Rushdie Comes to Brooklyn!

From the good folks over at Brooklyn Heights Blog, I have learned that Salman Rushdie will be giving an as yet undescribed lecture in Brooklyn this March. I can't wait!

Watch this space

Due to illness and busyness, it seems unlikely that I will have the time to post properly until October. But don't go away, because I will return.

Until then, here are a few interesting links.

The 'Real Reason' that Rushdie was snubbed for the Booker short list.

The MAGIC of Alan Carr


Bookmarks on FIRE!

Hardcore Writers

Gerrit over at the 2log, has challenged me to blog about the Guys Lit Wire post about the five most hardcore writers. And of course, I will.

First though, I wanted to mention the blog Guys Lit Wire. I had never heard of it before, and I am grateful to Gerrit for linking me to it, because it is a great blog. One of my concerns, as a guy who reads, is how rare that seems to be among my peers, particularly as I get older. Here I'll quote their excellent mission statement.

Guys Lit Wire exists solely to bring literary news and reviews to the attention of teenage boys and the people who care about them. We are more than happy to welcome female readers - but our main goal is to bring the attention of good books to guys who might have missed them. The titles will be new or old and on every subject imaginable. We guarantee new posts every Monday through Friday and have a list of twenty-three individual scheduled contributors plus several additional occasional posters all of whom have different literary likes and dislikes. We hope to provide something for everyone and will strive to accomplish that goal.

That is definitely admirable, and what's more they succeed. I read through a number of their short reviews, and they've been excellent. If you need to find a good book recommendation for a teenage boy, I think they should be one of your first stops.

Now to the top five list. I like lists of five, it's a good criteria to create discussion. It will almost never be accurate, there's too many excellent and terrible authors out there to ever be able to get a universally agreed upon top five on any subject.

It's even better when you throw in the term 'hardcore'. Check out those definitions. Do any of them capture the current colloquial use of the word? Not really. You don't say, "Hemingway went all over the world reporting on war and hunting animals, that dude is unswervingly committed!" Ok, you can, but it doesn't mean the same thing.

The Urban Dictionary is better. Their definitions are closer. I particularly like #2. Most of their definitions are about the hardcore music scene, which I would argue is the origin of the usage we're looking at. The desire to say that something is 'hardcore' in similar situations to words like 'kick ass,' 'bad ass,' definitely comes from the musical genre which, for long, is known as 'hardcore punk rock and roll.' Boy that's a mouthful isn't it? That's because 'rock and roll' gets shortened to 'rock' when attached to 'punk' and gets chopped off when attached to 'hardcore punk', and then 'hardcore punk' is so hardcore that it chopped its 'punk' off, and became just 'hardcore.' Of course, 'punk' also was so punk that it chopped its 'rock' off, and 'rock' ditched 'and roll' because extra syllables are lame. But enough about that.

Right, so 'hardcore' writers. I've been writing for seven paragraphs, and I haven't made any suggestions of my own. I found the Guys Lit Wire list pretty interesting, but I can't say I agreed with any of their suggestions. I'm sure Hemingway would make a lot of people's lists, but not mine. I find him kind of sad. He's a great writer, but that doesn't make his life particularly admirable, and I'm not a fan of big game hunting. I don't think that killing animals for the fun of it makes you cool or tough. Though I do think that driving an ambulance, in or out of war, does.

Xenophon was an interesting choice, but I think when you get to classical authors, the question becomes, compared to what? Almost all of them are more hardcore than any of us. Xenophon was pretty tough, but I think Julius Caesar has him beat. This guy everyone thought of in his youth as a bit of a pansy, became governor of southern Gaul, where he shared the same hardships as his soldiers, and conquered what amounts to all of modern France, as well as Switzerland, parts of Germany, and England. For the technology they had then, that's pretty good. He then went home and conquered Italy, fighting the guy who was supposedly the greatest military mind of the day. Oh yeah, and he wrote about it all, in the third person, because that was more modest.

There's also Thucydides. He was, as far as I can tell, Zbigniew Herbert's pick for most hardcore. I'll let Herbert argue it for me with his poem, Why the Classics?*.

1
In the fourth book of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides tells among other things
the story of his unsuccessful expedition

among long speeches of chiefs
battles sieges plague
dense net of intrigues of political endeavours
the episode is like a pin
in a forest

the Greek colony Amphipolis
fell into the hands of Brasidos
because Thucydides was late with relief

for this he paid his native city
with lifelong exile

exiles of all times
know what price that is

2
generals of the most recent wars
if a similar affair happens to them
whine on their knees before posterity
praise their heroism and innocence

they accuse their subordinates
envious colleagues
unfavourable winds

Thucydides says only
that he had seven ships
it was winter
and he sailed quickly

3
if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self pity

what will remain after us
will be like lovers’ weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wall-paper dawns

Hardcore, right? Herbert is one of my favorite poets, and that is my favorite poem of his.

Now if we're looking at the military as hardcore, then we're talking B.H. Liddell Hart, the military theorist/historian, and author of Strategy among others. To understand just how many people died because of who had and hadn't read this book, I will give you one quote.

The British would have been able to prevent the greatest parts of their defeats if they had paid attention to the modern theories expounded by Liddell Hart before the war.

Which war? and who said that? That would be WWII and the speaker? Field Marshall Rommell. Basically, after WWI, Liddell Hart, having witnessed the shocking capabilities of the new technology (tanks, planes, etc.) wrote a number of books trying to warn his country of what could be done, and what they would have to do. The British didn't read it. The Germans did. I consider this to be a great tragedy, and can only imagine how it affected Liddell Hart when Rommell admitted it. Still, I believe that qualifies Liddell Hart as hardcore.

I think Liddell Hart is hardcore partly because he failed. If the right people had listened to him, we might not have noticed him. I've read the book, and some other writings, and he's also a good read.

So I'm at three right? Julius Caesar, Thucydides, and B.H. Liddell Hart. Let's try to be a little less old dead guy, huh? Well, maybe one more.

Surviving against impossible odds is pretty hardcore, don't you think? For that I would recommend author and holocaust survivor, Primo Levi. Levi wrote all sorts of books, in addition to his survival of the holocaust. To my mind that's the most hardcore thing about him. He's really a stand-in for all holocaust survivors here. They made their way through one of the most horrific experiences in known history, such that no adjective can do it justice, saw the things they saw, and came out of it. Most like Levi managed to hold on to their compassion and humanity, if anything they became more human, and more humane. How do you do that? That is hardcore.

And one to go. I'm not ranking these authors within my five, so this one isn't any more or less than any of the others.

Salman Rushdie. One word, fatwa. Seriously, that is some mind destroying stuff. A powerful religious group, with fanatical followers has demanded your death, and some of your translators and publishers have actually been killed. He not only doesn't give up, he continues to say what he believes. That's pretty hardcore.

*from Selected Poems by Zbigniew Herbert, trans. Czeslaw Milosz, and Peter Dale Scott.

Reading for fun or facts?

I was reading this article in the Guardian, and it got me thinking about the role of Authors in what we read. Now obviously they produce it, but it can go further than that.

In this particular instance, despite Rushdie's objections, the interviewer is intent on linking, strongly and thematically, his new novel to his divorce. While I find Rushdie to be an interesting person, and enjoyed the interview, when I read the book I don't plan to look for that link. I try very hard to separate what I know about an author outside of their writing, from the book that I am reading. Clearly this interviewer disagrees with me, he is very interested in finding details about this author and (particularly in England) public figure. When he read the book, he was clearly looking actively for details about his reaction to his recent divorce. My immediate thought is that he thereby was unable to really enjoy the book, he wasn't reading a story anymore. In my mind what he did was no different than looking through Rushdie's tax returns, it has almost nothing to do with the pleasure of reading a story, or appreciating Rushdie's technique. It's about finding the specific clues to support a thesis.