostly sides with Calista's, but at the end he adopts yet another reading of the language:

"When did the... seas get rough between you?" Clara asked probingly.

Charles turned and ran his eyes over the spines of the books lining the wall. "In the middle of January, while you were in the north."

Clara opened a calendar in her mind while Charles pretended to read. "January, Charles! Then when we—"

Charles squeezed her elbow and held her close so that she couldn't see his face. "And yet you're clear," he said as if accusing her.

In Alan's translation, it appears that Clara and Charles have had sex at a time when he might be contagious, and yet Clara is symptom-free.  Perhaps Charles suspects that they are both carriers, and that Clara is the source of his lover's illness.

The passage is obviously a difficult one, susceptible to widely varying translations, and yet everyone was startled by Dave's translation:

"After all, we haven't made love since I don't know when!" Clara spat out with venom.

Charles turned away in shame, occupied with mental book-keeping. "We made love in January," he concluded. Then he added accusingly, "You wanted it up the ass."

Clara seemed to be choosing her words carefully while he pretended to read, but then burst out, "January! Charles! We didn't make love in January!"

Charles whipped her around and squeezed her cheeks with one hand. "You were drunk," he said. "Your lapse in memory is a terribly convenient way to maintain your innocence." Disgusted, he turned her head away with a sudden jerk.

To be honest, it's hard to support this translation at all.  Yes, "the north" can be used in an anatomical sense, as Üxt's northern territories are often called "the country's asshole" or "the ass-end of the country."  But this term is almost never used to refer to actual anatomy, and when it is, the point is to emphasize the back of the country as opposed to the front.  So for instance, a man might sit on a horse's "north," that is, its back—he is not sitting on the horse's ass!  This makes Dave's translation seem like quite a stretch.  In any case there's no express mention of sex in that line of the original text.

But that's just one isolated detail.  Dave's reading of the entire passage requires considerable leaps of logic.  For instance, after Clara asks her question (and by the way, it is very clearly a question in Üxtil, notwithstanding Dave's translation), Charles looks toward the wall of the room they are in, which is a library.  To assume that he is looking at mental books requires adding a concept that isn't in the text while ignoring where the characters are standing!

Moreover, in the original Üxtil, when Clara has done her mental math, she simply says the words for "Charles," "January," and "we."  All of the translations must fill in the gap to some extent, but adding a denial that they made love in January makes no sense.  If this were her meaning, she would have appended a complementary negative particle to "we."  The only way to support Dave's reading is to suppose that she is making an elementary grammatical mistake, unlikely for a woman of her class (or really any class...  this would be a very obvious mistake in Üxtil).

Finally, there is no mention of drunkenness or memory in the last paragraph.  In the original Üxtil Charles simply indicates that Clara is "spotless" or "unblemished," which could either mean that she is innocent or that she has not broken out in the lesions that are symptomatic of the disease.  Of course it could also be ironic, as in Uehara's translation.  But in any case, Dave appears to be making up most of the passage out of whole cloth.

Passages like this one have convinced most critics that Dave's translation is untrustworthy, despite the fact that he invented Üxtil, and despite the fact that Üxtil dialogue is admittedly allusive and indirect.  But I want to stay well clear of that argument, which is vexing and, in my view, ultimately irresolvable.  For one thing, much of our understanding of Üxtil and the culture and customs of Üxt is derived from Dave's magisterial four-volume A History of the Üxtil-Speaking Peoples, which was published in both Üxtil and English.  So to argue that Dave's translation of The Carriers is erroneous is to argue that he was more reliable in his translation of History than he was in his translation of The Carriers, and there is little basis for this conclusion.

Before we move on, I should mention that, in the context of the book, I think Uehara's or Alan's translation of this passage makes the most sense.  We ultimately learn that both Clara and Charles are carriers, but that Clara was most likely not the source of the disease that struck down Charles's lover.  Calista's translation is also defensible on the grounds that Charles might have thought they were both uninfected based on what he knew at the time.

The translators make other choices that involve the traditional translational choices among fidelity to the text, clarity, and elegance.  Where Calista writes that a Member of Parliament is "flying a kite," Uehara has him "floating an idea," and Alan has him "running it up the flagpole to see who salutes."  In another passage, Nora, translating fairly literally, writes that Charles is "fire-breathed," while Calista writes that "his breath was on fire with the vapors of whisky," and Alan writes that "his breath singed her nose with hot tongues of pungent whisky."  (Dave writes:  "Dragon-like, into her chest he poured the flames, igniting almost nothing in that empty space, but nevertheless consuming with a hot vengeance the pine needles shed by her wintering heart."  None of that, apart from the fire-breath, is in the text.)

But perhaps the most interesting passages are those that force us to confront the radical differences between Üxtil and English.  Üxtil contains a vocabulary of emotion that has no counterpart in English.  In one of the most beautiful and haunting passages in the book, Katie (whom we met earlier on the docks) speaks with Henry Tilden, her ex-lover, who has been incarcerated in a carrier colony on a cold, rocky north Atlantic island, where Katie has joined him.  Tilden and Katie can no longer have sex, for she might be vulnerable to the disease.  Tilden indicates all of this with a gesture toward their surroundings, and Katie simply responds, "Bueh."

"Bueh" (or "a'bueh") is an Üxtil word with no precise meaning in English.  It is used to convey emotional reassurance, and its meaning is heavily dependent on context.  Uehara renders the scene in this way:

Katie and Henry huddled in the dwindling light, heads touching, so close that from a distance they might have been mistaken for a single well-insulated seal gazing at the waves. "Katie, I have nothing to offer you anymore, not even... there is no beauty here. And I may die or go insane, leaving you with nothing. You deserve forests and cities and warmth, and here I have nothing but wasteland..."

"I know all this, and I will stay here, not in sorrow, but with gladness in my heart," Katie said. "Your love is like a million worlds to me."

Alan adopts a similar approach but puts more of the words in Katie's mouth:

Katie held Henry close, his head next to hers, their coats forming a single layer of insulation against the brisk wind. Henry looked up at Katie and half hoped that she would go live the life she deserved on the mainland.

"Don't you think I've considered all of this?" Katie said. "You would not tell me which books to like, or what kind of bread to enjoy. And yet you think to decide for me whether I would find more joy on shore or here with you! Purge your mind of this nonsense. I am here because I love you, and your presence makes this island the most beautiful place in the world to me."

Finally, Dave's translation is the most literal, while remaining uncharacteristically restrained:

The wind picked up, but Henry and Katie had overlapped their coats and now peered out at the waves like a polar bear from its cozy den. Henry turned his head, as if to say, "Can this ever be enough for you?"

With a single word Katie set his mind at ease.

One can complain that this translation fails to capture the full richness of the word "bueh," but it's hard to argue with its elegant simplicity.

And so we are, I think, left with no single "best" translation, but instead with a rich diversity of approaches, each with its own merits.  For those readers who don't have the time to learn Üxtil, I don't know which one to recommend, but ultimately I don't think there's a wrong choice.  The beauty of The Carriers comes through in all of them.

Alan's Tooth and Claw

Alan's latest project, Tooth and Claw, has perhaps the most emotional depth of any of his efforts.  What makes this surprising is that there are no human characters whatsoever, apart from the dry, economical narrator.  In fact, you can barely call it fiction—Alan prefers the term "speculative ecology."

What Alan has produced is a series of "field notes" documenting the behavior of species that do not exist.  Birds that glide upside down, lizards that engage in primitive agriculture, carefully cultivating little shaded patches where desert plants can thrive.  A cow-like ruminant that has evolved to brew beer in one of its stomachs, though it serves no discernible biological purpose.  Calista provided sketches, which she rendered in a traditional, realistic manner that looks as though it could have been found in a natural history book published anytime from 1700 to 1900.

My favorite field note describes a symbiotic relationship between a bison-like animal and a diving seabird.  They live on a sparse, windswept, sandy seaside bereft of trees.  Because of the lack of trees, birds have evolved to nest in the warm, insulating tangle of hair that grows above the bison's shoulders.  Our naturalist observes a fox greedily approaching a nest full of eggs, which appears to have been built on a hillock.  But suddenly the ground lunges up, and as the fox tumbles to the sand, a giant bearded face swings around, its horns pointed right at him.  He scurries away to find an easier meal somewhere else.

The birds have learned to communicate with the bison, flying high over the sand to scout out edible vegetation and report it back to the bison.  This allows the bison to conserve energy as it looks for food or a mate in the inhospitable land, which is too poor to support the large herds that are familiar from the American West.  At times, when vegetation can't be found on land, the pair will strike out into the ocean, the bird guiding them to a rich patch of seaweed for the bison to eat, tarrying sometimes while the bird dives into a rich school of fish.

When a bison gives birth, a young bird befriends the calf, and they grow up together and become lifelong companions.  They know each other's voices and use their distinct, evocative calls (high and haunting in the case of the seabird, low and rumbling in the case of the bison) to find each other over long distances in the sere landscape.  The birds are quasi-monogamous, but their relationships with their mates are nowhere near as close or enduring as their relationships with their bison companions.  Because of the effectiveness of their cooperation, both bison and bird can satisfy their nutritional needs in relatively little time, and they spend much of their days playing games or simply chattering to each other and enjoying each other's company as they wander along the shore, occasionally taking a dip in the salty ocean.

It is unclear whether they understand death.  On one hand, each engages in elaborate mourning rituals if the other dies.

On the other hand, if they do understand death, then the animals' subsequent behavior is hard to explain.  If the bird dies first, the bison ceases its itinerant grazing pattern and spends most of its time tracing wider and wider circles around its companion's burial place, behavior that resembles a searching pattern.  Likewise for the bird, which upon the death of the bison launches a search that will last for the rest of its life, circling high in the air, swooping down sometimes when it sees a lone bison in the sand, but flying away once it recognizes that it has not found its lifelong friend.  In either case, the widower from time to time emits the cry that it once used to summon its companion, and then pauses, listening intently for a response that will never come.

Alan's Balls to the Wall

Alan's latest effort, Balls to the Wall, is a bold, frenetic mess of a book, almost as if Alan had adopted the title of the book as his personal credo while writing it.  The book follows Francis Vorlauf, a "speculative etymologist," as he basks in newfound superstardom.  Vorlauf, having discovered several instances of "Stonewall" being used in an arguably pro-LBGT context prior to the famous Stonewall Riots, has published a groundbreaking paper arguing that "Stonewall" (as used by the gay rights movement) actually stems not from the Stonewall Inn, but from General Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, a Confederate general who stood "like a stone wall" for LBGT rights.  (Coincidentally, he also stood "like a stone wall" for the Confederate army at the First Battle of Bull Run, and it is the unlikelihood of this coincidence that has made Vorlauf's theory such a controversial and gripping one.)

But being an academic celebrity has its downsides as well.  Al Peretti, a government etymologist working for Cook County, Illinois, is trying to get the feds to help him debunk some of Vorlauf's earlier work.  In particular, Peretti believes that Vorlauf greatly exaggerated the strength of his evidence that "bailout," meaning the government rescue of banks during the financial crisis, refers to bailing someone out of jail, rather than bailing water out of a boat.  But Peretti is getting no traction, and his stodgy attire and abrupt, nerdy way of speaking are no match for Vorlauf's smooth, polished style.  In a confrontation on Charlie Rose's show, Peretti is easily outclassed, even when the evidence is on his side.

Meanwhile Vorlauf is struggling to find new topics to write about—he is caught on something of a treadmill, since each paper needs to dial up the controversy and sexiness of his ideas, or he will fade from public attention.  He toys with the possibility that the "card" in "discard" might refer to the human heart, an idea that would bring a little romance into his work.  He can't find much evidence for this proposition, which ordinarily wouldn't slow him down much, but with Peretti nipping at his heels he has to think twice.

What neither Vorlauf nor Peretti knows is that the federal etymologists are not indifferent to Peretti's claims—they are taking them very seriously indeed.  But so far their investigation is stymied by bureaucratic infighting, as Treasury tries to shut down the investigation, forcing the investigators to come up with a "smoking gun" or give up their case.  Meanwhile they are forced to withhold public comment, giving the impression of inaction.  In a violation of protocol, they decide to contact Peretti, and they find him at a Las Vegas conference arguing about whether "a storm is brewing" relates to brewing tea (the sky darkening like the water in a teapot) or brewing beer (the atmosphere churning as if roiled by fermentation).  (Peretti's responsible, measured answer—that it could be either, and likely doesn't relate to either in particular—neatly illustrates why he will always be a public sector etymologist.)  The agents pull him aside to pool their information, leading to a shocking discovery.

I'll leave the rest of the plot to the reader to discover, for at the end of the day, Balls is a book that you read for the thrill of discovery.  Not just learning what happens next, but that sudden feeling of gratification when you realize that "sidetracked" is about railroads or that "calibrate" comes from the caliber of a gun.

As for the book's messiness and its many loose threads left hanging:  I actually found that the shagginess of the story matched the fuzziness and loopiness of its main character and his ideas.  Where others see a book that badly needs an editor, I see a book that deserves to be appreciated in its raw form, a testament to the giddy full-steam-ahead, damn-the-torpedoes style that Alan practices so well.

Sarang's Mostly Harmless

File this one under "things I don't fully understand."  Sarang has published a pamphlet, entitled Harmless Error, in which he argues forcefully that if beer is properly packaged, then non-pathogenic obligate anaerobes (bacteria that need oxygen to reproduce) should not be considered a "contaminant" or "impurity" in the beer.  He cites as his main example Acetobacter, the bacteria that converts alcohol to acetic acid (vinegar).  Because Acetobacter needs oxygen to do its work, it will have no effect on beer that is bottled or canned with minimal oxygen.  Acetobacter can cause problems in wine, which is often opened and then consumed over the next several days, during which it is difficult to prevent oxygen exposure.  Beer, though, is typically consumed soon after opening, long before oxygen exposure has any potential to spoil the beer.  (Acetic acid is actually considered an important part of some styles, such as Flanders red ale, and so those styles actually require Acetobacter to turn out right.  But Sarang does not make much of this, since the acetic acid "kick" that characterizes Flanders red ale would be completely out of place in most styles of beer.)

I found Sarang's argument highly persuasive, but I wonder whether most readers will find the issue interesting or even debatable.  I'm probably the ideal audience for this kind of thing, and even I found Harmless Error a bit dry at times.  And maybe that's Sarang's point.  Sarang has long argued that beauty, and more broadly aesthetic merit, is a moral value.  Maybe Harmless Error is an attempt to demonstrate ("show don't tell") that being right isn't enough, it's also important to be entertaining or at least engaging.  There is no flaw in the pamphlet, but no merit either, and so we can see with shattering clarity that "the truth is not enough."

Or maybe it's the opposite—maybe Sarang is satirizing our short-attention-span culture, our refusal to take ideas seriously unless they come with an emotional "hook."  Here is a serious, sober, well-written argument that will get no traction whatsoever in the broader culture, while we spend our hours poring over the latest ephemera on Twitter.  Maybe we are pissing away our lives while the truth about beer packaging stares us in the face.

Sarang's Hold a Little Something Back

Sarang's latest effort, Hold a Little Something Back, is a stunning exploration of violence.  More than most movies, Hold a Little Something Back is about us, the viewers.  Sarang interrogates our response to violence, the way we fit it into neat categories, the way we attempt to civilize it or, failing that, to banish it from civilized society.  He holds up for inspection our sanctimony, our rationalizations, even our preoccupation with positioning ourselves relative to the violence that we witness...  and then he lets us draw our own conclusions.  Nothing is forced but the encounter with ourselves.

Visually, Hold a Little Something Back is perhaps his most accomplished movie to date.  Emotionally, it is strong but manipulative—but as suggested above, it is maybe stronger for the manipulation, for there is a kind of honesty in its transparent machinations.  Its cumulative force is overwhelming—if you wear mascara, I advise you to use the water-proof variety when you see this movie.

As Hold a Little Something Back opens, it replicates a typical NFL broadcast from the mid-1980s.  Low-resolution by today's standards, and featuring what now seem like retro uniforms, the film puts us into the living room on a lazy Sunday afternoon.  Sarang even airs period-appropriate commercials for beer and cars, which may explain how he was able to afford the movie's exorbitant production costs.

About ten minutes into the game, the announcer expresses surprise at a particularly brutal hit on the Cowboys quarterback, a fictionalized star named Drew Layton.  At this point, the film begins a subtle shift.  The resolution sharpens gradually, and the commercials stop airing.  Soon, the score is no longer displayed on the screen, and the shots become more cinematic, zoomed-in to show the action instead of the whole of the play.  The announcers fade away and we hear only the roar of the crowd, the grunts of the players, the sickening crunch of helmet on helmet.  We are not in our living rooms anymore.

And now we see with our own eyes that D'Shawn O'Neill, a (fictional) defensive player for the Los Angeles Rams, is indeed going after Layton as if he is trying to injure him.  At one point he is called for a late hit, but the referees mostly allow him to keep the hits coming.  By the standards of mid-80s football, O'Neill is simply playing hard.  To a modern viewer, the reckless violence is shocking, and I found myself wondering if Hold a Little Something Back were Sarang's foray into the CTE debate.

But after half-time, O'Neill steps up the violence.  We see what the referees can't:  at the bottom of a pile of players, O'Neill methodically punches Layton in the ribs, not even trying to wrestle the ball from him.  O'Neill would rather inflict pain on Layton than win the game.  Or maybe he just wants the Cowboys offense to stay on the field so he can keep hitting Layton.  This thuggishness is hard to watch, particularly since O'Neill is black and Layton is white, so that the behavior fits into very uncomfortable stereotypes.

In another encounter, Layton is carrying the ball when O'Neill slams him head-on in a helmet-to-helmet hit that rattles Layton's brain so hard that he loses control of his body for a second.  The ball drops from his momentarily paralyzed hands, but the camera stays on Layton's slack face while the players scramble for the loose ball.  This kind of hit was legal in the 80s, and unlike some of O'Neill's other behavior it actually promotes the Rams' chances of winning, but it is very difficult to watch.  We now know that the brain suffers permanent and cumulative damage from this kind of injury.

Suddenly and without prelude, the camera jumps to a children's hospital, where the Rams, in uniform, are spending time with chronically ill children as part of community outreach.  The children are dazzled, but soon it is time for the players to leave, and the camera zips back to the game, where one of the Dallas offensive linemen is getting into a fistfight with O'Neill, presumably in defense of his quarterback.  The Rams coach pulls O'Neill aside and yells at him, a short, fat, balding white man dressing down an impassive, brutish black man in face paint—the racial dynamic continues to be very uncomfortable.

The camera moves back to the children's hospital.  This time O'Neill is unaccompanied by his teammates, and he's not in uniform.  A nurse looks on gratefully while he plays checkers with a painfully skinny Mexican boy, who looks bashfully at O'Neill from under his long eyelashes, clearly starstruck.

O'Neill is sitting on the sidelines and his quarterback, a handsome sweaty white boy, sits next to him and leans in to ask him if he is all right, feigning nonchalance, but clearly worried about O'Neill's mental state.

A doctor is asking if a young black girl in pigtails is all right.  She has vomited on the book that O'Neill is holding in front of her, and now she is crying.  O'Neill lifts her up in his giant hands and turns her around to cry into his shirt.  Oh baby, there are plenty more books, don't you worry.

O'Neill is crying on the sideline.

Layton gives an impromptu interview on TV:  "Honestly, I wonder if it might actually clean up the cities.  It doesn't seem like too many regular people are getting it, does it?  Drug addicts and homos, mostly."

A doctor is explaining to O'Neill that children born with HTLV are living under a death sentence, that they will be lucky to celebrate their fifth birthday.  The doctors can only treat the secondary infections and hope for the best.  (HTLV was an early misnomer for what we now call HIV.)

O'Neill flattens Layton with his most brutal hit yet.  (We can't see whether Layton had the ball at the time of the hit.)  Layton doesn't get up.  His body lies perfectly still on the ragged green field, strangely peaceful.  O'Neill, too, appears to be hurt, though he rises to one knee, hunched over and breathing hard.

A Chinese-American doctor in scrubs puts a comforting hand on O'Neill's shoulder and tells him he is a good man.  Behind them somewhere a machine beeps regularly, delivering medicine or glucose or oxygen, or maybe just counting out the seconds of a life cut short.

Nothing Beside Remains

It is all the chattering classes can talk about.  How did Calista's presidential campaign implode so suddenly and in such spectacular fashion?

In my view the question misses the point.  A year ago her campaign was widely treated as a joke and no one would have given her more than a 5% chance of winning.  So the real question is not why she crashed, but why she climbed so high in the first place.  And why did almost no one predict her meteoric rise?

In a sense, everything was telegraphed well in advance.  Calista had been hinting at a run for years, using her Twitter feed to excoriate politicians "who neither see nor feel nor know,/But leechlike to their fainting country cling."  Still, it was commonly assumed that Calista was too busy running her highly lucrative business (she owns the Sometimes a Great Lotion chain of cosmetic stores) to consider a run for the White House.  McKay Coppins even wrote a mocking Buzzfeed profile accusing Calista of continually dangling a candidacy in front of the media, only to shy away when the time came to put her money where her mouth was.

And so it came as something of a shock when Calista, declaring that she had "balanced all, brought all to mind," launched a run for the White House.  Her bombastic announcement speech shocked the world with her controversial claim that "good fences make good neighbors" and that she would make Mexico pay for it.  But her campaign quickly seemed to founder when she attacked John McCain with a gratuitous smear:  "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick."  Rick Perry declared that the attack made Calista "unfit to be Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces" and said that she "should immediately withdraw from the race for President."

But the unexpected happened:  Calista's poll numbers didn't fade away, but instead continued their steady climb.  Maybe it was her oft-repeated promise to "get rid of Time's worst statute on Day 1 #FullRepeal."  Or maybe it was her evocative campaign slogan, "Let America Be America Again!"  Whatever the source of her appeal, she had soon built a durable coalition of white, less-educated voters that would remain loyal even through her erratic debate performances and questionable retweets.  She even survived an extended quarrel with Megyn Kelly of Fox News, which started when Kelly asked a scathing debate question and escalated the next day when Calista suggested that "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned."  Calista denied that she was referring to menstruation, but her remarks were considered over the line by almost everyone, including Red State founder Erick Erickson, who revoked her invitation to a conservative conference.  Still, the affair put only a small, temporary dent in her poll numbers.

What brought her down in the end was not her crudeness, her Twitter account, or the hapless #NeverCalista movement, but rather a cell-phone video of a closed-door session with major campaign donors.  The video is grainy, but Calista can clearly be heard responding to a question about the "47%," the "takers":

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn.

Confronted with the video, Calista insisted, "That is not it at all,/That is not what I meant, at all."  For a brief time it seemed as though she would weather the scandal.  It's true that the video was taken out of context, and that in view of her complete answer, it appeared that she was actually expressing solidarity with the workers, however inelegantly.

But soon more footage came out, showing Calista describing voters as "petals on a wet, black bough."  This was the final straw.  Her campaign came crashing down, with her opponents delivering the coup de grâce in the Connecticut primary.  And so she announced the suspension of her campaign from a peak in Darien.

Sarang's We Are Not Afraid

Sarang's latest effort, We Are Not Afraid, is one of the hardest to read of all his books.  I admit I put it down several times, and only the need to generate blog content compelled me to pick it back up.

To a large extent this is attributable to the book's subject matter, which is unrelentingly dark and sharp-edged.  Afraid is set in Louisiana in the period leading up to the 50th anniversary of a major civil rights march.  The governor's office, mostly represented in the book by the governor's oleaginous chief of staff, Blake Stenner, is planning a series of corporate-sponsored events to commemorate the march.  But civil rights activists feel that the governor, a white conservative Republican, is trying to co-opt the movement's symbols, paper over the state's abysmal record on civil rights, and draw attention away from how little progress has been made.  The activists are organizing their own independent commemoration of the march and are energetically vying for media attention.

Meanwhile, living in a poorly-insulated mobile home in a run-down trailer park, slowly dying of kidney disease, and minimally employed, Robert Percy Johnson seems at first like an unlikely object of attention for the governor's office and the civil rights activists.  But as a young man, Johnson took part in the march and, crucially, appeared in its most iconic photograph.  Recreating that photograph fifty years later has become a fixation for the media, and so Johnson's loyalties will help determine which camp, if any, scores the coup.

But where do Johnson's loyalties lie?  A white man, he is not much of a civil rights activist anymore, as we are reminded by his casual and frequently expressed (albeit fairly mild) racism.  Actually, we learn, he was never exactly a true believer.  At the time of the march he was dating a black woman, Sarah Hadley, and he went along to the march to be with her.  In the iconic photograph, he is on one side of a large sign, and she is on the other, and they are looking into each other's eyes.  In between, behind the waist-high sign, the marchers look straight ahead toward the camera, their black faces solemn and their jaws set.  The contrasting spontaneity and joy in the faces of Robert Percy and Sarah lighten the picture and make it the classic that it has become.

At first, as both camps reach out to Johnson, we don't understand why their approaches are so oblique and guarded, and his reactions so unpredictable and volatile.  Soon we learn, though, that Sarah broke up with Johnson years ago, and that he has never dated since.  Nevertheless, he gradually lowers his guard and begins to bond with Sarah's daughter Chloe, a New Orleans lawyer and civil rights activist who is helping to organize the counter-commemoration.

But we eventually learn that it wasn't only the breakup of his relationship that embittered Robert Percy.  A few weeks after the march, probably motivated by the famous picture (which was splashed across the front pages of local and national newspapers), the KKK abducted and castrated him.  His attackers were never caught, and while Sarah went on to bigger and better things, Johnson never left town and never really regained control of his life.  He dropped out of school and worked minimum-wage jobs, becoming obese and veering toward alcoholism.  He has experienced life as a series of humiliations and setbacks, brief moments of hope always dashed by his limits and his self-destructive behavior.

The book's title (drawn from the hymn and civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome") comes to seem sarcastic.  After all, Johnson is afraid of everything.  He's afraid of his not-too-distant death.  He's afraid his tormentors will never be brought to justice.  He's afraid Sarah was his only chance at love, and he's afraid that he would have lost her even if he hadn't been castrated.

Sarang has plenty of surprises in store for us, but they don't include redemption for Robert Percy, and to make matters worse, we steadily lose sympathy for Chloe as her controlling, selfish impulses drive the plot forward.  By the time Sarang is finished, life feels pervasively squalid and corrupt, and the end of the book brings finality but not closure, answers but not justice.  And so maybe in all its ugliness and inconclusiveness Afraid faithfully tells the story of race and class in America, leaving the reader with a bitter pill to swallow.

The RNC's 2016 Primary Post Mortem

Probably the most famous line in The Third Man celebrates the creative forces that are generated by turmoil and strife:

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The cuckoo clock is German, not Swiss.  But is the logic still true on a fundamental level?  The Republican National Committee is testing that hypothesis by taking the highly unusual step of commissioning a "post mortem" on the 2016 primary before the general election has even happened.  And it turns out that the stormy political scene has created fertile ground for unconventional, piercing analysis.  Partly this is because the RNC hired writers operating outside the usual collection of think tanks and conservative groups.  It is hard to think of a less likely roster than the one that ended up producing the post mortem:  Alan, Calista, Sarang, and Dave.

I should say post mortems, because fractious infighting meant that each writer produced a "minority report," none of which attracted any co-signers.  (There was no "majority report.")  The RNC made a virtue of necessity and published the reports as four separate books, with Reince Priebus noting wryly that the process of producing the post mortem was a pretty good metaphor for the primary itself.

Sarang's entry, Race Ipsa Loquitur, is the longest and has the broadest scope, starting with the strong civil rights plank in the Democrats' 1948 party platform (which, incidentally, was adopted in Philadelphia, the same city that will host the 2016 Democratic National Convention) and exploring at length the Republican Party's troubled and troubling connections to racial animus and resentment.  Sarang is at his most persuasive when he unpacks Trump's statements and connects the dots between his attacks on President Obama and his appeal to white racists.  Unfortunately for Priebus, Sarang's concluding advice to the GOP ("close your books, pack up your things, slink away in shame, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out") is less than constructive.

Dave's book, Behind the Veil, argues that the defining characteristic of the modern Republican Party is its embrace of ignorance.  Most groups are imperfect at acquiring and processing knowledge, Dave argues, but the Republicans are unique in their cheerful celebration of idiocy and their elevation of the conservative pundits and "journalists" who peddle it.  Dave's case is compelling, but my advice to the casual reader is to skip chapters 5-14, in which Dave explores the too-cute conceit that the Republicans are actually trying to replicate the Rawlsian conditions for discovering social justice.  The book picks up steam again as Dave turns to his stark prescription for the party:  cut itself off from Fox News and its ilk and return to mainstream sources of knowledge.  Dave persuasively argues that the Democrats have been well-served by the absence of a "partisan comfort blanket" that merely parrots their views.  The Republicans might lose a few elections without their propaganda machines, but ultimately the party and the country would be better off because of it.

Alan's book starts with a cheerful message for Priebus:  keep doing what you're doing, everything is fine.  But if Priebus keeps reading Worse Than the Disease, his comfort will evaporate pretty quickly.  "The Republican Party is sick all right," Alan writes.  "And the disease is conservatism."  Alan argues that conservatism as it is understood and practiced in the United States is a force for evil.  The only hope for our country is to channel conservatives into futile political projects that seldom or never attain power and that alienate as many voters as possible.  By that standard, the 2016 primaries were a rousing success.  Not only is Donald Trump one of the least electable candidates of all time, but the nomination process unearthed rich veins of idiotic and offensive statements that the Democrats can use to bury him in November.

To finish on a lighter note, Please Clap, Calista's chronology of the primary, recounts the hilarity that was one of its most remarkable features.  Calista shifts focus between small moments of levity, like the inartful Bush phrasing that gave the book its title, to the larger and darker jokes, like Ben Carson's endorsement of a man who compared him to a child molestor.  Calista mostly keeps the book light, but over the course of her narrative she develops a deep and troubling theme:  when people start laughing they often stop thinking.  This all-too-human response was crucial to Donald Trump's ascent, and may yet catapult him to the White House.  Don't stop laughing, she advises, but remember that if we don't work to defeat Trump, the joke may be on all of us.

Sarang's Through the Center of the Earth

Sarang's latest effort, Through the Center of the Earth, is generating a lot of buzz in the literary world—so much so that when Michael Chabon participated in an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, the majority of the questions were not about his own work, but about his opinion of Through the Center.  And the New York Times famously ran dueling reviews of the book on the same day, one by Woody Allen ("arguably the best book of the century") and the other by John Banville ("simply this:  a triumph—undoubtedly the best of the young century").  It's all anyone can talk about.

But I can't help feeling that people are paying attention for the wrong reasons.  The collection of short stories is mostly remarked upon for its imaginative and downright weird plotting.  This isn't misguided, exactly:  the stories really are fascinating.  (More on this in a moment.)  And his plotting really is much tighter and more focused than it was in Bletchley Park.  But hidden behind the well-crafted stories are hauntingly personal themes of loneliness, depression, and alienation, and unfortunately this nuance is at risk of being lost in all the celebratory fanfare.

About those plots:  Through the Center is, to a large extent, an exercise in implausible ideas made to seem plausible through the alchemy of Sarang's vivid prose.  In one story, the CIA recruits an up-and-coming Latvian chef, Māris Rubenis, to infiltrate the world of Soviet cooking.  After establishing himself as the USSR's foremost culinary star, Rubenis introduces what he calls "socialist realist cuisine," the most notable feature of which is that it involves eating prodigious amounts of asparagus at every meal.  As a result, the CIA is able to round up thousands of KGB agents, easily identifying them by the pungent odor of their urine.

But where do Rubenis's loyalties really lie?  Having defected to the United States, he serves the entire National Security Council a meal with well-disguised beets in every course.  After dinner, the council members are horrified when their urine is almost blood-red, and because their insecurities prevent them from talking to each other about it, a national crisis ensues.

This is all amusing enough, and no one does mordant humor better than Sarang.  But it is not just a clever story.  The all-consuming paranoia of national security finds its echo in Rubenis's relationships with his wife and her relationship with her lover, a Ukrainian expert in livestock management.  We come to realize that Rubenis's many deceptions are intimately bound up with his inability to trust other people.  In fact, Sarang suggests that an essential part of happiness may be the ability to trust the people we love, even (or especially) when they don't deserve our trust.  Everyone gets the joke when the urine starts flowing blood-red, but few readers seem to pick up on the quiet tragedy of Rubenis's gradual alienation from the people he loves.

Throughout the book, Sarang escalates the stories to ever-increasing levels of silliness.  In the title story, a physicist, Jan Elias, is hired to develop a system of communication between New York and Tokyo that works by projecting a beam of neutrinos through the center of the earth.  The story is an extrapolation from a real-life project using a trans-arctic cable to profit from a faster connection between those financial centers.  With their even-faster system, Elias's financial backers hope to get rich at the expense of their competitors.  Elias builds a giant tank of water directly beneath the Tokyo Stock Exchange and a particle accelerator directly beneath the New York Stock Exchange, and soon his employers are busily using their market-best informational edge to accumulate vast profits.

Part of the joke here is the ease with which Elias accomplishes otherwise impossible tasks, thanks to his financial backing.  (Imagine building a particle accelerator under the most densely populated land in the United States.)  Of course, the corruption of late-stage capitalism has been a theme throughout most of Sarang's work, but here it has a particularly sharp edge.  Sarang hints that the financialization of our society is inexorable, and the only chance at preserving anything of value involves tawdry compromises.  (For instance, Elias slips a lot of pure science into his project, and finds that he is better-funded than any of his colleagues in the civilian world.)

But again, these themes, which ramify and deepen as they reverberate through the characters' lives, don't seem to be getting any attention.  Wall Street traders are said to like the story, apparently not recognizing themselves in its villains.  (Or, more chillingly, they are embracing the villainy.)  Sarang is in danger of creating a paean to the world he is trying to puncture.

The book has plenty more to offer in the way of fabulous storytelling.  In one story, Nabisco spends a large portion of its marketing budget encouraging people to use the term "Triscuit conditional" in place of the traditional "biscuit conditional," and the campaign is so successful that soon all of the major snack companies are scrambling to keep up.  In another story, a psychologist develops a highly effective method of teaching patients self-control.  But the method is catastrophically successful:  the modern economy is so dependent on exploiting people's addictions and self-destructive impulses that when they gain the willpower necessary to lead happy, healthy lives, the economy implodes.

But I urge you not to get carried away by Sarang's high-flying flourishes.  Re-read the stories with an eye to the sadness and sense of loss that is so easily obscured.  The surface is beautiful, but the real substance lies beneath.

Calista's The Phantom Laundry

Do poetry and politics have anything to do with one another?  Political oratory occasionally ascends to rarefied heights—Lincoln's "better angels of our nature," Churchill's "broad, sunlit uplands," Nehru's "tryst with destiny."  But rhetoric aside, is there any meaningful way in which poetry influences politics or vice versa?  Or are these human endeavors mutually incomprehensible, and insulated from each other by their incomprehension?

These are the issues broached by Calista in her latest effort, The Phantom Laundry.  The book opens with a typical scene from modern American politics:  a young conservative governor from the Midwest, who has just launched his campaign for the presidency, appears on a Fox News morning show.  Smooth and winning, white, religious, and very conservative, Governor Wilkerson seems to have everything it takes to make it in the modern Republican Party.  The cheerful, puppyish interviewers lob a few softball policy questions and then start chatting about his favorite movies, his favorite music, and so on.  When they ask about his favorite book, Wilkerson says that apart from the Bible, his favorite book is The Bell Jar.  "I think voters might have chosen very differently in 2008 and 2012 if they had heeded its message," Wilkerson says, shooting a knowing look at the camera.

The interviewers move on, but something is pulling at the corner of Wilkerson's mind.  Only as he walks off the set does he realize his mistake:  he meant to say The Bell Curve, not The Bell Jar.  It was an inexplicable slip-up, since he has never read The Bell Jar.  But his campaign is just making its first impression on the voters, and now is not the time to admit that he bungled a simple question on national television.  He has no choice but to stick to his answer.

Wilkerson hastily reads the book, comes up with a few trite things to say if anyone asks about it, and then focuses on his tour through Iowa.  But almost in spite of himself, he finds his thoughts returning to the novel and its harrowing story of youth, ambition, and mental illness.  In minutes stolen between campaign appearances, he looks up Sylvia Plath poems on the internet, compulsively clicking from one to the next.  His aides find it harder and harder to draw him away from his smartphone to go on stage or to work a line of voters.

Meanwhile, the Republican primary devolves into a clown show, with each candidate vying to be more outlandish and obnoxious than the last, like a political version of the penis game.  Here Calista is at her sardonic best, punctuating long chapters of prose with punchy interstitial material consisting of candidates' Twitter feeds.  The madness of the race is palpable.

As the novel builds toward its climax, Wilkerson finds himself on the ropes, unable to compete with the lunatics who have come to dominate the race.  Where Wilkerson tends to use dog whistles to attract bigoted voters, his competitors freely express their bigoted thoughts, almost as asides, easily drawing in the voters who previously would have gone to Wilkerson.  His campaign is capsizing, but he can salvage it with a strong performance in New Hampshire, and so he spends more and more time in the state, practicing the retail politics that launched his career in the first place.

It is here, in front of a gaggle of cameras and microphones, that he gets a troubling question from a distraught young woman.  She describes her struggles with addiction and mental illness and holds up a tattered copy of The Bell Jar.  Laboring to enunciate her words through her tears, she says that she knows Wilkerson must be able to empathize with people like her, since he found Plath's book so touching.  But if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, then treatment will be beyond her reach.  What will Wilkerson do for people like her if he is elected?

We don't see his answer.  Instead, the book closes with a long car ride home from New Hampshire, the defeated candidate tired and pensive, surrounded by his dejected but loving family.  Did he do the right thing?  Calista doesn't answer, at least directly, and a lively debate has flared up, with many commenters insisting that no race-baiting Republican could possibly be redeemed by reading Sylvia Plath poetry, of all things.  But if you believe that poetry can mean something even to a politician, that once it takes hold in someone's heart it never stops exerting its tidal pull, then maybe you have found a different answer somewhere in the pages of this beguiling novel.