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Wednesday, April 30, 2003

Empire

Sometimes, when New York gets too hectic, the best way to clear the mind is to go lie on the beach in Rio de Janeiro for a couple of weeks. Sometimes? More like always. It certainly worked for Nick Denton, who preceded his trip to Brazil with dozens of mini-postings about Rio, Sao Paulo, and Parati, but who has returned to the blogosphere with a very interesting thumbsucker about American empire and moral hazard.

It's well worth reading in full, but here's a brief excerpt:

I am, to all intents, a hawk. So why on earth does the prospect of an American Empire bother me?
There is a deep flaw in the American imperial project: moral hazard. A guarantor, whether an insurance company or a central bank, typically encourages perverse behavior. Countries borrow too much, and their banks lend too freely, both in the expectation of a bailout by the International Monetary Fund.
The US, by assuming the role of global guarantor, runs an analogous risk. By guaranteeing the security of Israel, it ensures that no Israeli government will make a territorial settlement with the Palestinians. By guaranteeing the global order, unilaterally, the US encourages the caprice of a country such as France. By supporting the Mubarak regime in Egypt, the US removes the pressure for democratization. With an external power guaranteeing stability, the people of Egypt and other puppet states can never take ownership of their own predicament. As bankers sometimes say, the road to hell is paved with guarantees.

The idea isn't completely new: everybody has long understood that the reason Europe punches so far below its weight, militaristically speaking, is that all European countries know that if they were ever attacked, the US would come to their defense. That's created a European Union without a credible military of its own, which couldn't even deal with the Balkan crisis until Clinton stepped in.

Denton, it seems, thinks that the only answer is for the United States to send its children out into the street to play with each other, free from adult supervision.

So what if the US removed that excuse for inaction, just let go, and allowed history take its course? Let Vietnam go communist, Europe deal with Bosnia, the theocracy hold back Iran until the old ayatollahs die out, let Mubarak fall to the Islamists, and Victor (sic) Chavez take on Venezuela's capitalists and landowners.
No one should pretend that the immediate effects of laisser faire would be any other than disastrous. The loss of another generation in Iran, the emigration of the middle class from Egypt, further chaos in Venezuela. But at least these countries would be taking control of their own destiny, free to make their own revolutions, and fumble toward liberal democracy of their own accord. No superpower to bail them out, no one to blame but themselves.

What Denton doesn't examine is the implications for US national security. Some of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration might have wanted to invade Iraq for a long time, but it was the events of September 11 and the subsequent War on Terror which allowed them to turn their dreams into reality. In the post-9/11 world, any state which hates the US can be a major threat, no matter how small it is: look how Afghanistan, of all fourth-tier countries, was blamed (and bombed) for sheltering and supporting Osama bin Laden.

So it's hard to see how the US could or would stand idly by while watching Islamic extremists take control in, say, Egypt. It's even harder to imagine the US leaving Israel to its own devices. Israel is an undeclared nuclear power with a history of human rights violations smack in the middle of the Middle East, yet no matter how many settlements it builds in East Jerusalem, it knows that it will never be abandoned by Washington.

So Denton's fantasy of a US hyperpower constraining itself to some kind of neoisolationism will never come true, today's announcement of a withdrawal from Saudi Arabia notwithstanding. Indeed, the rest of the world, as Denton makes clear, should be glad of that fact: living under a US security umbrella has given millions of Europeans, at the very least, a much better standard of living than they could otherwise have hoped for. It very well might also have averted nasty Islamic theocracies in places like Egypt and Tunisia.

But at the same time, it's clear that the US has neither the ability nor the desire to administrate a new imperium. As Niall Ferguson says in this week's New York Times magazine,

If -- as more and more commentators claim -- America has embarked on a new age of empire, it may turn out to be the most evanescent empire in all history. Other empire builders have fantasized about ruling subject peoples for a thousand years. This is shaping up to be history's first thousand-day empire. Make that a thousand hours.

Americans, says Ferguson, simply don't have any desire to plonk themselves in the middle of the Arabian desert and stay there for decades. It's the CIA problem writ large: just as the spooks would rather be in Virginia than in the Hindu Kush, today's generation of graduates is much more interested in corporate America than it is in Middle Eastern politics. In 1999, says Ferguson, of Yale's 47,689 undergraduates, just one was majoring in Near Eastern languages. And of 134,798 Yale alumni, only 70 lived in Arab countries.

Empire, historically, has consisted of vast swathes of territory ultimately controlled from a very small national base. The USA has an enormous national base, and no need to grow by acquisition: taking over Iraq (GDP: roughly $50 billion), for instance, would not significantly affect America (GDP: $10 trillion, give or take). It is this which should most reassure those worried about a new Pax Americana: the fact that Americans really don't care about ruling the world. They'll spend money and commit their forces when and where they like in order to maintain military dominance and minimise any threats to their national security. But you can't administer a country like Iraq by remote control from Washington: you need a lot of people on the ground for that kind of thing, and no one's sticking their hands up and volunteering for the job.

Only time will tell how much sovereignty Iraq will have in a year, in two, in five, in ten. In a globalised world, no country is an island, and the best that Iraq can hope for would be to be as autonomous as, say, Indonesia or Brazil. The US, both bilaterally and through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, is going to have a large say in what goes on in Iraq – but I think that in a few years, Iraq will be less under US control than Colombia, South Korea, or even, for that matter, the UK.

Denton thinks that the US should withdraw from the Korean peninsula, and leave the North Korea problem to that country's neighbours. This might be unrealistic: with or without a US physical presence there, the moral hazard argument will still apply. And it also misses the point a bit: the problem with American empire is not military bases in Korea or the Philippines, so much as it is US hypocrisy with regard to international law.

The USA, as Global Hegemon and Ultimate Policeman, can do whatever it likes, wherever it likes, while everybody else has to stick to America's interpretation of what international law says. That causes huge amounts of resentment, whether US forces are in Saudi Arabia or not. America has unilaterally decided that it, and it alone, is above the law, and can do things like invade Iraq if it thinks they're a good idea. (It goes without saying that if America thought invading Iraq was not a good idea, then it would have unceremoniously squished anyone else's plans to do so.)

Better, I think, that the US listen to Timothy Garton Ash, also writing in the New York Times magazine, and realise that "The new American hubris combines an overestimation of the military dimension of power with an overestimation of what the United States can do on its own." Rather than retreat to its own borders, the US should try to be inclusive, and bring the rest of the world on board with respect to its program. That would solve the moral hazard problem, without jeopardising US national security.

Posted by Felix at 17:06 EST | Comments (1)

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

Aureole Las Vegas

I've just got back from a trip to Las Vegas – what a city! I went for my birthday, and one of the highlights was a trip to Aureole Las Vegas for my birthday meal. Although I'm really not qualified to pronounce on such things, I'm sure that it's one of the world's great restaurants, and it's definitely top of the list of my Vegas bloggables.

Running a gourmet restaurant in Las Vegas is not the easiest thing in the world, although it can be very profitable: one report I saw said that this one restaurant makes $10 million a year. All top-end restaurants have to find excellent waiters, sommeliers and cooks, of course, as well as source ingredients, maintain consistency, etc etc. But in Vegas there's so much more: the space has to be mind-blowing, and you know that patrons are going to be walking in with sky-high expectations. Aureole Las Vegas specialises in presenting its diners with the unexpected, and then making those expectations seem positively pedestrian.

The centerpiece of the restaurant, in more ways than one, is its wine – specifically, a 42-foot-high glass tower, filled with 9,000 bottles of wine, which are retrieved by "wine angels" with wireless headsets flying up and down the tower on a mechanised pulley system. You enter the restaurant by descending a staircase which wraps around the tower, admiring 3-liter bottles of 1996 Ornellaia ($975) and 1988 Yquem ($1,900) strategically placed to whet the appetite.

The tower is carefully temperature- and climate-controlled, but even so, only the younger wines live there. Your 1900 Chateau Margaux ($16,000 the bottle, $28,000 the magnum) is kept in a proper underground cellar. Where the super-expensive younger wines (like the $15,000 magnum of 1985 Romanee Conti) are kept, I'm not sure. Sparklers have their own, colder, cellar – and as you'd expect in Las Vegas, there are a lot of them. There are over 100 different Champagnes, with vintages going back to 1962, as well as bubblies from Australia, Austria, Italy, Germany, South Africa, and, of course, the United States.

It's hard to overstate how enormous the wine list is. Most top-end restaurants have 250 different wines to choose from; in Las Vegas, where the big hotels on the Strip are always trying to outdo each other, 400 is not unheard of. Aureole, in contrast, has 3,700 and counting: the list is growing every day. Take a wine like Penfold's Grange, from Australia: Aureole has 35 different bottles, including 17 magnums, going all the way back to 1964. There are 20 pages of California Cabernets alone, at 14 bottles a page, including many of the cult wineries like Screaming Eagle (the 1996 vintage will run you $2,000), and rarities like a 3-liter bottle of 1984 Opus One at $2,295.

Many of these wines, of course, might be represented by only one or two bottles. They disappear off the list very quickly, and different bottles replace them on a daily basis. There's simply no way that a wine list could be printed often enough to keep track of the comings and goings. The top end of the list, especially, is very volatile, since high rollers can generally get any wine they choose paid for by the hotel, and big winners like to celebrate in style. Besides, a $10,000 bottle of wine doesn't seem like such a big deal when you've been gambling that much a hand on the blackjack tables for a couple of hours.

How, then, to present the wine list to patrons? Well, Aureole Las Vegas is in the same town as the annual Comdex computer show, where, at the end of last year, Microsoft introduced its tablet PC in a blaze of publicity. Now, when you're presented with your menus at Aureole, you're also given a wireless tablet PC, running a Java programme which will take you through the wine list. A slightly pared-down version can be seen at ewinetower.com, where I got all the prices for this blog.

Choosing your wine from an electronic list has upsides and downsides. Among the positives are the fact that every wine is included the minute it arrives, and you'll never be told that the wine you've chosen is out of stock. If you know exactly what you're looking for, it's great: there's an advanced search screen where you can put in a colour, country, region, grape variety and price range – and presto, a list of wines appears. Any you're interested in you can add to your bookmarks, for later advice from the sommelier. Some wines also come with detailed tasting notes, which is wonderful.

But there are big problems with the wireless wine list, too. For one thing, the computers are not particularly reliable: mine froze a couple of times, and there are known issues with the special stylus which operates the touch screen. Also, something isn't fast: I don't know if it's the speed of the wireless connection, the speed of the database, or the speed of the application, but it can take a long time for a page to appear. Clicking through pages is not something which can be done quickly: it's a laborious and time-consuming process.

What's more, if you don't know exactly what you want, there are problems. If you want a claret, for example, you need to decide off the bat which one of eleven different appellations you're interested in. If you're searching in Pauillac, you won't find a Graves. Even if you do know what you want, it can be hard to find: if you're looking for a Solaia, say, or a Grange, then you need to know both the region and the dominant grape variety before being able to bring up a list of vintages. And it's impossible to select more than one category at a time, so you can't search for wines under $100: you have to decide if you're looking for under $50 or for $50-$100. Searches aren't remembered, so can't be tweaked: every time you want to do a new one, you have to start all over again from the beginning.

There's also the lack of a voyeuristic element. With a physical list, you can flick quickly through the expensive Burgundies and Bordeauxs on the way to the affordable New World stuff, raising your eyebrows at the umpteen different vintages of Lafite without spending much time on them. With the computer, that kind of thing takes far too much time, and if one person is choosing at a table for two, the person without the computer is likely to get very bored very quickly.

Still, most of these problems can be solved. Aureole should invest in this system, and make it really great: speed it up, and add a lot of functionality. Make the search much more powerful, with saved searches and the ability to choose multiple categories. Input the menu into the computer, and then write a program which makes recommendations based on the combination of dishes that people are ordering. Create a "best of" list with maybe just a dozen bottles or so in each price range: every sommelier has his favourites, which he recommends a lot, so put those in the computer. Let people take advantage of the range of wines, most of which they'll never have heard of: have a function where they can select their personal favourites, and then see a list of similar wines which they might like more. Maybe cross-reference the list to the wine.com database, so that it's possible to see an independent opinion of many of the wines.

Nevertheless, even in its present, nascent state, the Aureole wine list is incredibly impressive. And it's more than matched by the food, which is just mind-blowingly good. It's full of fresh, zingy flavours in innovative combinations, and even the heaviest dishes come with a light touch. Take the roasted guinea hen with a large piece of foie gras on top, accompanied by braised leg ravioli: it sounds delicious, but what's surprising is how quickly it disappears, how the weight doesn't overwhelm the taste.

Everything is presented in a gorgeous setting: if you're well seated, your table abuts a door which exits onto a private terrace overlooking a small pond, complete with waterfall and three swans. There you have your aperitif, before retiring back into the sumptuous surroundings of the restaurant (gilded this, waterfall that) for the meal proper.

The only disconcerting part of the meal was in the service. I can see why in a restaurant of this size it might be hard to find the sommelier in a hurry, but it was still a bit weird to see him wearing an earpiece, rather as though we were being served by an FBI bodyguard. And our waiter, while perfectly friendly, had a peculiar habit of referring to all our food in the future tense: "this will be a pan seared piece of monkfish, which will placed atop a garlic-thyme vinaigrette, and will be accompanied by zucchini and baby garlic". After a few courses (we had the tasting menu), each of which had two or three such future foods, my head was positively dizzy with temporal realignment. It put me in mind of Schrödinger's cat, or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: it was as if the tasting of the food was necessary for its existence, as though the plate with food on it was just proto-food, which would become activated, the waveform collapsed, only when meat touched tongue.

The following day, however, when we took a shuttle bus to the airport (thereby saving a sum roughly equal to 20% of the tip on the meal), the driver announced that we'd reached our destination with the words "this will be United Airlines". So it might just be a Vegas thing.

All quibbles aside, however, I can say with certainty that top-end dining in Las Vegas has now equalled, if not surpassed, New York standards. Every major hotel has a $100-a-head gourmet restaurant, and many have a few: the Mandalay Bay, home of Aureole, has another three or four restaurants in the same price range just a stone's throw away. Each attempts to outdo the last: Aureole trumped Nobu, at the Hard Rock Casino, and in turn has lost quite a lot of buzz to Prime, Jean-Georges Vongerichten's steakhouse at the Bellagio (which is also home to Olives, Le Cirque, etc). Las Vegas is a city of excess, and now you can add dining to the sex and drugs and shows – and gambling, natch – at which Vegas has always excelled. What's more, at the end of the evening, you'll never find yourself spat out onto a harsh and blustery New York street. What's not to like? Just make sure that when you go, you're carrying a lot of cash. It goes fast in this city.

Posted by Felix at 14:40 EST | Comments (4)

Sunday, April 13, 2003

Literary fiction

A couple of weeks ago, I was quite rude about those who take their literature extremely seriously. Today, in order to redress the balance a little, I'd like to respond to the opposite tendency: the idea, as Michael Blowhard puts it, that literary writing is "no longer something special and above, but a niche market instead."

Well, in terms of numbers of books sold, one could probably say that 'twas ever thus. Genre fiction, be it sci-fi, horror, romance or mystery, has always sold more in aggregate than difficult, literary works. But Michael wasn't talking about sales figures, he was saying "that, in the larger scheme of things, lit just doesn't matter that much, that it's just a specialist taste and activity."

Michael is particularly rude about his two bêtes noir, Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison. He doesn't like them one bit, and, what's more, he claims that his friends in the publishing industry don't like them either. It's all some kind of conspiracy, it would seem: the powerful few, lunching at the restaurant whose name Michael borrowed for his nom de web, constituting a cabal who pump up the likes of Rushdie and Morrison in order to perpetuate a literary heritage of their very own. Or something.

It's pointless trying to get into an argument about quality here: I could shout very loudly about how wonderful Rushdie is, and Michael would shout back "oh no he isn't," and no one would get anywhere. De gustibus non est disputandum, and all that. But then I had an idea: I could show, quantitatively, that literary fiction is not just another genre, and is, in fact, separate and different from the rest of contemporary fiction.

The idea came from reading a column in Slate which reminded us that classic novels are big money makers. It's hard to track their sales, since they come in so many different editions, but when you do, they outsell many bestsellers from only a few years ago.

Well, I don't have access to Nielsen BookScan, but I do have access to Amazon.com, which helpfully provides a sales rank for every book it offers. I had an idea: that Rushdie and Morrison could be distinguished from their non-literary contemporaries by their staying power. I would compare their books to those written at the same time, and see where the numbers fell. If the literary types were selling much more than the genre writers, then it would be clear what the difference is between literary and other fiction: literary fiction aspires to longevity, to being read many years in the future, whereas most other contemporary fiction is written basically only for immediate consumption.

What follows is not tweaked at all for rhetorical purposes. I have included every book I looked up: I haven't excluded genre fiction which sold better than I thought it would, or literary fiction which was languishing in the 200,000s on Amazon's sales rank. I didn't need to: every literary book I looked up was in Amazon's top 10,000, while every non-literary book was lower, sometimes much lower. What's more, literary books were generally available in hardcover or library bindings, whereas non-literary books generally weren't: it's clear which ones are aimed at posterity.

The results, then: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is ranked 4,475 in paperback and 23,337 in hardback. Toni Morrison's Beloved is 4,002 in paperback, 6,788 in a different edition, and 84,203 in hardback.

Other relatively recent literary books might include One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, which is 2,394 in paperback, and 9,469 for the Everyman's hardback.

By contrast, the number one bestseller in 1988, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, by Tom Clancy, is now 11,396 in paperback and 28,473 in hardback. Clancy's royalties from this book are lower than those received by Thomas Pynchon for the famously-unreadable Gravity's Rainbow, which is ranked at 7,050.

The number one bestseller in 1991, selling an unprecedented 2 million copies in hardback, was Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, by Alexandra Ripley. Where is it now? At 17,776 in paperback; the hardcover is long out of print. Even the paperback is outsold by Infinite Jest, ferchrissakes.

The following year, the biggest-selling book was Dolores Claiborne, by Stephen King. It's now 85,325 in paperback, and good luck finding the hardback (there is a library binding, ranked at 500,670).

Meanwhile, let's go back to literature, and Don DeLillo, whose White Noise is ranked at 3,461. The Viking Critical Library also has its own edition, ranked at 26,378, which includes "an extensive critical apparatus, including a critical introduction, selected essays on the author, the work and its themes, reviews, a chronology of DeLillo's life and work, a list of discussion topics, and a selected bibliography."

DeLillo has another claim to literary merit: a scathing review of his latest novel in the New York Times' Sunday books section. It is impossible to imagine a review such as this being written of any book without literary aspirations: if Walter Kirn had written anything half as cutting about Clancy, Ripley or King, the Times would never have published it. If such a piece ever did appear, thousands of letters would come in, complaining that Kirn doesn't get it, or shouldn't be reviewing such books in the first place if he hates them so much.

Literary fiction is different, is more important, and not only is taken more seriously than other types of fiction, but – rightly – will continue to be taken more seriously for the foreseeable future. Rushdie was universally panned for his latest novel: he's not some kind of sacred, untouchable icon of the publishing world. Rather, he's written some books – Shame, Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses – which are magical, wonderful works, the kind of writing that will be read with great pleasure long after anybody reading this article is dead. In a word, literature.

Posted by Felix at 11:39 EST | Comments (9)

Monday, April 07, 2003

Beacon, Barney and Baker

If New York didn't know about Dia:Beacon before, surely it does now. A massive Richard Serra piece dwarfs a black-clad gallery-goer on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, which inside runs a 6,500-word opus by Michael Kimmelman all about the Dia Foundation and the new home for its permanent collection.

The piece is nothing if not gushing: at parts it reads more like a press release than a critically-reported magazine feature. "The Greatest Generation," it's called on the cover:

The most influential American artists weren't Pollock or De Kooning. They were the ones who came next – Minimalists, Conceptualists, Earth artists – who redefined what art was and who are now, finally, celebrated in a spectacular new museum.

Granted, probably Kimmelman didn't write the cover blurb. But he does contrive to put Dia (and Barnes & Noble) chairman Leonard Riggio in a very favourable light, despite being confronted with a man whose quotes would be considered self-parody if he weren't so serious:

"When Jay Chiat asked me to join the board, I asked the question everybody asks: 'What is Dia?' He told me it had great parties. My epiphany came when I saw Serra's 'Torqued Ellipses.' I immediately got the idea of the single artist space, seeing art in its own environment. I just got the concept of Judd, Flavin and all the others without even seeing their work yet."

One fears to think what Donald Judd would have said about a man who "just got" his work before seeing any of it, but Kimmelman doesn't even pause to catch his breath before Riggio continues, po-facedly glossing some of the most élitist artists in the history of the world as champions of the people.

"I went to Marfa and Roden Crater and visited Heizer in Nevada, and I thought these artists recognized the genius of the average American. Judd built his museum in a little Texas town. Turrell was hiring Native Americans from the area. Heizer was working with local people."

Sure, Leonard. Ask the "local people" of Marfa what they think of Donald Judd. (Be prepared for invective of a vehemence you probably never normally encounter.) Ask yourself, for one minute, who else Turrell and Heizer could have been working with, given where they were constructing their projects. These are great artists, but recognising the genius of the average American was never what they were about.

Similarly, Kimmelman seems to have written his article not for the general public, but for a very small number of art-world grandees. The piece concludes with our intrepid reporter standing in the middle of the new museum, its walls still bare, the museum director by his side. Here's what we learn:

To get acclimated to Beacon is to become attuned to an aesthetic of plainspoken industrial spaces, simple forms and a kind of meditative silence.

Sure, Michael. "Meditative silence" – that's bound to be what most of us find when we squeeze through the "tight vestibule like a small compression chamber" which Robert Irwin has designed as the entrance to the museum.It's "akin to the entrance at the Guggenheim in Manhattan," we're told, an entrance which is usually so bottlenecked that a line ends up running down Fifth Avenue, often stretching around the corner onto 88th Street.

I saw such a line myself on Saturday: I went up to the Guggenheim to check out the Matthew Barney show which they have on there at the moment. It opened back in February, and it's on until June, but even so, the crowds were huge and the lines for people to pay their $15 entrance charge long and chaotic. If this is the kind of response that Matthew Barney gets, imagine what Serra, Judd, Warhol, Heizer et al will elicit up in Beacon. "Meditative silence"? I think not.

I saw the Barney show just after finishing A Box of Matches, the new book by Nicholson Baker, and it's interesting to see how one can consider both Barney and Baker to be direct descendants of the Dia's artists.

Few, if any, artists were ever self-declared minimalists: no one liked the term much, and it only really caught on by default because the alternatives (like "literalism") were even worse. One of the biggest problems with the name is that it conceals what Kimmelman refers to as the work's "crazy scale and wild ambition". These are artists who blast tons of rock, who change the shape of ancient volcanic craters, who drill holes a kilometer deep into the Kassel earth, who buy up entire Texan towns: both ego and hubris are outsized in most of them, from Judd all the way to Serra. Michael Heizer's 20-foot-deep holes, lined in Cor-Ten steel, stand in relation to your average Pollock much as the Pollock would to a Van Gogh. And those holes are as nothing compared to Heizer's City.

Matthew Barney is one of the few artists of the next generation to make work of similar ambition and magnitude. The Cremaster cycle, a series of five films and associated artworks which rival Wagner's Ring cycle in length and complexity, fills essentially all of the Guggenheim. The show isn't a retrospective, it's one work. Ain't many other artists, of any generation, who need an entire museum just to show one piece.

Whatever you think of the Cremaster cycle, there's no denying the way in which the sheer scale of the work awes the spectator. The production values, as they say in Hollywood, are about as high as these things get: no starving-artist cost-cutting here. Walk in to the Guggenheim, and it's almost as though the long circular drain running down the museum's famous spiral was built to collect not liquid vaseline, but rather the money which is pouring off every surface in the exhibition.

Meanwhile, Nicholson Baker has taken the simplicity of minimalism, its focus on the kind of things we normally don't even bother to see, and transferred it into print. This is minimalist minimalism, in all senses: the book is very short, is broken up into tiny little parts, only a few pages each, and is concerned with the minutiae of life, the kind of things we never stop to think about in any detail: how we take our pajama bottoms off, or the sequence of actions we go through when we take a used coffee filter out of the machine in the morning.

Baker also has a nice line in wry punchlines: at the end of one of his finely-observed and meandering paragraphs, he'll suddenly come out with a phrase like "no animal likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck". Here's an example:

Once I told a doctor from France that I was able to wake myself up at a preset time with the help of nightmares, and he said that his father had been a soldier who had taught him that if you want to wake up at, say, five in the morning, you simply bang your head five times on the pillow before you close your eyes, and you will wake up at five. "But how do you manage five-thirty?" I asked the doctor with a crafty look. He said that in order to wake at five-thirty you just had to do something else with your head, like jut your chin a little, to signify the added fraction, and your sleeping self would do the math for you. I've tried it and it works except that it's much harder to go to sleep because your head has just been hit repeatedly against the pillow.

Most of the time, however, Baker is doing much the same thing that people like Robert Irwin and John Cage did in the 70s. Irwin would try to focus attention on elements of a space which are normally ignored; Cage brought to notice the kind of sounds which were never previously considered eligible to be classed as music. More generally, all three are concerned with the processes of perception, and with foregrounding the normally overlooked.

At Dia, Irwin has designed the car park: a characteristically oblique act in that most people will rush through it on their way to the Serras, barely giving it a moment's thought. But it's good to see that the legacy of minimalism continues to run both ways, or even more. You could set up a kind of matrix, with a simple/complex distinction on one axis ranged against an effacement/hubris distinction on the other. Irwin would be simple effacement; Serra would be simple hubris; Baker would be complex effacement; and Barney would be complex hubris. At Dia, they like to keep things simple. Looking at contemporary work, however, it looks like complexity is more the order of the day.

Posted by Felix at 12:35 EST | Comments (3)

Tuesday, April 01, 2003

The Believer

For a new magazine from the Dave Eggers stable, The Believer has had surprisingly little hype. It's quietly arrived in bookstores without the Eggers name anywhere to be seen (although his influence is obvious and everywhere felt) and is clearly attempting to distance itself from the rapidly-disintegrating Eggers bandwagon.

The editor is Heidi Julavits, who kicks off the debut issue with a 9,000-word manifesto about the state of fiction reviewing. A quick list of checked names (just the reviewers, not the reviewed): George Orwell, Jonathan Franzen, Ed Park, Lionel Trilling, Norman Podhoretz, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy, James Wood, Dale Peck, Leon Wieseltier, Harold Bloom, Tom Wolfe, Richard B Woodward, Lorin Stein, Colson Whitehead, Sam Sifton, Daniel Mendelsohn, Anthony Lane, David Denby, at least two reviewers quoted anonymously to protect the guilty, and a hypothetical "home décor columnist" assigned to review a novel of ambition. Checked publications: The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Commentary, Partisan Review ("it is sobering to note the following hard number: Partisan Review rarely enjoyed a circulation of above 10,000"), The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Observer, The New York Press, Vogue, Time, Newsweek, New York, The New York Post.

At this point, you stop wondering how Julavits managed to get so many people in, and start wondering how she managed to leave some of the other obvious names out: Hitchens, Wolcott, Updike, BR Myers, the TLS, the New York Review of Books.

The bigger point is that Heidi Julavits Means Serious Shit. One of the reviews further back in the book tells us at the very beginning that "Here's 7,000 words about a guy you've never heard of. But should have, we say." Julavits herself clearly sees this magazine as no laughing matter: "books are my religion," she says, casting a scornful eye over those (Sifton, explicitly) who approach the business of reviewing as an opportunity for "snarkiness".

It's just as well Julavits is so unambigous about this, because there's a bit of a disconnect between her rhetoric and what we actually encounter in the rest of the book. Much of the copy is written in what you might call Eggers High Ironic: the headline for Julavits's own manifesto is "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!" over a picture of a hot air balloon (there were rumours this magazine would be called The Balloonist).

And although the articles are long, they're most definitely not the kind of things you'd ever be likely to find in the New York Review of Books. An essay by Jonathan Lethem proposes that we "read Dombey and Son as though it were a book about animals". (The sub-hed puts it more graphically: "envision all the characters as fur-covered and wearing little Victorian waistcoats and corsets".) It sits opposite a one-page essay by Ben Marcus about putting a frozen log of pancetta through a Jet 708521 JWP-12DX 121/2 Portable Planer ($349.99). And a seven-page review of the new album by Interpol begins thusly: "The watershed leg-warmer moment came as Kevin and I were coming out of the movie theater, three quarters of the way through a John Hughes film festival."

I think the risk, actually, is that the differences of style are going to obscure the differences of substance. Because The Believer is a radically different kind of review, and not because most of its articles have a lot of first-person stuff in them, and not because of the witty drawings and the jokey NYRB-style insertions ("Query: For several years I have been working on a song involving both muskrats and love. Some associates have noted that there exists an old and obscure song that may have explored similar territory. Any information about this song or its author would be most appreciated. -Gerald Clam Ferrari").

What Julavits wants is a book of enthusiasm, of postivity, of reclaiming the obscure yet excellent rather than trashing the popular and overrated. "We will focus on writers and books we like," the editors say on the very first page. "We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt."

In this, Julavits is following through on something her publisher, Dave Eggers, was obviously thinking about more than two years ago, when he published an email exchange with Jonathan Lethem on his website entitled "Some Complaining about Complaining". In section three of the exchange (which I blogged at the time), Eggers writes that "there should be no fighting in the world of books," and this seems to be the driving force behind The Believer. If you want conflict, go elsewhere – to The New Republic, actually, according to Julavits. Or to any number of UK book review pages which love to see sparks fly. This magazine, in contrast, is going to be a big-hearted place, free from malice and scorn, a place where, in the immortal words of Alice, everybody has won and all must have prizes.

It's not necessarily a bad idea: accentuate the positive, and let the carping sour the pages of someone else's journal. But what is lost is any concept of a dialectic. If I think back over my years of reading the New York Review of Books, the pieces which stick with me for their excellence are the ones where an intellectual fight is engaged at a high level: John Searle vs Noam Chomsky, say, or Richard Dawkins vs Stephen Jay Gould.

And while The Believer has one excellent piece (Paul LaFarge on Nicholson Baker, giving the master close reader a masterful close reading of his own, bringing in everything from Pale Fire to September 11), a huge chunk of the magazine's 128 pages are taken up with that most wasteful and unenlightening prose format, the Q&A. A conversation between Salman Rushdie and Terry Gilliam could have been lifted straight from the pages of Interview; Beth Orton gets seven pages to talk about nothing in particular; and even Kumar Pallana gets five (although for some reason he's the only person on the contents page who doesn't merit small caps). Who's Kumar Pallana, you ask? Is he an exciting young author, someone whose books we should be rushing out to read? No, he's a film actor.

Most egregiously, The Believer seems to have decided (according to this article) that there will be an interview with a philosopher in every issue of the magazine, and that this interview will be in Q&A format. If the first such interview is any guide, this decision was a big mistake. Galen Strawson, an English philosopher who claims there's no such thing as free will, gets lobbed the softest of soft questions by a Duke grad student, and responds gamely, but without passion. At one point Strawson is told that he's written one of the most effective critiques of his dad's paper, and is asked what it's like to have that kind of a public disagreement with his own father. The answer? "Actually, I've no idea what he thinks" – an answer which is allowed to stand unchallenged. A review of his book, whether it was positive or negative, would have taught us more, and even a piece by Strawson himself would probably have put up some rather stronger objections than this interlocutor did, if only to keep things interesting.

So is The Believer worth your $8? I can't see it, really. The New Yorker, the NYRB, The Atlantic, even, I daresay, Salon – all these places have more interesting stuff. To read this magazine, you first need to be able to abide the cheap humour, then you need to get around the nasty design (columns don't line up, one story has its final paragraph 100 pages on from its rightful place), then you need a real desire to read long essays about books you've never heard of by writers who are more interested in showing off their own literary chops than they are in actually informing you about today's culture. It's everything that's bad about Harper's, rebranded for the 24-35 demographic.

But if you see a copy lying around at a friend's house, read that essay on Nicholson Baker. It's really good.

Posted by Felix at 16:55 EST | Comments (4)

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