Fairy tales and fantasies are as old as the world. This is an easy thing to forget.  It is easy to see only the stories we tell today – fresh and shiny – and then assume that they came from nowhere, that they have no ancestors, and no narrative parents whatsoever.  But today’s fantasies are built on a rich imaginative heritage, a global heritage.  As long as there has been language, there have been stories.  And as far back as we can trace, those stories have been about dragons and magic and sacrifices, fools and wise men and wizards, fate and luck and love.  What we call realism in storytelling is a relatively new concept.  It is the sapling in the wood surrounded by towering moss-covered giants as old as history, giants grown up out of myths and legends.  Fantasy.

Alan Jacobs is great blogger. He may not want to embrace that label but his Tumblr blog is full of interesting links, thought-provoking analysis and great quotes.  A great example is his post in response to Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece on high fantasy for young adults.

What really struck me was his conclusion on Tolkien and modern liberalism:

Modern liberalism likes to think that all our problems are epistemological: we are afflicted by never knowing with sufficient clarity what we ought to do. Our fictions tend to reflect that assumption. Tolkien, not being a modern liberal, thought it more interesting to explore situations when people know what they need to know but may lack the strength of will to act on that knowledge. He might say, and with some justification, that contemporary literary fiction is not simplistic in regard to such problems but oblivious to them.

What say you? True? Fair?

Related articles

• Does Mr. Gopnik Really Not Recognize What That Loss Is?: (brothersjuddblog.com)
• Adam Gopnik: “The Lord of the Rings,” “Twilight,” and young-adult fantasy books. (newyorker.com)

Cover of Great House: A Novel

RB: Do you challenge yourself? For instance, do you set yourself to write about things that you haven’t written before or in a way that you haven’t previously? Ideas first or the process?

NK: For me writing is a long process of wandering and getting lost. I have no sense at all, setting out, what I am going to write. I think that will always, more or less, be the nature of my process. I can’t imagine being the type of writer who has a blueprint or a plan in advance that I more or less follow. Setting out, everything has to be unknown. I find that this allows very interesting and unexpected things to happen. It becomes an intuitive process, discoveries are made. That’s why writing has held my interest all these years, why it remains one of the only things in life that doesn’t finally bore me. If I knew what I was going to make in advance, and was equipped with all of the insight in advance, why would I pursue the project?

RB: This way of looking at things or being seems to be at odds with the planning for and of nurturing of children. Organization and planning are a great part of parenting

NK: Right.

RB: Is writing like bungee-cord jumping for you?

NK: I’m not sure what that means. But planning is certainly part of parenting. But intuitively responding to one’s child as he changes is even more critical. Being open to who he is, what there might be to learn from him, and how it might be possible to help him find the most comfortable way to live in the world as himself.

RB: What I am trying to get at is—I am not well organized, I always forget something—

NK: I understand. Life is filled with so many responsibilities, and limitations to who and what we can be. Unfortunately life is not an endless exercise in self-reinvention. You become who you are. You are formed by forces that bring you up into the world and you change, but not in epic or monumental ways, I don’t think. Or not very often, at least. Writing has always been for me the opposite of that. In my work I can become anyone. Inhabit any character. I can express all kinds of things that I might not otherwise think or be able to express. Everything is possible. That can be terrifying, but ultimately I think it’s thrilling and is the reason I continue to write.

Related articles

• Nicole Krauss helps launch fall season at New York State Writers Institute (timesunion.com)
• Review: Great House, by Nicole Krauss (laurasmusings.wordpress.com)

I assume the book is not taken off the in-stock list until it is purchased. This is what the kids today call a “fail.” It leads to the false assumption that a copy is available when it is in fact not.

Guess I will just buy it at Amazon.

Sure enough, Buckley is as fair-minded a study of its subject’s career as you could possibly expect from a contributor to The Nation and Tikkun. It deals bluntly but honestly with such difficult topics as his equivocal views on civil rights, and it gives him full credit for having purged the conservative movement of such “loonies” (Buckley’s word) as the members of the John Birch Society. Above all, Bogus recognizes that “Buckley and his colleagues changed America’s political realities,” both by making conservatism intellectually and socially respectable and by turning the GOP into something not far removed from a genuine conservative party.

But Buckley is too soberly written to be of interest to the average reader, and the only full-scale biography, John B. Judis’s William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of Conservatives (1988), is both outdated and overly partisan. The best thing published so far about Buckley is Richard Brookhiser’s Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr., and the Conservative Movement (2009), a sympathetic, at times startlingly candid memoir that describes him more vividly than anything other than Buckley’s own autobiographical volumes, of which Cruising Speed: A Documentary(1971) is the first and best. What is now needed is an up-to-date biography written by someone with the twin gifts of literary portraiture and historical perspective. This, alas, isn’t it.

Frustrating because I was looking forward to reading it (and probably still will).

Speaking of Richard Brookhiser, Richard Beeman finds his bio of James Madison worth reading:

The amount of scholarship chronicling these events is immense, and although Brook­hiser is somewhat sparing in acknowledging his debts to historians who have preceded him, his sprightly narrative will serve as an entertaining introduction for those who are making their first acquaintance with Madison. Moreover, Brookhiser’s book is a useful corrective to some of the recent works in the fields of political science and law that place excessive emphasis on Madison the theorist.

For more on Brookhiser from my perspective, see the related articles links below.

And from a completely different perspective, Eloisa James brings a book to my attention (Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact By A. J. HARTLEY) that I think will be added to the ever-growing TBR pile:

Post Harry Potter, we can all sketch the outlines of a paranormal private school novel. Darwen Arkwright is a far odder and more creative addition to the genre than I have read in years. Darwen has powers of a sort…but he also has the ability to behave like a bumbler, like a dunce, like a grieving boy. The book never relies on paranormal flourishes alone to carry the reader’s interest. A. J. Hartley shows an uncanny, brilliant ability to shape the inner life of an unmoored child, who realizes that the worst thing of all is that there’s no one to be disappointed in him.

This sounds like a great fit for me and a potential read aloud book for my daughter.

Related articles

• Q&A with Richard Brookhiser on Right Time, Right Place (therightreads.com)
• James Madison by Richard Brookhiser (collectedmiscellany.com)
• Is James Madison an under-appreciated founding father? (collectedmiscellany.com)
• Right Time, Right Place by Richard Brookhiser (therightreads.com)

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Jeff Pearlman‘s biography of Walter Payton has stirred some controversy. Shocking, I know, in this culture of celebrity and shock marketing.  But I also thinks it raises some interesting questions. Do we really want to know the history of iconic figures?  In particular, do we want to know the ugly details of our sports heroes?  Obviously, there is a market for books that offer salacious gossip about the lives of the famous. But is there something wrong with publishing the unseemly details of the life of a football player that is a hero to many; someone that seemed to represent all that is good about professional sports?

Sports Illustrated writer Peter King weighs in with his thoughts:

When the furor over the Walter Payton biography Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton surfaced last month, I told you I’d pass along my thoughts when I’d read it. Now that I have, I can tell you it’s terrific.

The painstaking detail is what makes this one of the best sports biographies I’ve ever read.

[...]

You pass judgment on whether a book about a beloved figure that both glorifies and tarnishes him should be written. My judgment is it should. Payton was a superstar, a public figure of national significance for 25 years. Were we demanding to know he used drugs and philandered and at times was a bad teammate with the Bears? No. But figures of renown are subjects of books all the time, and Payton’s life, as it turns out, is beyond interesting. It’s compelling. It’s most often riveting, particularly the parts about his formative years in the Deep South. It’s real history, not the gauzy stuff.

Oh. And the prologue of Sweetness … The first page of the book is jarring. It can’t get better than Pearlman’s meeting with Walter Payton. But the rest of the book lives up to the promise of the first page. It’s that good.

I am torn. It sounds like a fascinating book and full of great details about both Payton and the NFL, but I am not sure I really want to know the truth at this point. Perhaps I prefer to keep my unsullied view of Walter Payton. Perhaps I want to hang on to my icon rather than the real person behind it (flawed yes, but also compelling and real).

What about you? Do like to read iconoclastic biographies?  Do you prefer to keep your heroes on a pedestal?

Related articles

• Jeff Pearlman surprised at backlash: “I love Walter Payton” (profootballtalk.nbcsports.com)
• Ditka calls controversial Payton book “gutless” (espn.go.com)

The freedom to ask big questions. At age eleven, I thought about unanswerable questions all the time. I thought about mortality, I thought about missed connections – what if this had happened? What if this hadn’t happened? I thought about who I would be at future points in my life, and whether I would in fact even be the same person. I thought about other paths my life might have taken, about the unknown people I would eventually love in my life and what they might be doing at that very moment. I don’t think I was a remotely unusual kid, however. Kids grapple with big stuff, and writing for kids allows me to tap that now-underused part of my brain.

Interesting, and I think this taps into something about why it is I enjoy reading well written young adult fiction as an adult.

Kathryn Harrison reviews Nathaniel Philbrick’s recently released Why Read Moby-Dick?

Philbrick, whose “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex” recounted the real-life inspiration for Melville’s shipwreck, wears his erudition lightly. He broaches the novel in quirky thematic fashion, with gracefully written compact essays on topics like landlessness, chowder and sharks. His voice is that of a beloved professor lecturing with such infectious enthusiasm that one can almost, for a moment, believe in the possibility of a popular renaissance for Melville. But convincing and beguiling though his slender apologia is (the whole of it taking up less than a quarter of the space allotted to the Norton Critical Edition’s appendixes), Philbrick doesn’t have an audience held captive in a classroom.

Still, his Bible metaphor applies in that not only is “Moby-Dick” a big fat book about the wages of sin and the elusiveness of redemption, but also one to which zealots return even as potential admirers push it away, put off by its size and its longtime residence on literature courses’ reading lists.

Robert Pinsky tackles Jose Saramago’s Cain

In a grieving but marveling spirit, Saramago remakes, from Cain’s viewpoint, not only the story of Cain and his parents and his brother but also — with Cain entering each narrative as a time-traveling participant — the tales of Abraham and Isaac, Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife, Lot and his daughters, Noah and his sons. The narrative veers drastically away from tradition and back toward it and then away again with radical aplomb. The effect is sometimes comic, but with a complex, outraged commitment far beyond parody. Comedy and boundless complexity: Saramago’s novels have been called parables, but they are not allegories.

Lastly, Sarah Towers explores Kimberly Cutter’s The Maid: A Novel of Joan of Arc

But, as Twain observed, pinning down the mysterious interior of this woman — imaginatively experiencing how she came to be — has confounded many a writer, including Twain. Far too often Cutter’s Joan (or “Jehanne,” as the novel has it) is flat, overexplained, fragmented: “She wept. Horrified. Weeping, furious at herself for weeping. Amazed how much the words hurt her. ‘How dare you?’ she screamed.” Many of the scenes are fragmented as well — in a novel of 287 pages there are 150 chapters, which boils down to less than two pages per chapter — so it feels as if Cutter, unsure how to embody Joan, is in a race to get to the end of the story.

To Cutter’s credit, it takes true Joan of Arc-ian boldness to attempt this oft-told story in the first place, and the reader certainly recognizes intellectually, if not viscerally, Cutter’s passion for her heroine. The ultimate problem is that Joan of Arc’s sublimity makes it incredibly difficult, like hitting a bull’s-eye from a great distance, to do her “divine soul” justice, to allow the fictional record to reflect the real woman with as much force and ingenuity as the historical one.

So there you have it. Three fascinating characters (whether that is Ahab or the whale in Moby-Dick) and three fascinating, at least to me, books. Have any of you read these book already? Do they seem as interesting to you as they do to me?

Related articles

• ‘Why Read Moby-Dick?’: A Passionate Defense Of The ‘American Bible’ (npr.org)