Calista's Chicken Fried Chicken

Calista's latest effort, Chicken Fried Chicken, is an exercise in Southern Gothic excess. The protagonist, Johnson Wilson, is nearing the end of a long and mostly happy career teaching linguistics at Cornell. But while he is revered as a spellbinding lecturer, all of his research projects have been small-bore and, at best, workmanlike. He longs to complete a magisterial work befitting his long career.

Meanwhile, Wilson needs money. An acrimonious divorce has left him with only a 1992 Camry and a small and perpetually under-heated house near campus. Early in the book he learns that a friend has received a 6-figure advance to write a popular book on cosmology, and Wilson's envy is palpable.

Wilson is therefore ecstatic when his literary agent, Alain de la Droite, tells him that his book proposal has been accepted by a major publishing house. The advance is generous and the publisher's timeline will allow him to leave Ithaca for two winters in a row to work on The Patois of Southern Louisiana. Wilson practically floats to his daughter's wedding in Brooklyn, where he impulsively foots the bill for a raucous after-party. The next day, after a pleasant brunch with the newlyweds, he heads to Manhattan to sign his book contract.

But when Wilson is ushered into a glassy conference room to complete the formalities, he is in for a surprise. A large cardboard mock-up of his book cover sits on an easel at the end of a table, and de la Droite is waiting for him, grinning ear to ear. But the title on the book is subtly, devastatingly wrong: The Patios of Southern Louisiana. Wilson's mind races. He wants to write a book on linguistics. But he really needs the advance! But surely this is just a misunderstanding? But what if it isn't! Wilson doesn't know anything about patios.

And so it is that after a crash course from a friend in the architecture department, Wilson points his Camry south and into the unknown. The second half of the book follows Wilson as he gamely rings doorbells all across the bayou, brandishing a camera that he barely knows how to use, trying to cobble together enough material for a book that meets his contractual obligations. Wilson is in for more than his share of humiliation, but he also finds hospitality, graciousness, and eventually friendship on his odyssey.

Calista wisely leaves certain questions unanswered. We never learn if Wilson summons the courage to turn in a manuscript on linguistics instead of the book on patios that he has been assembling. We never learn if his marriage proposal, to a federal public defender in New Orleans who rescues him from an alligator while his car is stalled on the shoulder of a rain-drenched highway, is accepted. But what is clear is that, throughout his misadventures, Wilson feels more alive than he has in years, finding some inner source of vigor he didn't know he possessed. And so perhaps de la Droite's typo saved his life. At the very least, it launched a rollicking shaggy dog story that readers will have a hard time putting down.

Calista's Summer '77

Calista's latest effort, Summer '77, is a love story wrapped inside a mystery. Set in South Korea, the movie follows Song Ji-woo, a middle-aged teacher at a rural high school, as he searches for his missing daughter Soo-ji. Intermittently the movie jumps back in time to portray Song's romance with Soo-ji's mother, Jae-eun, which took place against the backdrop of the Korean War.

The movie deploys classic noir tropes, but it is not a playful pastiche. Soo-ji suffers from schizophrenia and Song suspects that she has fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous man she met at college in Busan. But Song's only evidence for this is a letter Soo-ji wrote before she disappeared, and as Song follows clues and interviews her friends and acquaintances, he comes to realize that reality is more complicated. Song doggedly follows up any hint he can find, however hopeless, sweating in the omnipresent heat of the Busan summer. (The weather is almost another character in the film, mentioned by everyone and visible in nearly every scene. From time to time the humidity boils up into violent thunderstorms that bring only temporary relief. Calista realizes the itchy, sweaty atmosphere so convincingly that the movie is almost physically uncomfortable to watch.)

In flashback scenes, Song is no less determined and monomaniacal in his pursuit of Jae-eun. The setting is the same—in the hot summer of 1950, both Song and Jae-eun have fled behind the Pusan Perimeter, the last desperate U.N. holdout against the invading Communists. Jae-eun seems likely to marry her suitor Park Chang-ho, who helped her and her parents flee to safety at considerable risk to himself. Park's heroism makes a persuasive case, but Song desperately begs Jae-eun to choose him instead. Eventually he succeeds, at some cost to his dignity, and in the shambles of war he and Jae-eun start a family.

Back in the 1970s, Song finally finds his daughter with the help of the man he had suspected of abducting her. Tomorrow Song will take Soo-ji back to the rural town where he lives, where Jae-eun is buried. He couldn't rescue Jae-eun's family from the invading Communists, he couldn't save her from cancer, and he knows the storms in Soo-ji's head will never go away. But tonight in Busan he has hired an air-conditioned hotel room he can't afford, and he and Soo-ji are out of the feverish heat. While she sleeps he strokes her back and remembers.

Sarang's Low Background

Sarang's latest effort, Low Background, is surprisingly subdued, a pleasant, low-key diversion from present events. The novel is set in a small town in eastern Tennessee in the early 1990s, and it opens with a calamity—a flood has washed out a large bridge spanning the adjacent river. Luckily no one was hurt, but the bridge will take a long time to replace, and until then residents will have to drive several miles to the next river crossing.

As if that weren't enough, the mayor is soon at loggerheads with representatives of the county and the state over who will pay for the replacement. The problem is that although the bridge was built by the federal government, its ownership (and responsibility for its maintenance) was transferred to the state shortly thereafter. But the state apparently transferred the bridge to the town in the 1950s without fanfare (and without much in the way of documentary evidence). Maintenance costs have traditionally been shared equally between the town and the county, but this arrangement was never formalized (or if it was, the town's beleaguered attorney can't find any evidence of it). Now the state and the county are determined to avoid any financial responsibility for the bridge's replacement. The mayor, on the advice of the town attorney, decides to surrender. The expense will be crushing.

But before the documents are signed, a chance remark by the mayor's daughter sets the story on a new course. In her college physics course she learned that the detonation of atomic bombs starting in 1945 dramatically increased the "background radiation" in the atmosphere, so that steel made after 1945 is contaminated with trace amounts of radioactive material. As a result modern steel emits an elevated amount of radiation—not enough to matter for most purposes, but unacceptably high for delicate instruments such as medical imaging machines and Geiger counters. Manufacturers of those instruments have to pay a premium for "low background" steel, made before the contamination of the atmosphere. The ruined bridge was a cantilever bridge made in the 1930s, so it will be an excellent source of low background steel.

Now the tables are turned. Unfortunately before the documents are signed the hapless town attorney tips his hand, and the state and county immediately change their positions. The state argues that the bridge was never properly transferred to the town and still belongs solely to the state, while the county argues that by sharing maintenance expenses the parties established a "course of conduct" that gives it a one-half ownership stake in the bridge. I won't spoil the conclusion, but needless to say the town is at least spared the cost of replacement.

Low Background is not a long book or a particularly dramatic one. What is distinctive about it is precisely its calm, deliberate, one-damn-thing-after-another plotting, which feels true to life in a way that busier, more elaborate plots often fail to achieve. It captures the tedium of life without becoming tedious. I suppose that's another way to read the title, as an invocation of a calmer time, an elegy for a life of low stakes punctuated by infrequent bursts of energy, before technology made it impossible to be detached from day-to-day microbursts of outrage and nonsense. A way of life that can no longer be sustained, but still something to seek out in its restful graveyards of steel.

Dave's Hybrid Rainbow

Is Dave's latest effort, Hybrid Rainbow, a political game? That's the category in which it was entered for the inaugural Video Games of Merit awards to be given at the New Yorker Ideas Festival. (Sadly the VGMs have been overshadowed by the New Yorker's decision to invite and then disinvite Steve Bannon to the festival. Bannon had no role in selecting the finalists for the VGMs.)

In a sense Hybrid Rainbow is free of politics. In the game, the player runs an engineering company hired to design various exotic structures on alien planets. Functionally the game works much like Kerbal Space Program, except that the engineering is terrestrial and generally conducted on a much larger scale. One of my favorite assignments required me to build tracks for a bullet train along the entire equator of a large planet—I had to build bridges to scale valleys and tunnels to go through mountains, and I ended up using a long string of dirigibles to lift the tracks above a vast ocean. Unfortunately it turns out the game's weather simulator is fairly realistic, so I won't be doing any more projects for that planet.

Throughout all of this, the player has very little choice of what to build. Assignments are put out to bid and the player tries to win them. There is no way to influence the society's priorities. For this reason, critics have argued that the game isn't political at all. Or if it is political, it envisions politics as a technocratic exercise, the solving of optimization problems.

I think this criticism is unfair, or at least incomplete. What it ignores is the way that the game forces the player to observe and participate in the sad trajectory of planetary civilization. At the beginning a given planet, in the first flush of economic success, tends to fund projects of varying degrees of frivolity (such as my ill-fated bullet train). But over time, planets fall into political and economic dysfunction. Environmental problems mount, and more and more resources have to be spent furiously trying to lift the biggest cities above the rising waters, or protecting citizens from an increasingly toxic atmosphere.

And it is at this point that the game can be seen as a political one. The player still doesn't have any power to affect the political choices that planets make, but the player is an involuntary witness to a bleaker and bleaker struggle over planetary resources. By the time a planet has descended into environmental disaster, often the only paying clients are hyper-wealthy private citizens willing to spend vast sums to preserve their luxurious lifestyles at the expense of the rest of the planet. Even in the best-case scenario, where a reasonably free and democratic government remains in control of resource allocation, the hard reality is that only so many cities can be propped up, only so many domes can be paid for. The fate of most democratic planets is to turn to increasingly desperate engineering projects as most of their cities sink beneath the waves.

I feel somewhat embarrassed admitting that this tragedy is also the most visually appealing part of Hybrid Rainbow. After a continent has been submerged, you can still make out its shape just beneath the water, the light blue outline set against the deep blue of the old ocean, swirls of bright clouds swelling over the warm water and then expending themselves over the cold impassive oceans. The violence of the initial onslaught of waves is long over, and only a tranquil patch of shallow sea remains. Here, where the water is a bit darker, is the deep canyon I built a highway through. Over there, you can still see the ghostly shape of the titanic arch that I built over a long-dead city. Coral grows over the financial district where I built a monumental tower, topped with an aluminum statue now cloaked in seaweed.

But little remains of the rich, vibrant society that paid for all those projects. A few floating platforms remain, powered by the sun, stolidly paddling away from huge blooms of colorful toxic algae. They can't afford my services anymore, but I pad my bids on newer, richer planets and use the profits to keep their machines running. As long as I have work, they'll have a shot at survival and, who knows, maybe some kind of renaissance centuries down the line.

The Ballmer Prize Finalists

The short list for the Ballmer Prize is in, and as usual the projects are remarkable. You can see them on special display at the Smithsonian, although as noted below most of the projects require a degree of audience participation that makes it difficult to appreciate them fully there. This year the finalists for the $1 million prize are Alan, Calista, Dave, and Sarang. The theme this year was "the human condition," and the prize will go to the project that best expresses that theme. I don't get a vote anymore (thanks Donna Tartt!), but I will describe the finalist projects for my loyal readers.

Calista's entry, "More Evidence," is deceptively simple. It consists of a giant crossword puzzle spanning hundreds of rows and columns but otherwise following the usual conventions. It is intended to be solved collaboratively, with two or more people starting in different places on the puzzle and eventually working toward each other's completed squares.

The trick is that there is no unique solution—each clue can be solved with at least two possible answers. This ambiguity tends to be resolved based on earlier answers, which lock in certain letters. Those answers, in turn, depend on the happenstance of which answer occurred to the solver first. The puzzle captures how our knowledge of the world comes to us in path dependent ways. Depending on our formative learning experiences, we process later information differently and try to fit it into our existing world view with minimal disruption to its coherence.

In "More Evidence," this can play out in different ways. Some couples solve the puzzle with no discord and are surprised to find the project garnering rave reviews as a work of art. This is because they were serendipitously working toward the same solution the whole time. Other players find that when their filled-out areas started to overlap, they give incompatible answers (that is, each has been working toward a different solution to the overall puzzle). They are forced to reconsider at least one player's work and start over. Of course the problem is deciding which player's work to cast aside, and it neatly captures something deep about the way that people form incompatible but equally valid beliefs about the world. How do you decide whose truth is acceptable and whose must be discarded? And on a psychological level, how do you cast aside so much hard-earned "knowledge" all at once? The resulting fights have been legendary, and at least two spectacular breakups have resulted.

Dave's entry, "Calling All," is perhaps the most ambitious of the finalists. It is a procedurally generated computer game consisting of billions of records—grainy photographs, newspaper stories, emails, transcripts of telephone calls, and so forth. There is no stated goal or win condition, but players have realized that the game invariably depicts the last few weeks of human life on earth around the time of an enormous catastrophe. It's widely assumed that the point of the game is to piece together what happened.

It tends to be a lonely enterprise because a new scenario is generated each time someone plays the game. You can't apply anything learned by anyone else to your particular iteration of the game. (Some players have managed to play collaboratively on a single "run" of the game, though.) Sometimes the world ends in a nuclear cataclysm, sometimes humanity is wiped out by infectious disease. Sometimes the world's institutions simply collapse and we lose the capacity to feed or protect ourselves.

My game happened to involve a military conflict culminating in nuclear war. The nature of the game is that I had more than enough information to piece together what happened (in fact, more records than I could possibly review in a lifetime), but it was nearly impossible to tell whether any particular piece of evidence hid some important meaning. Here's a picture of an Israeli jet flying over Turkey. (Or is it a Russian jet disguised as an Israeli jet?) Here's a transcript of a frantic radio transmission as a Japanese army outpost is overrun. But then, here's a prewar memo from the U.S. Secretary of the Interior about wolves in national parks—can that possibly have any bearing on what happened? (The Secretary, for what it's worth, survived the initial nuclear strike and briefly led the Coalition relief efforts in Alberta.)

The information is voluminous and fragmented and often contradictory. A few players have published compelling timelines for their games, but when they've opened up the data to the public, as often as not the initial timeline gets picked apart as people turn up countervailing evidence. Part of the problem is that with so much information to review, it's impossible to know whether you've reached the truth or whether there is some email or photograph lurking in the archives that will completely change your understanding of events. It's difficult to describe the feeling this creates, but it's a kind of uneasiness paired with frustration and boredom. Most people give up trying long before they form any stable, coherent understanding of the world of the game.

Sarang's entry, "I Want a Lawyer," is a movie following 8 characters over the course of a 24-hour period in Philadelphia. I should say "movies," because "I Want a Lawyer" actually consists of 8 movies, each of which is exactly 24 hours long and depicts everything that happens to one of the characters over the course of that day. The project can only be screened at multiplexes with at least 8 screens, and each member of the audience must choose which screen to watch at any given moment (viewers are allowed to go from screen to screen throughout the viewing). The only way to see every frame of the film is to view it 8 times, and even then you can't take any breaks to sleep or use the restroom. (This is alleviated somewhat by the fact that the camera stays with each character even when he or she is sleeping, so you can catch a break during those downtimes.)

One interesting aspect of "I Want a Lawyer" is what happens when two of the main characters meet. In some cases, Sarang used one shoot (with two cameras) to capture the scene, so that the viewer is seeing the same action take place on screen. This does not mean that you would necessarily come away from the two depictions with the exact same understanding of what happened, of course, but it limits the extent of any divergence.

In other cases, Sarang shot the scenes separately, and fairly significant differences were introduced, presumably reflecting the characters' subjective experiences or memories of the events in question. This makes it extremely challenging, even after viewing all 192 hours of film, to say exactly what happened in the movie. Perhaps the title of the project is a reference to the fact that the way events are understood is inherently up for debate and therefore subject to advocacy. In other words, comprehending the "fact of the matter" is the beginning, not the end, of our journey toward truth.

Finally, Alan's untitled project is in some ways the simplest. It is an old brown dog with a graying muzzle. It lies on a well-worn hair-covered bed and occasionally licks itself or farts. It is friendly enough, and certainly doesn't bite, but it tends not to respond much to human visitors unless they bring cheese.

Sarang's The Angel Critique

Sarang's latest effort, The Angel Critique, is an odd but timely book. Set mostly in Michigan, the book follows T'Quan Phillips, a star football player in his first season for the Detroit Lions, with periodic flashbacks to his time at the University of Michigan and, earlier, playing high school football in his hometown of Flint. As the novel opens, Phillips enjoys something approaching hero status in Michigan, where he led the Wolverines to a national championship and where he is the Lions' only hope for a successful season. It barely catches the reader's attention when Sarang casually mentions that the University of Michigan's computer system has been hacked and its academic records breached. There are far more exciting events to consume our attention, like Phillips' outrageously good 17 touchdowns with only 1 interception during the first five games, all of which the Lions win.

But things fall apart quickly for Phillips once one of his undergraduate papers is made public between game 5 and game 6. The paper focuses on students in inner-city schools and finds that they learn best when they play an active role in deciding how the topic they are studying is presented (I'm simplifying—the actual finding is hard to encapsulate). At first, the paper is downloaded by football fans eager for any insight into their star player, but soon it attracts broader attention on social media, especially Twitter.

That's where it comes to the attention of Murray Angel, an NYU statistician who writes a blog post pointing out flaws in Phillips' methodology. The problem is not so much that Phillips engaged in "p-hacking" (tailoring the numbers to reach a conclusion that crosses the 0.05 "significance" threshold for p-values) or "fishing" (trying many theories until one reaches the significance level, like this)—Angel doesn't find any indication of these things. But the study suffers from what Angel calls the "garden of forking paths": Phillips had too many degrees of freedom. That is, he could have analyzed his data in many different ways, and the particular way he chose to do so was probably shaped by the data itself. This undermines the strength of his conclusion and calls into doubt whether it has any real value. Nevertheless, the paper earned Phillips a B+ and helped him pass the class and ultimately graduate from the University of Michigan, all of which is now cast into doubt in the minds of the public.

Once they've absorbed Angel's bombshell critique, outraged Lions fans turn on Phillips with a vengeance, even as he delivers stellar results on the field. After each victory, during postgame interviews, sports reporters only want to talk about the Angel critique. Ultimately, after a 9-1 start to the season, the Lions have no choice but to bench Phillips, and the team finishes out the season at 10 and 6, barely missing the playoffs. Although his contract will last for two more years, Phillips knows that he will never play another game for the franchise. His career in professional football is effectively over, and because of the ignominious way in which it ended, he is unlikely to get a job in sports writing or broadcasting.

The Angel Critique is unsettling because it shows how our heroes so often fall short of our expectations. Whether it's performance-enhancing drugs, domestic abuse, or the garden of forking paths, our athletes often disappoint us off the field. So why do we keep investing our hopes in them? Why do we insist that they share our values and our politics? Why are we so crushed when they turn out to be deeply flawed?

These are questions that are roiling the world of professional sports, and so Sarang's work is yet again essential to understanding the times we live in.

Heather's The World Is Too Much With Us, Lady Soon

Heather's latest effort, The World Is Too Much With Us, Lady Soon, is a compellingly bizarre novel. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, The World follows Maruyama Natsue, a lecturer in poetry at the Federal University teaching an introductory class in "pre-Restoration poetry" (that is, poetry dating from before the permanent re-establishment of national-level governments in the Western Hemisphere, commonly dated to the Mexico City Conference). Scattered through the book are the poems that Maruyama teaches her students, and it is obvious to the reader that the poems have been handed down through some sort of oral tradition that has allowed errors to creep in. Heather gets a lot of mileage out of the difference between the poems as we know them and the poems as Maruyama teaches them—sometimes the changes are slight, but inevitably meaning is both lost and found in the new poems, sometimes to an astonishing degree. Her students have delightfully idiosyncratic and amusing reactions to the texts, usually awkward and forced, but sometimes containing rare insight.

Interspersed with classroom scenes are passages from an extended conversation Maruyama carries on with an unnamed interlocutor. Walking through Hyde Park, by turns they discuss deep questions and bicker like old friends. Maruyama is taking some sort of personal risk by talking to the man, but we never learn the source of the risk or why she accepts it. Is he a lover? A relative? A political dissident? Merely a friend? The conversation meanders and loops back on itself, giving a sense of stasis and futility. There is something they cannot bring themselves to say, and so they circle it endlessly. What is it that has left them without the words, or without the will to say what needs to be said?

I felt like a detective as I sifted through Maruyama's syllabus looking for clues. But nothing is ever resolved in The World, and when Maruyama and her conversational partner finally make their way to a Tube station, they get on trains going in opposite directions, whisked away from each other in a world struggling to find its way, by flawed memory, in the dark.

Alan's The Old Air

Alan's latest effort, The Old Air, is a masterful synthesis of personal and social themes, by turns fanciful, somber, and triumphant, its threads coming together with symphonic force and then drifting apart into artfully discordant narratives. This is fitting, given its subject matter, but I am getting ahead of myself.

The book is set in the not-too-distant future where, as a last ditch effort to stop climate change, the government has pumped huge quantities of a synthetic gas into the atmosphere. The gas (confusingly called "syngas," a term that currently refers to man-made hydrocarbons) is relatively cheap to produce and has an effect that is the opposite of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. By spewing large quantities of it into the atmosphere, humanity has been able to stabilize temperatures a few degrees above their present equilibrium.

Syngas is controversial, but most of the dire effects that were predicted by its opponents have not materialized. Overall, cancer rates do not appear to have gone up or down, and while certain types of cancer have become slightly more prevalent and others slightly less so, in all cases the changes are very small in magnitude. Much the same can be said of agriculture—yields are down slightly on average, but the change is almost negligibly small. In fact there is scientific dispute about whether these phenomena are real, or are even caused by syngas. Perhaps some effects of increased global temperatures simply took time to manifest themselves, or perhaps they are caused by something else entirely. Or perhaps it is all statistical noise.

One consequence, though, is indisputable and universally acknowledged. Syngas changes the way waves propagate through the air, deadening and distorting the sounds we hear. People can still understand each others' speech, and things like police sirens still work, though the volume must be increased. But most music is completely ruined. Church hymns sound ghastly; concerts are pointless. Music fans buy special headphones that form a seal with their skin, and then pump the headphones full of carbon dioxide from a cartridge. (The same system is used in movie theaters.) But syngas slowly leaks in, and within an hour or two the headphones have to be purged again. Music becomes an expensive taste, and live music of all kinds quickly disappears.

Of course adaptations soon emerge. Concert halls are retrofitted to be airtight, and the syngas-laden air is pumped out and replaced with a combination of pure nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide—the "old air." The audience is admitted through an airlock, and for a few hours music sounds the way it once did. But this is preposterously expensive, and so real, live music is available to only two categories of people: the very rich, and the musicians themselves.

The protagonist of the story is Marcus Weller, a pianist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Weller is a highly talented musician, and so his access to music is assured. But his girlfriend, a librarian, is neither wealthy nor musically talented, and although Weller can get her into the occasional performance for free, it is obvious that music doesn't mean very much to her.

Before long the orchestra begins experimenting with a combination dormitory/practice space that is sealed from the environment and filled with old air. This is fairly economical, because it is really the airlock—which allows people to go back and forth between the atmosphere and the old air—that is expensive to operate. And so Weller is sequestered with his fellow musicians for weeks at a time, straining his relationship with his girlfriend.

Inevitably, the orchestra soon begins renting out rooms in its sealed dormitory, which is augmented with gyms, stores, and restaurants. Wealthy patrons join the musicians for weeks-long stays, working remotely during the day, or perhaps enjoying movies without the need for headphones. Every night there is live music. Weller earns some extra money at night by playing in a dark, redolent, joyously raucous bar. For a few hours, at least, it is possible to forget everything and lose himself in the music, and he leaves every night with a full tip jar. But he wakes up every morning alone, missing his girlfriend, missing the outdoors, and feeling that there is something artificial and repellent about playing piano in a dive bar populated by the super-rich.

One day Weller is practicing by himself, and when he finishes a song, he turns to find that a guest has come into the room. Although it is against the rules, Weller lets her stay, and by the time he is done practicing she has started to weep, stirred by the music.

You can imagine where it goes from here. Weller is forced to confront deep questions that he has long repressed, most importantly, can he truly love someone who doesn't appreciate music? And how much control can he exercise over his feelings? Is love the kind of thing that can be made subject to reason?

But it is more than that. Weller foresees a dark future of growing separation between the haves and the have-nots, a world without any shared love of music. In short, a world in which music is a luxury that can be enjoyed only by people with talent or money, musicians and musical tourists. A world in which blessings are showered freely on the elites and denied to everyone else. How is a good person who loves music supposed to navigate a world like that?

And so The Old Air adroitly focuses the reader's attention on real-life questions about the foundations of love and the quandaries of privilege in an increasingly unequal world. Here I give Alan credit for his light touch. He doesn't pretend that there is any easy or satisfying answer to these questions. In fact, he suggests that we are caught on the horns of a society that is charging forward onto morally and aesthetically untenable ground. And our only choice, if we have a choice, is to be impaled on one horn or the other.

Calista's Ignominy, Part 2

Among all the stories in Calista's latest effort, Ignominy, "Doomed to Repeat It" is the one in which she most clearly wears her heart on her sleeve. "Doomed" tells the story of Rafael ("Raff") Stafford, a young black man who became politically active on campus as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. Determined to continue fighting for change, Stafford makes a long-shot run for governor of Missouri, campaigning on a promise to reform law enforcement and the justice system.

At first things go Stafford's way. A veteran Democratic politician, seemingly a shoo-in for the nomination, decides not to run due to a family health issue, and he unexpectedly endorses Stafford. Capitalizing on the endorsement, and finding an unexpected joy in (and talent for) campaigning, Stafford wins a narrow victory in the primary and prepares for the general election. His opponent, Mark Ligett, is a fellow alumnus of the University of Missouri, a smarmy white classics major who spent his college years as a right-wing provocateur, inviting controversial speakers to the campus and then capitalizing on any impropriety in the resulting protests.

Early in the race, Ligett goes on Fox News and claims that under Stafford's leadership the black students on campus had tried to "subjugate" the Mizzou football team, an explosive charge in Missouri. Stafford responds angrily, arguing that Ligett's attack is a preposterous racial provocation. The fact of the matter is that Stafford had requested that the football team enter the practice field through a pathway on the opposite side of the field from an area where BLM activists gathered during a campus protest. Stafford's request was simply meant to keep the activists from getting in the players' way and vice versa, and he can't imagine why it would be considered "subjugation."

But by this point Stafford's luck has run out. The path that he had suggested for the football team took it beneath an ornate gateway—literally, the team was being asked to walk sub jugum, "under the yoke" (that is, beneath the horizontal cross-piece of the gateway). "Subjugate," far from being a racial provocation, was in fact a refined, erudite, and completely true way to describe Stafford's proposal. Stafford faces near-universal condemnation for his ignorance of history and his haste to play the race card.

Stafford soon lags Ligett by double digits in the polls, and his campaign sheds staff as donations dry up. Stafford crisscrosses the state with a few loyal volunteers, trying to convince voters that he is not the caricature the media has portrayed him as, but as election day approaches it seems like an impossible task.

Once again, though, fortune smiles on Stafford. With just a week to go until the election, Ligett goes on Sean Hannity's show to crow about his inevitable victory. Hannity asks him what he plans to do in office, and Ligett says that he wants to fight back against all the policies that have been put in place by "Obama, Schumer, Pelosi, etc." Hannity, stunned, asks Ligett to rephrase his point. Ligett repeats himself using essentially the same words, and Hannity buries his face in his hands.

Then, his voice tinged with regret and breaking at times, Hannity explains that while et cetera and et alia both mean "and others," et cetera means "and other things," while et alia is the expression used to mean "and other people." Ligett has just referred to three politicians—a black man, a woman, and a Jew—as things rather than people. Ligett tries to plead ignorance, but Hannity, who spent hours talking up Ligett's knowledge of the classics during "SubjuGate," won't hear it. He kicks Ligett off of his program and apologizes to the audience for what they have just seen.

The next morning, Rush Limbaugh coins the nickname "Ligett the bigot," an epithet that will follow Ligett for the rest of the campaign. Republican candidates across the country disavow Ligett in an attempt to contain the damage. For the most part they succeed, but Stafford wins in a landslide that brings with it majorities in both the Missouri House of Representatives and the Missouri Senate. By this point the "subjugate" controversy has come to seem quaint and overblown by comparison to Ligett's open bigotry, and Stafford holds his victory party on Mizzou's practice field, where supporters can walk "under the jugum" in tongue-in-cheek celebration. A new day has dawned for racial justice in Missouri.

Calista's Ignominy, Part 1

Calista's latest effort, Ignominy, is hard to categorize. I suppose it could be called a book of short stories, though some aren't particularly short, or a series of novellas. Maybe it's best simply to call it a collection of absurdist political vignettes with surprisingly complicated human dimensions. I'll write a separate review for each of a handful of stories, starting with one of my favorites, "High Desert."

The story follows a Democratic political consultant, Anne Borland, as she tries to rescue what should have been an easy Democratic campaign for a Senate seat in Oregon. The problem is that the Republican candidate, Grant Sissley, has proven to be considerably more charismatic and eloquent than the Democrat, Jim O'Neal. A fourth-generation hop farmer, Sissley was an early and vocal supporter of gay rights, making it hard to depict him as a typical Republican. After a strong debate performance, Sissley takes a modest but steady single-digit margin in the polls, and Borland is sent by the national party as a "big gun" to take control of the situation.

Borland quickly launches a vigorous "oppo research" project, and before long it has hit gold. The hops that Sissley grows, it turns out, are not the strong, resinous hops used to brew the Pacific Northwest's famous "dank" IPAs. Instead, he favors noble varieties descended from the mild, herby, spicy hops of central Europe. Borland rolls out a "Cascadia Challenge" booth at political rallies, where undecided voters can sample beers brewed with Sissley's hops and beers brewed with more typical Northwest varieties like Citra, Simcoe, and Centennial. A large majority of voters leave the booth shaking their heads, wondering how they could ever have viewed Sissley as "one of us."

Borland is scrupulously fair when she procures the beers for the Cascadia Challenge—the beer brewed with Sissley's hops is a well-crafted pilsner beer that shows off the hops to good effect. But Oregon drinkers consistently reject the pilsner in favor of what, in all honesty, can only be described as a mediocre double IPA.

And herein lies Borland's ethical quandary. Borland is a beer enthusiast and she recognizes that Sissley's hops are a true accomplishment, creating some of the best pilsner she has ever tasted. She knows Sissley's beer is better, and yet voters are rejecting it out of hand. The Cascadia Challenge is everything that is wrong in American politics, trading on voters' ignorance, tribalism, and prejudice, their unwillingness to engage with anything that is different or challenging. This is not why Borland got into politics! In the voters' rejection of foreign-tasting beer she detects shades of the anti-immigrant sentiment that swept Trump into power.

And so the story hurtles toward its dramatic conclusion, with Borland out of control and drinking more and more of the Cascadia Challenge pilsner, Sissley growing increasingly bitter and desperate as his lead dissovles, and the race slipping into the dark territory that has come to grip American politics...

My Apology to Sarang

Clearly I owe Sarang an apology for what happened this week, and I offer one without reservation. But I also want to explain what happened in detail so that, I hope, my readers can see that I had no malicious intent.

Literature has never been a particularly good way to make money, and in recent years a lot of traditional revenue models have been challenged. I now derive almost all of my income from this site, which frees me from certain pressures, but which also requires me to promote myself more aggressively than previous generations of literary taste-makers. To drive traffic, I often tweet excerpts from an interview before publishing it. (This practice is not uncommon and is not inherently problematic, though obviously in this case it was inadvisable.) And so when Sarang agreed to a phone interview while touring in support of his latest effort, The Tricolour, I knew that I had to make the most of my opportunity. That's why on Monday I started tweeting a few of the most interesting parts of the interview.

Among them was this now infamous tweet:

Sarang: "Dublin is the soul of Ireland and has been for a very long time..." #CallousLiterature #books #novels #provocative

— James (@15c3PO) August 21, 2017

Of course, "#provocative" was putting it mildly. Sarang has always enjoyed a very strong following all over Ireland, and his readers outside the capital city were shocked and dismayed. Dublin is the largest city in Ireland, but it was first a Viking city and then the seat of British rule, and a large majority of Irish people do not live in Dublin... so claiming that the soul of Ireland resides there came across as, at best, a tendentious and simplistic way to understand Irishness.

This was all the more troubling because The Tricolour is set in Ireland (both the Republic and Northern Ireland), and Sarang's publisher is relying heavily on the book's success to make up for the commercial disappointment of his previous novel, Lady Chatterjee's Lover. I will post a full review later, but suffice it to say that The Tricolour is a nuanced exploration of Irish identity and, as it happens, is set almost entirely outside of Dublin.

I posted the tweet on Monday, but it got almost no attention (including, apparently, from Sarang, who is not among my 113 Twitter followers) until it was retweeted yesterday by Colm Tóibín with the pithy comment, "My god..." By then, Sarang was on a jet to New York, blissfully unaware of the firestorm that my tweet had ignited. #HasSarangLandedYet quickly shot to the top of Twitter's trending topics, and everyone from Colson Whitehead to Alec Baldwin weighed in with biting commentary.

Worse, once he arrived in the U.S., Sarang was whisked straight from JFK to Charlie Rose's studio, so he was blindsided when Rose read him the tweet out loud and asked him if it was accurate. Sarang confirmed that it was and expressed surprise that anyone might disagree. Many of his ardent fans had stuck by him this far, assuming I had misquoted him, and so his calm reaffirmation of the statement sparked a new wave of shock and revulsion across the globe. (The interview has not aired yet, but leaked footage of this back-and-forth spread quickly on social media.)

My only defense is that conversation with Sarang is never easy, and it is all the more difficult when carried out on cell phones across the Atlantic. Here is my initial transcription of my recording of that portion of the interview (we had been discussing the extent to which different countries are dominated by a single preeminent city):

J: England is sort of in between. 

S: Perhaps. London is obviously the most important city, but you've also got Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham... but for my purposes what is more important is that Dublin is the soul of Ireland and has been for a very long time. 

Sarang now claims that he meant that Dublin is the Seoul of Ireland. I hope you will agree that my interpretation was reasonable, but I take Sarang's word for it that he was comparing Ireland's largest city to South Korea's.

And so I wholeheartedly apologize for my tweet and for the anguish that it has caused Sarang and his readers. I hope that we can move past this painful episode. I also hope that Sarang's publisher will take my sincere apology into account when considering its legal options.

[UPDATE: Sarang has asked me to post a more complete excerpt from my transcript, which I have done below.

S: Of course, the U.S. has any number of cities preeminent in their sector. New York for finance, San Francisco and Seattle for tech, Washington for politics, Los Angeles for God knows what... all the filmmaking energy is in Frankfurt now... [Editorial note: Sarang has taken advantage of extremely generous German tax subsidies to move his independent film studio to Frankfurt.]

J: But not France.

S: No, not France, everything is in Paris. And more to the point, not South Korea. Seoul is the epicenter of everything in the country, there isn't a major sector it doesn't dominate.

J: England is sort of in between.

S: Perhaps. London is obviously the most important city, but you've also got Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham... but for my purposes what is more important is that Dublin is the soul of Ireland and has been for a very long time. I mean in some ways it is a hypercharged soul, it is more soul than soul. I don't even know what Irish city would be comparable to Busan, which is clearly South Korea's "second city." Belfast, if you count that. Otherwise I suppose it would be Cork?

 I hope this clears everything up and we can move on.]

Sarang's The Coleridge Proof

Sarang's latest effort, The Coleridge Proof, is a slim volume, but its density of ideas and Baroque style give it a much bigger impact than its page count would suggest. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Calista's Into the World (which I reviewed in these pages) and Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, and owing more than a little to Sarang's previous work Bletchley Park (which I also reviewed), The Coleridge Proof explores the overlap between abstract ideas and personal interests, policymaking and the war of ideas.

The novel opens as Anabel Coleridge, a political philosopher guest lecturing at the University of Chicago, achieves the holy grail of left wing scholarship: a formal proof refuting neoliberalism. In the opening pages of the book, Coleridge alternates between carefully checking her work, covering page after page with careful, neatly written notation, and strolling through Hyde Park, her mind on fire with the astounding implications of her proof. Of course she understands that capitalism is not going to go away without a fight, but her proof of its incoherence will remove any last vestige of intellectual justification, and slowly but surely the new socialist order will take shape. Of course Coleridge also stands to become famous, a towering figure in academia, a God on Twitter.

The turning point comes when Coleridge, almost finished writing up her proof for publication, idly works out a few of its logical implications. She is brought up short when she realizes that her proof not only refutes capitalism, it also proves that walkable urbanism lacks any rational justification. Coleridge desperately works through the proof again and again, but the stubborn fact remains. She cannot launch her attack on capitalism without exploding walkable urbanism as well.

Once she has resigned herself to the harsh truth, Coleridge confronts her unpalatable options. She could, of course, publish the proof without making any mention of its implications for urban policy. For some period of time, she would reap all the rewards for her accomplishment without any price being paid. It is even possible that the destruction of any intellectual case for walkable urbanism would go unnoticed for years, decades... maybe forever.

But the difficulty is that Coleridge's proof is certain to inspire a deluge of derivative academic work—the proof will be the basis for thousands of papers mining it for new ideas. It would be foolhardy to think that its implied refutation of urbanism will go unnoticed, especially when so much money is riding on it. And while Coleridge despises neoliberalism and longs to sound its death knell, she loves cities almost as much, and would hate to give up her carless lifestyle, enabled by the very mass transit and dense zoning that her work has the power to destroy. But is her reluctance to publish simply an expression of her own privilege? Doesn't integrity require her to publish her ideas even at great personal cost? (Though she tries to be high-minded about all of this, among other things Coleridge can't ignore the huge and vocal urbanist presence on Twitter—if she publishes the proof, then so much for her dreams of widespread Twitter acclaim!)

In desperate need of advice, Coleridge turns to an online forum for academics working in political philosophy. Obviously she can't reveal the full extent of her dilemma, but she lays it out in abstract form. Alas, even this general description is enough to pique the interest of Charles Laval, a veteran lobbyist for the car industry. In his youth, Laval was working toward an irrefutable refutation of urbanism with a brilliant Vietnamese philosopher, Dr. Phan, when the war interrupted their collaboration. Laval made it out of Saigon on a helicopter; Phan didn't. Without Phan's help, Laval was unable to complete their work, and he eventually quit philosophy for a career on K Street.

Now, decades later, Laval notices a few seemingly innocuous details in Coleridge's forum posts that suggest that she has stumbled on the same argument that preoccupied Laval and Phan so many years before. Of course, Laval is now in a position to mobilize vast resources in service of his clients' interests, and, perhaps haunted by his failure to get his friend out of Saigon, he sets in motion a plan that ultimately brings The Coleridge Proof to its stunning denouement.

It is not my place to spoil the ending of the book, so I will simply note that I wish more novels were as convincing as The Coleridge Proof in describing the ways in which academic work and personal foibles interact. We may like to think that grand ideas exist on some elevated, airless plane, far above our petty concerns and personal feuds. But in real life they are all a jumble, and it is only when we confront this truth about our ideas that we can evaluate them in their true light.

Calista's Flameout

Calista's latest effort, Flameout, is a sharp send-up of the surveillance state, as well as a pessimistic exploration of morality and personal responsibility. Flameout is buoyant and entertaining, but it carries a hard cynical edge that was missing from Calista's earlier satires.

As the story starts, a government agent, Brian O'Malley, is trying to hack into a personal computer used by Julie Fleishman, a minor politician in the opposition party. O'Malley is good at his job, but he has begun to question the morality of the surveillance. As his supervisors push him for results, he squirms, trying to find some way to avoid complicity. But he is saddled with student debt, and if he leaves his job the government will do its best to tarnish him in the eyes of potential employers. There appears to be no way out. O'Malley sinks into depression, unable to take pleasure in anything, and starts drinking heavily. Even his favorite hobby, homebrewing, ceases to offer any escape for him, and simply becomes an excuse for more drinking.

But O'Malley's darkest moment also proves to be his salvation. He finally breaks into Fleishman's computer, where he finds nothing more embarrassing than a few racy (but non-pornographic) pictures and a few unflattering emails. But more importantly, he also finds Fleishman's beer recipes (she, too, is an avid homebrewer). O'Malley brews a tart wit beer using one of the recipes, and it is delicious. In fact it is by far the best beer that O'Malley has brewed. Suddenly he sees a way out! He surreptitiously fixes the security flaws on Fleishman's computer, pretends to his bosses that he was unable to penetrate it, quits his job, and opens a brewpub. Fleishman's amazing recipes make it an instant success, and it soon grows into one of the largest and most beloved craft breweries in the country.

Here, though, the story sours. Fleishman's career does not go as well as O'Malley's—after losing a close election, she leaves politics to open a brewery. The problem is that her beers are seen as unoriginal knockoffs of O'Malley's best-selling beers—in fact they are basically identical. Fleishman endures the ridicule of beer reviewers and the scorn of beer drinkers. She is forced to rely on her retired parents for money to keep the brewery afloat, and she feels like a failure.

All of this would be more tolerable if O'Malley felt some responsibility for Fleishman's predicament. But he feels no guilt. Worse, he sees his actions as heroic, having shielded her from surveillance. Of course he ignores that his surveillance has also ruined her life. Here we are forced to consider what the real cost of surveillance is. Would Fleishman have been happier if the government had seen her pictures and emails, but her recipes had been ignored? Is it the act of surveillance or its real-world consequences that should concern us?

But the deeper questions are moral ones. Calista cuts into them with a deft, almost surgical touch, and yet for the reader the result is like being mauled with a hammer. Are humans driven to cast themselves as heroes no matter what the truth is? Are they self-justifying to the point of absurdity? It is hard not to answer those questions in the affirmative, and it is a bleak picture that emerges. After all, if a wrongdoer is forever shielded from recognizing the wrong, then how can true justice ever be done?

As the story ends, Calista has set O'Malley and Fleishman on a collision course. O'Malley is scheduled to appear at a beer festival to give a talk on recipe design. Fleishman will be at the same festival, pouring a new beer that she hopes will redeem her reputation and save her brewery. But first, she attends O'Malley's talk, where she recognizes his recipe... and here the book closes with the fuse lit, but the fireworks unexploded. It is for us to imagine the likely confrontation, and for us to argue about whether O'Malley can redeem himself, whether humans are capable of transcending their petty self-righteousness, whether, after all is said and done, there is any hope for us.

Dave's Unreadable Latest Effort

I have a strict rule that I must read a book cover to cover (or watch a movie start to finish) before I post a review in these pages. It's part of my implicit contract with my readers. This is why I read the entirety of Calista's ill-conceived "bike lane" trilogy. It is why I watched all 16 hours of Sarang's n Things I Hate About You. It is why I haven't posted a review of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and probably never will.

And yet I feel compelled to break my rule and review Dave's latest effort despite having read far less than 1% of it. The reason is simple: Dave has simultaneously published 10 million detective novels, and even if I could read them at a rate of 100 per day, I could not finish a third of them before dying. Clearly an exception was called for.

As you will have guessed, Dave didn't actually write 10 million books. Or at least, not directly. The novels were procedurally generated using an algorithm that Dave "trained" on the collected works of Agatha Christie. Dave claims not to have edited the results at all, or even to have read very many of them. (This raises the bizarre possibility that I have read more of Dave's books than Dave has.)

The books themselves, at least the ones I read, were highly enjoyable, featuring plenty of unconventional plot twists but never straying far from the eminently satisfying formula that Christie perfected. Pleasingly, there seem to be plenty of Poirot mysteries, which have always been my favorites.

However clever the plot, though, it was seldom difficult to identify the murderer, at least after reading two or three of the books. It is not that the identity of the killer is always the same—the murderer might be almost anyone, from an over-the-hill chess genius, to a willowy débutante, to a surgeon with a deadly secret. But Dave programmed the algorithm so that the murderer is always given the same name—"the Great War" or "World War I." The other characters blithely use these names, giving no indication that they are in any way out of the ordinary. This can be quite confusing when the actual war is discussed.

Needless to say, the consequence is that the books do not quite match Christie's capacity to surprise. But of course this is the point. As the books go on, one after another, the Great War's death toll rises, and the ridiculous number of books hammers home the sheer enormity of the disaster. (By the way, you may have noticed that the number of novels doesn't match the actual death toll from World War I, which was about 17 million. My theory is that this is because there are sometimes multiple murders in a single book.)

Shortly after publication, it emerged that several libraries had set up their acquisition systems automatically to order Dave's books upon publication, and the resulting delivery attempts were astonishing, with fully loaded trucks lined up for dozens of miles. Overnight, Dave became the best-selling author of all time, and his books now account for more than 6% of the Library of Congress and more than half of the Harvard library.

Those statistics get more and more stunning the longer you think about them. The Harvard library is a massive compendium of human knowledge, but it would take more than half of it to devote even a slim novel to each victim of World War I. (I say "would take" because Dave's books don't describe the actual victims, whose personalities are almost entirely lost to history. It merely gestures at the scale of the project if one were to attempt to do so.) And each of those victims was fully human, imbued with character and passions and personality, so that one doubts whether a single book would be enough to capture the individual in full. And then the true horror of the war forces itself into your awareness, in a way that it has never done before.

Calista's The Collaborator

I don't know if it is a coincidence, but this year longtime friends and sometime rivals Calista and Alan have separately published novels called, respectively, The Collaborator and The Collaborators. Naturally I devoured them both—in this post I'll review Calista's latest effort, and in my next post I'll review Alan's.

The Collaborator is written in spare, unadorned prose. I found it to have a staccato quality—sudden moments of drama or revelation punctuate a calm, somewhat melancholy resting state. Like a calm sea voyage suddenly blaring with the warning of torpedoes—but more on that later. At times the novel felt excessively dreary and philosophical, but I soon learned that it was at exactly such moments that I should expect the next torpedo to arrive.

The story is set in wartime Zurich, where Tom Cullen lives with his daughter Mary. Cullen is an Irish expatriate, a veteran of the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War (on the Anti-Treaty side). Cullen has maintained contacts with fellow hardliners in the IRA, but he is no longer active in the movement. He runs a small bar popular with refugees and outcasts, including deserters from both sides, many of whom have entered Switzerland illegally. The bar scenes have a vivid cinematic quality, inspiring Dave to describe the novel as "The Magic Mountain meets Casablanca."

It is a rowdy, colorful existence, but Cullen does not seem to find any joy in it. A morose and sardonic man with a tendency to alienate those who care about him, Cullen mostly dwells on the perceived slights and indignities that he suffered at the hands of his rivals and former friends. ("Sullen Cullen," I took to calling him.) He feels forgotten and unimportant—never more than a bit player in history, he senses that even his minor role has come to an unsatisfactory end.

That quickly changes when he is approached by men claiming to represent the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service. Cullen's cosmopolitan clientèle and his Fenian contacts make him a promising conduit for information about the Allies, particularly about their convoys across the Atlantic. Here at last is Cullen's chance to strike a blow against his first and truest enemy, the British Empire. (Whereas Cullen is conflicted about the Irish Civil War, particularly the death of his boyhood hero Michael Collins, he has never felt a trace of sympathy for the British.)

But Cullen is no monster, and so ensues the quiet moral struggle that forms the heart of the book. Too intelligent and intellectually honest to equate the British Empire with the Third Reich, Cullen considers contacting British intelligence in order to double-cross the Germans. (He would much prefer to work for the Americans, but the U.S. espionage apparatus, at least in Zurich, is pathetic. Meanwhile, so adroit are the British spies that Cullen can't rule out the possibility that his "Abwehr" contacts are actually British agents.) But the idea of working for the British stirs up terrible memories, long repressed, of what Cullen and his compatriots did when they discovered collaborators in their midst.

So the past continues to weigh on Cullen, but with a new valence. Every night in his bar he sees Hitler's victims, and every morning he walks the streets, reliving the depredations of the British, the partition of Ireland, the murder of his friends and family. But then he flinches as he imagines torpedoes finding their mark, the sudden jolt of the deck under frightened Canadian feet, smoke in the air, blood in the water. He goes in circles, trying and failing to find some way to make a fit of his wildly discordant loyalties, to his country, to his morality, to his fragmenting sense of self.

I had better leave it there. Partly I don't want to reveal what Cullen decides to do, but more importantly, we must remember that Cullen is a fictional character and as such his decision has no implications except for the fate of his fictional soul. It is the struggle that matters, and here there are no surprises to reveal, just a realistic and wrenching portrayal of a man caught in the trap of history, like a fly in a saucer of milk or coffee.

Alan's Something Shining in the Stream

Alan's latest effort, Something Shining in the Stream, is a return to form for the eclectic artist, and it proves beyond a doubt that he still has the capacity to surprise.  Something Shining is a collection of short stories, except that it starts with a novella, "Pear-Shaped," which revolves around a  Washington farmer named Frank Gustafson.  For Gustafson, we are told, things have indeed gone pear-shaped.  He is trying desperately to hold his family together in the face of various struggles—his son can't get his career on track, his daughter has just broken up with her boyfriend and moved back in, and his wife wants to spend more time in Seattle, where many of her friends live.

But as we eventually learn, Gustafson is hugely grateful that things have gone pear-shaped.  Gustafson owns a pear orchard, and if the fruit on his trees hadn't gone pear-shaped he would be financially ruined.  As it is, his excellent harvest enables him to support his children while renting a small apartment in Seattle where he and his wife can spend time when they want to be in the city.

It is this sort of unexpected and yet logical turnabout that makes Alan's fiction such a delight.  Other stories in Something Shining describe a middle-aged woman who, we are told at the outset, has been taken to the cleaners by her financial adviser, a sarcastic country doctor who gets a taste of her own medicine, a love lorn student who is barking up the wrong tree, an archaeologist who can read the writing on the wall, a lawyer who puts on a dog and pony show for his clients, a studio musician who knows where his bread is buttered, and an elderly author who has lost his marbles and whose son is a few bricks shy of a load.  In each case, Alan sets expectations at the beginning of the story and then dashes them by the end, and his ability to startle us with these plot twists is unparalleled on today's literary scene—to be honest, it sometimes feels as though no one else is even trying.

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.