Review of the The Devil in Silver

The fundamental metaphor of The Devil in Silver is pretty easy to grasp. Pepper, the protagonist, is brought to the New Hyde mental institution not because he demonstrated a mental illness or implied he was a risk to himself and others, but because the plain-clothed cops who arrested him didn't want to deal with the paperwork of formally booking him. Though Lavalle doesn't articulate the idea directly until two-thirds of the way through the book, it's clear that we are supposed to understand life (or maybe society, fine line for social animals) as an asylum we can't escape from.

In another writer's hands, this metaphor might have induced eye-rolls, but throughout the course of the book, Lavalle reveals, deepens, plays with, and complicates that image. For example, in the beginning of the book, Pepper spends a lot of time thinking about Marie, a woman he hoped to have a relationship with, but after a while at New Hyde, after he began to adapt, Marie might as well not exist. So, yes, all the world is an asylum we can't leave, but we also have an amazing capacity to adapt to whatever our situation is, to join what surrounds us. Another; the staff at New Hyde are overworked, underpaid, and don't have nearly the resources they need to provide the care that is asked of them, yet, they still control the lives of the patients. Through this relationship, and in the context of the guiding metaphor, Lavalle explores how differences in power, even amongst the powerless, create antagonistic relationships. When one group can make the other take sedatives, there is going to be an “us and them,” relationship. And, whether it's a middle school or a corporation a group with over a certain number of members is going to fracture into tribes and cliques and so, after he comes out of his initial drug addled semi-coma, Pepper aligns himself with Dottie, the matriarch of New Hyde, Loochie, a teenager who compulsively pulls out her hair, and Coffee, an African immigrant who thinks if he can just call President Obama, all their problems will be solved.

And haunting New Hyde, is The Devil. The first time we see The Devil, it drops into Pepper's room from a hole in the ceiling and nearly pummels Pepper to death. Later on we get a good look at it. It's described as having the head of a bison on top of the body of an old man. Despite the fact that The Devil actually kills residents of New Hyde, the staff accepts its presence.  They even throw a blanket over its shoulders and guide it gently out of the room when they save Pepper. The actual term “the devil in silver,” refers not directly to this Devil who lived behind a silver door, but to the hallucinations seen by silver miners induced by the poisonous fumes created by, well, silver mining.

Much like the overarching metaphor of “World as Asylum” Lavalle's Devil is a risky image. No “explanation,” for the character will be satisfying. But Lavalle is able to provide conclusion for the character without restricting how we interpret it, not by foisting some kind of artificial ambiguity over the character, but by creating an environment, a plot, and a group of characters, that provide a range of understandings of the big reveal.

Victor Lavalle has a unique style. Even though I knew from The Big Machine how deep and intelligent of a writer he is, the depth and intelligence of The Devil in Silver still took me by surprise. He has a direct, conversational prose style, but he doesn't write with the ponderous simplicity that is so often considered (and too often lauded as) “accessible.” Wisdom just rises from his work like steam from the sewers.

In this way, Lavalle is, more than any one else I've read, the true heir to Kurt Vonnegut. The weirdness of Lavalle's (and Vonnegut's) work doesn't come from a commitment to the fantastic, but to the realistic, not from an obsession with the strange, but from a quest for the mundane. Often, the only way to understand reality is through surrogates; plots, characters, and settings totally different from anything that happens or can happen in reality, but that provide us a connection from distance that helps us understand what we see every day. For example, the residents' (inmates') conflict with the Devil, and Pepper's leadership role in that, perfectly maps out the tangle of ethical questions and assumptions knotted around treating mental illness with medication, but that all doesn't come together until one, succinct, and stunning moment. It takes a battle with a marauding old guy with a bison's head to get there, but the truth Lavalle reveals is more powerful and more meaningful from the course we took to get there.

This just scratches the surface of the themes and ideas explored by Lavalle through the residents of New Hyde. Race, class, immigration, law enforcement, sex, the paradox of know-it-alls through the life of a rat; Lavalle even sneaks in a Ulysses reference. But, taken with Big Machine, Victor Lavalle's greatest talent, which connects him again with Vonnegut, might be his heroes. With “anti-heroes,” pretty much the only heroes we read and see anymore, and with traditional heroes as stale, lifeless, and unrealistic as they were when artists first created anti-heroes, we've entered an era of protagonists. For better or worse, we no longer have heroes, just characters the book happens to be about. But Ricky Rice, from The Big Machine, and Pepper, from The Devil in Silver, are different.  They have quests.  They have flaws.  They try their best.  They make mistakes.  They want to save the world and they are heroes. And, in the world of books, so is Victor Lavalle.

Why I Will Vote for Elizabeth Warren

The United States of America emerged from The Great Depression and World War II with a period of some of the fastest and most egalitarian economic growth the world had ever seen. We were still a long way from being a more perfect union, with huge sections of population considered second class citizens, but in terms of the economy, especially when you think about it in the context of human history, post-war America was a miracle. That American ideal of home and car ownership was created during this period, as was the idea that would, in one generation, became an American assumption; that your children will have more wealth than you did. How did we go from The Great Depression to the Great Expansion? It wasn't tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of markets.

Our path to prosperity from the Great Depression, isn't really up for debate. It is historical fact. Federal spending, whether in the form of New Deal programs or World War II kept society from completely collapsing while the economy recovered from reckless financial practices and historic drought. Some of those programs, like those run by the Public Works Administration, the Rural Electrification Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, not only put people to work in the moment of crisis, but also produced infrastructure vital to our future productivity and leisure. Imagine how long it would've taken to have a consumer electronics market without the electrification of rural America. After WWII, three policies in particular built on the products of New Deal spending, and established the key resources for the explosion of growth. The GI Bill did two things, one short term and one long term. In the short term, it gave all the returning soldiers something to do while the economy readjusted itself to peace time. Instead of flooding the market with millions of new workers, returning soldiers went to college. In the long term, it produced the most highly educated work force in the world. The Eisenhower highway system, originally intended to make it easier for American troops to move from place to place, also allowed for the cheap transportation of goods from place to place. To put this another way, McDonalds would not be nearly as successful without this investment in national infrastructure. Finally, the Marshall Plan ensured there would be other economies for the United States to trade with. Government spending in Europe allowed American manufacturing to thrive.

The spending programs were coupled with regulations of the financial industry, including banking and the stock market. Regulations like The Banking Act of 1933, which included the Glass-Steagall Act and FDIC, ensured there was an inherent level of stability in finance even while the risks of investment were taken.

The result of these federal spending programs coupled with prudent regulations: from 1948-1980 we had six recessions and stock market crashes. From 1980-2010, when we began to roll back regulation, lower taxes on the wealthiest Americans and cut spending on infrastructure, we had 11 recessions and stock market crashes, with 2008 only being the most recent and most drastic. (That's actually being a little generous, as I'm not counting the recessions with primarily foreign sources, like the Asian market crisis.) We now work more hours for less wealth. American families, with two full-time adult wage earners, can no longer afford that house and car that was, less than a generation before, practically a birthright. And the gap between the rich and everyone else has exploded.

Republicans and Democrats have been talking about the middle class for months, but you don't have to do anything more than open a history book to know which side is correct. Federal investment in infrastructure coupled with prudent regulation created the American middle class as we know it. Elizabeth Warren supports policies that worked. It's that simple. Though the specifics will of course be different, the strategies of The Great Depression are applicable to The Great Recession. Elizabeth Warren will work to implement those strategies.

Furthermore, the arc of American history has always been towards a more inclusive society. When our Founders put pen to paper, their idea of freedom was limited to white men who owned property and since then we have been struggling to extend the benefits of a free society to more and more members of our community. That struggle for inclusion isn't just about voting rights, though if it was contemporary Republicans would still be on the wrong side, but about an economy where all people are paid the same wages for the same work, where families are able to plan their interaction with the economy, where workers are valued as human beings through fair pay, safe working conditions, retirement security, and leisure time, where immigrants who want to contribute to our society are given the opportunity to do so, and where domestic partnerships are not restricted to a certain arrangement of genitals.

Elizabeth Warren's policies are not just moral, historically proven, and good for the economy, they are moral, historically proven, and good for American. Oh, and I'd rather not need a lawyer to understand my credit card bill, so let's thank Elizabeth Warren for that too.

Scott Brown has done his best to keep his head down in the two years he has been in office and it's not hard to see why. He wouldn't stand a chance for re-election if he adopted the policies that define his party at the moment. But while he tries to distinguish himself from his own party, he has to distinguish himself from Elizabeth Warren, and his major legislative attempt to do so resulted in what I consider the strongest argument against his abilities as a legislator.

The Blunt Amendment was offered during the fabricated conflict over contraceptive coverage, in response to the Obama administration slightly changing existing contraception policy. Scott Brown did not just vote with his party in favor of the amendment; he co-sponsored it. The problem is, regardless of how you feel about contraception, the amendment was poorly planned and poorly thought out. It's goals aside, it was bad legislation. Essentially, the Blunt Amendment would allow employers to not contribute to health care policies that include, or health insurance companies to not cover, "specific items or services...contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan.” Scott Brown will tell you his co-sponsorship of this amendment was about religious freedom, but even if that were true, it's still bad legislation.

What if my employer were a Christian Scientist? If so pretty much all health care would be contrary to its religious beliefs. And who would get to decide whether an employer/health insurance provider has an actual “moral conviction” against a specific service or procedure? What's to stop a health insurance company claiming that chemotherapy is against their “moral convictions?” Who will arbitrate between the providers and the provided and between the employers and the employed? There are three ways to answer this question; additional federal legislation that specifically outlines exceptions which means a massive intrusion of the federal government in the economy; ceding that authority to an existing federal agency which means a massive intrusion of the federal government in the economy; let the courts figure it out, which could mean millions of tax payer dollars spent on litigating particular moral convictions and particular services or procedures. Rather than rolling back Federal involvement in religious beliefs, the Blunt Amendment would have required either massive Federal management efforts or an endless stream of tax payer funded litigation.

The Blunt Amendment was a poorly thought out, poorly written piece of legislation smashed onto a bill about transportation, designed to fabricate some kind of statement about religious freedom. It would have been an expensive, legislative disaster if it had been adopted. And Scott Brown didn't just vote for it, he co-sponsored it. Oh, and he bought his pick up truck for his daughter's horse trailer. I've got no problem with that, but don't throw on a Carhartt jacket and sit in a pickup truck, pretending you're an average American dude, when you own horses. Run on your policies, not your totally fabricated, totally disingenuous brand.

In short, Elizabeth Warren supports policies that solved our nation's past crises and laid the ground work for a more prosperous society, while Scott Brown supports the policies that caused the current crisis and could continue our course towards a divided society. In some ways, we are lucky in Massachusetts to have an election like this. This isn't about ideology or politics, this is about history, and history tells us the right choice is Elizabeth Warren.

Review of Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway shouldn't work. It's a book that's kind of like the meals you make after you've been shut in your house for a week or so, cobbled together from the “provisions” way back in the cupboard; you know the long grain rice you bought on a health kick, the Chinese five spice you got for that one recipe, the canned salmon that's always been there. You throw it all together in the pot, because you're tired and you've been watching anime on Hulu for a week, and maybe you've been drinking, OK, you've totally been drinking, but who can blame you, I mean, have you read the news lately, and somehow, staggering and chaotic, the result is fantastic.

Angelmaker is the story of Joe Spork, clockmaker and grandson of England's last great outlaw, who finds himself unwittingly turning on a machine built by a brilliant French scientist with the highest of ideals during WWII, that could destroy the world. Once you've reached the big transition in the story, you realize just how much of the beginning is exposition, set up, establishing of the conflict of the characters. Maybe two-thirds of the book is background and character development, which you don't often see in what could be described as an adventure story. And boy, does Joe spend a lot of time thinking about how he just wanted to keep his warehouse and fix clocks. To make matters worse, the first part is rather flashbacky, telling the story of British super-spy Edie Banister and her lifelong conflict, starting about WWII, with a villain with god-like aspirations named Shem Shem Tsien. And then when the pace of events pick up and things start happening all over the place, rather than weaving together a single narrative Harkaway just breaks up all the events and lays them out in short, sometimes single paragraph long, sections. I mean, Harkaway even uses The Fred Weasley (which to me, will always be The Boromir because it was written first, but well, such is pop culture.) This is not how novels work.

And yet...

And Joe Spork shouldn't work either. He's an old tired form of a character. When the story opens Joe Spork is a mild-mannered clockmaker, who played by the rules, and wanted a quiet life of working on clocks and mechanisms only hoping for a little bit of love and comfort from the world. Well, right then you know he is completely and totally fucked. So it's no surprise when he is tortured for five days by a shadowy arm of the government. You've met Joe Spork hundreds of times, in hundreds of different books. But... I'm not sure he's ever been this interesting.

And what do you call this thing anyway? It's like Nick Haraway shook a whole bunch of books and tropes and images from the back of his brain into a blender, hit the button, and walked away to make an Old Fashioned, or maybe check his email. There's a good bit of steam punk in here. Some late Philip K. Dick with the idea of identity replication and transmission through data recording. Plenty of Jules Verne. Some Dickens London underworld business. And the idea of the world being destroyed by the truth couldn't have happened without post-modernism. Parts of it read like what you'd expect from a penny dreadful; you know, Opium Khans, automatons, baby war elephants, and all that. Also, Ruskinites building trains and submarines. It's the kind of brain-stormy mash-up that happens after you and your friends have been mixing your cocktails a little to stiff and a little too tall for a little too long and you decide to finally get all those brilliant movie ideas down on paper. It shouldn't come together.

But...

Despite all the different styles and elements of Angelmaker, the one book it reminded me most of was, say it with me now, Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene. Why? What did you say? James Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in Havana. The only thing he wants to do with his life is support his daughter Milly. Selling vacuum cleaners isn't doing it, so he connects with MI6. Unfortunately, MI6 only pays him when he sends them information and he really doesn't have any. So, he gives them information. He even passes off a schematic for a vacuum cleaner as a schematic for some horrifying Soviet destruction machine. And then, well, things get interesting. It is absolutely preposterous. I mean, it assumes that the rocket and missile people back in England don't know enough about rockets and missiles to spot when a schematic would never make a rocket or missile anything. It's also brilliant and hilarious and perfectly captures the self-delusions that drove much of the Cold War. For satirizing the systems of power, Our Man in Havana is up there with The Man Who Was Thursday and Catch-22.

Angelmaker doesn't reach that level of social significance, but it is the best kind of entertainment. Harkaway trusts his readers to keep in all straight in their heads, he leaves in much of the science and a whole lot of the talking, he brandishes the outlandish (a submarine made of ice!) with glee, he injects new life into old forms, and he tells a ripping spyscifipicarvenromanture novel, that's about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on (assuming that's how you read).

This is usually the part in the review about “breaking all the rules” of writing, where the critic talks about how the creative writing professor would fail this manuscript or imagines all the things the conscientious editor would beg Harkaway to cut, blah, blah, blah, look at how I see through the conventions of “traditional” storytelling, and all that. I have to admit, that idea sounds true and it sounds good and it gives the critic a few very handy “concluding,” phrases, but the idea is really just setting a riding lawn mower on a field of scarecrows. The only “rule” there has ever been about writing is: “Make the reader think and/or feel,” and the other “rules” that appear to have developed aren't rules so much as they are best practices; shit that has worked before. And people have always written against and in response to those best practices, finding new ways to make readers feel and think. There is really only one lesson we can draw about storytelling from Angelmaker (or any other excellent book); Nick Harkaway is a damn good storyteller.

Not Only Genius: Lessons from the Panama Canal

There's a reason why people buy David McCullough's books in bunches. Like all the best historians, he knows how to adjust the perspective of his work to move back and forth between the big, grand, abstract events that interest us and the mundane but tangible details that give those events meaning we can actually wrap our heads around. He also finds a nice balance between data and personality; the dates, numbers, documents, and figures, that are the substance of history and the characters that are the story of history.

A couple of weeks ago I had a hankering for a particular kind of book. Since my day job is satisfying such hankerings, it's pretty rare for me to struggle with one for any length of time. Usually I know what I want to read and have a stack of galleys that fit it. (New bookseller term “galleylag: reading the galley of a book after it's come out in paperback. Use it in a sentence today.) For reasons lost in the mysteries of consciousness, I wanted to read a big dense book of history that wasn't about war. You may or may not be surprised at how few books that really is. (Another book that would have worked, if I hadn't already read it would have been A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman). This hankering hung over me for a few days and its solution was met with an inordinate amount of relief. I would read Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914 by David McCullough. Here's what I learned.

Just look at a world map. How could you not look at that tiny little sliver of land connecting the Americas and not imagine making just a little cut and joining the Atlantic and Pacific? Riding high off the completion of the Suez Canal Ferdinand de Lesseps did just that. De Lesspes might not have been the single most important person to the completion of Suez, but it certainly wouldn't have happened without him. De Lesseps wasn't an engineer or an architect. He was a diplomat, but his diplomatic skills played a very small part in the completion of the Suez Canal.

His genius was in promotion. De Lesseps, more than anyone else, convinced people, the French government, the French people, the Egyptian royalty that a canal could be built and would be built. He merely needed to show up at a stock holder's meeting or something and somehow everyone left believing not just that a sea level canal across the African isthmus was possible, but that it was only a matter of time. Money poured in. Morale stayed high. Personal conflicts were smoothed over in service to the greater goal. De Lesseps was able to convince everyone involved in the project that they were doing the great work of human progress, that nothing more important was happening anywhere on Earth, and that completion of the Suez Canal was a foregone conclusion.

In short, he was a genius at making people believe in him, and this skill is absolutely vital in accomplishing tasks believed impossible. But there are tasks that are actually impossible. And when faced with such tasks, genius like that of de Lesseps leads to utter disaster. Which is what happened when the French tried to build a seal-level canal in Panama.

If there were someone else leading the effort, really anyone besides de Lesseps, it is very likely that a lock canal would have been built in Nicaragua. But because de Lesseps believed in the sea level canal at Panama and because de Lesseps could convince everyone to believe in him, and through him, in the idea he represented, the French attempted an impossible canal, millions of French citizens lost billions of dollars, careers were destroyed, reputations tarnished, corruption flourished, and Ferdinand de Lesseps, the emblem of modern humanity, the hero of the French people, died in disgrace. For the important tasks in humanity, genius is not enough; it has to be the right kind of genius for the right kind of task. Otherwise at best some mediocre result is reached and at worst thousands of people die of malaria and yellow fever with nothing to show for their sacrifice.

If there is one major difference between the French and American efforts to build the Panama canal is that the Americans had enough foresight or luck, to have the right kind of genius working on the problem at the right time. The first was John Stevens, the chief engineer from 1905-1907. Stevens was the first executive to realize that the primary challenge of Panama was not engineering but infrastructure. In order to dig a canal, you needed to move the dirt out of the way and keep enough workers healthy to do the digging. So he authorized one of the greatest health and sanitation efforts maybe the world has ever seen and turned his vast experience in building railroads, to building, well, railroads for dirt and debris. He solved problems of transportation, efficiency, and disease. Everything else that happened after his tenure rested on the structures he created. Work, any kind of work, could happen because of his systems.

The next and final chief engineer was a military man named George Washington Goethals. He did two things that allowed the completion of the Panama Canal; the first was that he followed the path set by Stevens and continued to manage the digging systems as much as the digging itself, adding in a level of military efficiency and commitment, and second, and most important, he understood that a task of this scale needed an entire society to complete it. Among other things a canal newspaper was founded under his watch and he set aside several hours every Sunday to hear and redress the grievances of anybody involved in the canal. He incentivized marriage. A director of women's clubs was hired. Essentially, he created a community whose identity was based in the completion of the canal and so each and every employee (or at least all the white American employees) was personally and completely invested in the project. And so when tragedy did strike, whether it was a landslide that undid months of effort or an accidental explosion that killed dozens of men, moral was unshaken. No matter what the condition, everyone got up for work the next day and gave it their all.

But who knows what would have happened if Americans had employed another de Lesseps. (In a way, we did, in Theodore Roosevelt, but he wasn't in charge of the actual building, so much as he was the force that ensured building would happen.) The work could have continued for decades and still ended in failure. Of course, John Stevens had been in charge at Suez, there probably would have been a railroad instead of a canal. Genius has its limitations and the wrong genius can sometimes be more disastrous than incompetence. Which leads to a strange, almost paradoxical conclusion. Perhaps the most vital genius in any great project, is the genius of knowing which genius to put in charge of what aspect at what time.

Something New in Lit Crit

Something new might be happening in literary criticism, something interesting. It started for me with House of Ulysses by Julian Rios (see my fullreview of the book on The Millions here.) As I say in my review, a ton of books have been written about Ulysses, many of which organized around providing entry into the difficult book for otherwise reluctant readers, but Rios' book isn't a guide or a work of criticism, rather it's a novel set in a book club. A summary of each episode is provided and then six different speakers expound on the book. Not to go all Jonah Lehrer on you, but as I say in the review, it's some of the best criticism I've read of Ulysses, but it has to carry a different interpretive weight for readers than other criticism, because it is not in the voice of the “critic,” but in the characters.

Next came two books by Andrei Codrescu, The Poetry Lesson (which I review here) and Whatever Gets You Through the Night (which I discuss along withThe Poetry Lesson and The Post-Human Dada Guide here). The Poetry Lesson, essentially, is a novelization of the first day in a poetry workshop, and Whatever Gets You Through the Night is an amalgamation of fiction, criticism, anthropology, sociology, cultural theory, and mythologizing inspired by Scheherazade from The Arabian Nights. As in House of Ulysses, the acts of fiction and interpretation are amalgamated into something else.

Then there's Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, in which Adam Bertocci re-writes The Big Lebowski as if it were by Shakespeare. Annotated and illustrated as editions of Shakespeare tend to be, Bertocci's story of Walter, Donald, and The Knave, while being freaking hilarious, reveals some of the primal currents in storytelling; ways of ordering events and characters that have succeeded since Shakespeare and continue to succeed today. Furthermore, as Bertocci points out, this kind of adaptation itself is very Shakespearean. The Bard “reinterpreted” all kinds of pre-existing material. As Bertocci has done here, Shakespeare took different genres, history and poetry primarily, and converted them into the genre of drama. (One of our age's creative tragedies is how copyright has been used to prevent the kind of creative interplay between old and new that lead to, say, Hamlet and Ulysses. What would be written if, say, Don DeLillo could write a Micky Mouse novel or Warren Ellis could imagine a super-hero caper featuring cartoon figures from advertising? How cool would a novel featuring a contemporary teenage character trying to figure out the world through The Catcher in Rye be? But, alas, there's no way Salinger would let it happen.) Also, because it is attempting to BE Shakespeare it is fundamentally ABOUT Shakespeare and because it is attempting to BE The Big Lebowski it is fundamentally ABOUT The Big Lebowski. (I might add the same goes for my other blog project, TheMuppets Take Ulysses, in which my partner and I imagine a Muppet movie version of Ulysses, but that would be shameless self-promotion.)

Finally, we have The Emily Dickinson Reader by Paul Legault, which is published by McSweeney's (which tells you something) and is billed as “An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson's Complete Poems.” What does that look like? Here's how Legault “translates” 465, the poem that starts with “I heard a fly buzz when I died;” “In some ways, the Battle of Antietam shares a beauty similar to that of autumn. They both involve death spreading over an increasingly red landscape.” “Because I could not stop for Death,” becomes “I asked this guy to marry me, and it scared him off.” And here's how Legault “translates” number 1, perhaps Dickinson's longest poem; “Everything has to love something.”

The bookstore currently has this book in our humor section, because it's McSweeney's, because of the premise, because it is clever (215: “Jesus has a lot of explaining to do.”), and funny (463: “That person is asleep. Oh, actually that person is starting to decompose.”) and morbid (1100: “Last night was kind of boring, except that my friend died and we played dress-up with her dead body.”) but, maybe Dickinson is more clever and more funny than we've given her credit for. Sure, we knew she was death-obsessed, but maybe her relationship with death was more akin to that of a drinking buddy, than that of some persistent brooding specter. Because her style is so original, so enigmatic, so idiosyncratic, it seems obvious that critics should engage her work with as much originality, enigmaticy (pronounced to rhyme with “intimacy”) and idiosyncrasy as they can manage. As Legault writes in the “Translator's Note,” “Emily Dickinson is both the father of American poetry and the most infamous lesbian vampire of the nineteenth century.”

Furthermore, the “translations” have their own kind of profundity, something directly connected to Dickinson but still distinct. 432: “I cannot write people back to life. As hard as I might try. And I do. Furiously. Like a wizard. Or a grammarian.” 1189: “It was kind of rude of God to pretend to be a human, just so he could show us up at our own game.” 1609: “If you don't like Earth, you probably won't like Heaven.”

In a way, these books remind me a of Borges' writings on fictional books, in their strange inextricable combination of criticism and fiction. Something about this captures the critical act a lot better than traditional criticism does, because it reveals how important imagination is to interpretation. In short, to interpret a work is to imagine that you wrote it. To understand a work of fiction, you have to participate in the creation of its fiction. These works simply reveal a hidden process that all critics go through, and frankly, I love it. I can't say whether this will turn into some kind of movement in criticism or whether this will in anyway help push literature and interpreting literature back to the forefront of cultural consciousness, or whether this trend will lead to a new Ulysses, but I like it and I want to see more of it.