Archives for June 2004

One of the first critics to cast a cold eye on the moviemaking of Michael Moore was Pauline Kael. My friend Kenneth has just revisited her 1989 review of Roger and Me.

– Maud has a short story, “Post-Extraction,” up at the newish literary magazine Swink. In news that will surprise nobody, it’s really, really good. How smart and nice of them to make it freely available!

– Part of Maud’s story is about on-line gaming. A little while back, a thoroughly fascinating essay in The Walrus looked at the real-world economics of on-line fantasy worlds. Economist Edward Castronova stumbled on these games a few years ago and what he discovered there revived a flagging academic career:

EverQuest had its own economy, a bustling trade in virtual goods. Players generate goods as they play, often by killing creatures for their treasure and trading it. The longer they play, the more powerful they get–but everyone starts the game at Level 1, barely strong enough to kill rats or bunnies and harvest their fur. Castronova would sell his fur to other characters who’d pay him with “platinum pieces,” the artificial currency inside the game. It was a tough slog, so he was always stunned by the opulence of the richest players. EverQuest had been launched in 1999, and some veteran players now owned entire castles filled with treasures from their quests.

Things got even more interesting when Castronova learned about the “player auctions.” EverQuest players would sometimes tire of the game, and decide to sell off their characters or virtual possessions at an on-line auction site such as eBay. When Castronova checked the auction sites, he saw that a Belt of the Great Turtle or a Robe of Primordial Waters might fetch forty dollars; powerful characters would go for several hundred or more. And sometimes people would sell off 500,000-fold bags of platinum pieces for as much as $1,000.

As Castronova stared at the auction listings, he recognized with a shock what he was looking at. It was a form of currency trading. Each item had a value in virtual “platinum pieces”; when it was sold on eBay, someone was paying cold hard American cash for it. That meant the platinum piece was worth something in real currency. EverQuest’s economy actually had real-world value.

He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S.–higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game–the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. “That’s higher than the minimum wage in most countries,” he marvelled.

Then he performed one final analysis: The Gross National Product of EverQuest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Bank rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia.

It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn’t even exist.

– I like James Lilek’s affectionate tribute to writers who smoke. Or is it smokers who write? In any case, Christopher Hitchens’ recent slice-and-dice jobs on Michael Moore and Ronald Reagan are the occasion for a description I know will have certain FOOGICs nodding their heads in self-recognition:

I am reasonably sure he wrote both pieces in the same state of furious irritated inebriation, and both strike me as two-pack essays. Forty cigarettes, minimum. Of course, you don’t know if he’s one of those light-

Colm Toibin’s The Master must be one of the most widely discussed books of June. The reviews are popping up like dandelions. I haven’t read the book yet, but I’m finding the reviews fascinating. Everyone admires it, most critics without reservation, but this week a few interesting exceptions have surfaced. In this week’s New York Times Book Review, Daniel Mendelsohn agrees with other reviewers about the novel’s stylistic beauty and imaginative power:

[W]hile [Toibin’s] dazzling embedding of bona fide Jamesian nuggets throughout his narrative will delight James scholars, they never obtrude into the smooth and elegant flow of the novel’s movement.

But he goes on to wonder whether the novelist underestimates how much authentic “living” James did. He questions an overly easy but commonly held idea about James: that he sacrificed “living” for his art. According to Mendelsohn, Toibin goes even further, suggesting that, like an “artistic vampire living off the lifeblood of his innocent and truly suffering victims,” James leeched off of the lives of others. Mendelsohn thinks this an unfair assessment, and calls into question the assumptions on which it rests: a narrow understanding of “life” and a dubious, simplistic opposition of it with “art.” He raises these questions eloquently and even passionately:

”The Master” is, of course, a novel, and Toibin isn’t bound by the facts; but the way that he’s loaded the dice against James here suggests what is, to my mind, a larger failure of sympathy.

This is strange, because sympathy is something Toibin the critic, the chronicler of gay lives, has thought a great deal about. ”The gay past is not pure,” he writes in ”Love in a Dark Time,” referring to the way in which the homosexuals of an earlier generation were forced to lead double, lying lives. ”It is duplicitous and slippery, and it requires a great deal of sympathy and understanding.” But ”The Master,” Toibin’s fifth novel, made me wonder whether he fully understands only a certain kind of suffering, and has only a certain kind of sympathy. For Oscar Wilde, with his extravagant public sufferings and real physical abasement, for the scholar F. O. Matthiessen, with his tortured closetedness and eventual suicide, Toibin–who has acknowledged what he feels is the ”abiding fascination of sadness . . . and, indeed, tragedy”–clearly has great sympathy in his essays. And it is for this 19th-century, operatic sympathy that he has sympathy in the new novel, too: Minny and Constance and Alice James, with their Pucciniesque sufferings, their illnesses, premature death and suicide.

But it may be that Toibin’s very nature, his own fascination with high tragedy and his admirably fierce moral objection to the kind of secretiveness and closetedness that once ravaged him, as it did so many of us, makes him unable to get to the deep opaque heart of Henry James–the elusive and frustrating thing that got him going about James in the first place. It’s possible that James just didn’t suffer in the way Toibin understands suffering. From everything we know, he was indeed quite a happy person (by his own standards, rather than ours) for most of his life–productive, sociable, well loved and remarkably kind. And, of course, a very great artist for whom art was the highest satisfaction. Yet Toibin never explores what it might feel like to be satisfied by art alone in the way that most of us want to be satisfied by love and sex; he just keeps showing you the damage that art causes without really suggesting what its compensatory value might be–for James or, indeed, for us. There is an early story of James’s in which a young American asks himself whether ”it is better to cultivate an art than to cultivate a passion”; for James in real life, at least, it seems clear what the answer was–just as it seems clear what Toibin thinks, too. The last page of ”The Master” provides one final memory, one final illumination of why James was ”cold,” why for him there was a kind of emotion in art that nothing in ”life” could match. A closing image of the lone artist, anxiously culling moments from life to be preserved in art, is meant, I suspect, to come off as melancholy, if not tragic.

But what if James wasn’t tragic? That a life without passion as we think of it could still be a fulfilled life is one paradox that Toibin’s artful, moving and very beautiful novel doesn’t seem to have considered; and so he does not dramatize it because it isn’t clear to him. What we get in ”The Master” is, instead, the intricate and wrenching drama of James’s ”victims.” The Master himself remains, ultimately, unknowable–a problem that perhaps no artist could ever solve.

In a perfect world we’d get more book reviews like this one: judicious, eloquent, and animated by a compelling Big Idea.

In this week’s New Yorker, John Updike has the same Idea:

We sorely miss in the novel, and find abundantly in the biographies, the sound of James’s voice, as it is heard in [Leon] Edel’s and [Fred] Kaplan’s frequent quotation of onrolling sentences and stabbing, mischievous phrases culled from his letters. T

I returned from the barber seconds ago and am now about to go up the spout, but I just received this e-mail from a reader apropos of the Evelyn Waugh quotation-from-memory I posted at the end of yesterday’s Consumables, and wanted to pass it on to you before I retire to my Secure Undisclosed Location:

I may be late on this, but here’s the passage in Evelyn Waugh’s diaries that you asked about on your blog the other day. It’s the entry for Sunday 17 November 1946 (p. 663 in the English edition). A houseguest had departed, and Waugh wrote, “What an enormous, uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age and to turn, as the door shuts behind the departing guest, to a first reading of ‘Portrait of a Lady.’ “

Even better. Many thanks. Ta-ta for now.

“To ‘live’ is an expression which has had much harm done it by second-rate writers who seem to think that ‘life’ is limited to pretending you like absinthe and keeping a mistress in Montmartre.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams, “Gustav Holst: An Essay and a Note”

Last fall I pulled Mary McCarthy’s Intellectual Memoirs off the shelf for the first time in years and found two fifty-dollar bills tucked inside. Nice, but alarming enough that I can now confidently say–after an evening of on-the-ground investigation–that there is not another red cent hidden in any book in my apartment. This is not my usual notion of a savings account–my money didn’t earn a lot of interest there, needless to say–and I’m going to be very careful next time I take a box of books to the local bookstore.

A piece in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) catalogs some of the amazing items discovered in used books at New York’s Strand and a few other bookstores. These items include an activist’s rap sheet; sketches by Bosch, Michelangelo, and the unidentified; birth certificates; dirty pictures; and, natch, love letters. Some of the gaudier finds:

The Strand did buy a $15 doodled-over book of drawings by the Renaissance artist Ucello. The doodler was Salvador Dali. Fred Bass, the Strand’s owner, once opened a book titled “The Bill of Rights” to find it was hollowed out. The bottom of the inside was signed, “Boo! Abbie Hoffman.” Mr. Bass says he learned later from Mr. Hoffman that he had hidden a tape recorder in there during the Chicago Seven trial.

Mining the dusty stacks, browsers can strike gold too: a signed photo of Bette Davis; a dried four-leaf clover; a ripped-out flyleaf from a first edition with a poem scrawled on it: “A plague upon / and to perdition / the Hun who mars / a first edition…”

Harvey Frank wasn’t pleased, though, to learn that a personal note he wrote had landed in a customer’s hands at the Strand. Mr. Frank had slipped it into a copy of his own self-published book of poetry, “My Reservoir of Dreams,” before sending it to WOR Radio host Joan Hamburg. “I thought I would bring her into my life,” says Mr. Frank, who is 80. Ms. Hamburg remembers the book, vaguely. “I was sort of touched,” she says. “I put it on my desk. Or somewhere.” She says she has no idea how it ended up in a used-book bin.

Ouch, and d

“Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions”

Raise your hand if eww. The grammatical errors and infelicities found by Louis Menand in the punctuation guide Eats, Shoots & Leaves are enough to make this editor’s hair stand on end. Thanks anyway, Lynne Truss, but I’ll stick with the foundational texts in “the Edward Gorey school of grammar” (as one Amazon reviewer nicely puts it), Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s Deluxe Transitive Vampire and New Well-Tempered Sentence. They’re trustworthy and titillating–what more could you want in a grammar guide?

I’m here on a visit, but no more than that. First thing Tuesday morning I remove myself to an Undisclosed Location for three days of rest and relaxation. I won’t be attending any performances of anything whatsoever, except maybe dinner. I’m not bringing my iBook, either, so don’t ask me.

I plan to be back and blogging on Friday, but in the meantime I’ve left behind a few postings to keep you warm (see below), and I’ve also updated the Top Fives in the right-hand column. Take a look.

I now return you to the capable hands of Our Girl in Chicago, who kept the home fires burning very nicely last week. Give her a kiss for me.

Toodle-oo.