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Number Four, Spring 2006: Reconstruction

THE INTELLECTUAL SITUATION

Global Warming
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Chad Harbach

There seems to be a persistent if unstated resistance on the part of the left to the precepts of ecology. Environmental causes haven't captured the attention of our subtlest thinkers and writers, but remain cordoned off to be pursued by nature lovers and nonprofiteers. In fact, global warming represents the third great crisis of technological civilization.

POLITICS

Note from La Paz
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Daniel Alarcón

Among the guests in from Peru to witness the inauguration was a white-maned wolf of a man named Hugo Blanco. It took me most of the speech to realize it was him—mostly because it never occurred to me that a man like that could still be alive.

First, Do No Harm
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Andrew Ellner

And so, with the help of a colleague, I shoved the feeding tube through his nose, down the back of his throat, and into his stomach while he thrashed wildly. It was terrible the first time we did it. Then, and amazingly considering that his arms were tied to the bed and an attendant was constantly in the room, he managed to get the tube back out, requiring its replacement. This happened on three consecutive days.

The Trouble with Being German
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Johannes Türk

Internationally, the real heirs to the German tradition live in Buenos Aires today, where the Argentines debate the question of whether socialism is national or international.

Gut-Level Legislation, or, Redistribution
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Mark Greif

Some say, the more the rich are rich, the better off everyone will be. But really the Dick Cheneys of the world are obese because they're eating everybody else's dinner.

LOST WORLDS

My Life and Times in American Journalism
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Philip Connors

Peter Kann had once been a journalist. In the 1970s, he'd won a Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. Moving to the suites had hampered his prose style, but if you read the memo enough times, you could figure out what he was saying. He was saying: Since I'm not giving back my $1 million New Economy bonus, lots of people are getting canned.

Why Repeat These Sad Things?
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Meline Toumani

He had spent seventy years living quietly in a place he was supposed to have been erased from, and it had left its mark. One day, when a village guard in the town of Mus asked him why we were interested in seeing a structure--it was a church converted to a mosque--Sarkis Bey snapped, "Who are you that you need to know? I've got as much right to be here as you, by my lineage." But he never, ever said what that lineage was.

LOST ILLUSIONS

The Mystery Guest
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Gregoire Bouillier

Yes, if they wanted my blood, I thundered to myself, I'd give them vintage blood, and a very good vintage at that, and they would drink it in remembrance of me.

Afternoon of the Sex Children
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Mark Greif

The trivialization of sex and the denigration of childhood can still be put on the agenda of a humane civilization. However, I think it's basically too late for us. Perhaps I simply mean that I know it is too late for me. If you kick at these things, you are kicking at the heart of certain systems; if you deny yourself the lure of sex, for example, or the superiority of youth, you feel you will perish from starvation.

AMERICAN WRITING TODAY

Short Story
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Elif Batuman

Here is the crux of the problem, the single greatest obstacle to American literature today: guilt. Guilt leads to the idea that all writing is self-indulgence. Writers, feeling guilty for not doing real work, that mysterious activity, turn in shame to the notion of writing as "craft." "Craft" solicits from them constipated "vignettes"—as if to say: "Well, yes, it's bad, but at least there isn't too much of it."

Poetry
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Stephen Burt

John Ashbery represents contemporary (post-'73) literature about as well as Robert Lowell represents '45 to '73. He doesn't think he's going to change the world, he doesn't give art a consistent ethical mission, he doesn't compete with the novel or film, he envisions the limitless flow of limitless information, and he doesn't mind that not all that many people understand him.

Academic Criticism
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Caleb Crain

Literature is only an art. It's not at all clear to me that the propagation of a taste for it needs to be federally subsidized—or that it deserves a niche in Ivy League schools, while courses in wine-tasting are consigned to institutions that place circulars in plastic bins on street corners.

American Writing Abroad
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Rodrigo Fresán

And I don't even want to think of the scant diffusion of classics like Adolfo Bioy Casares or Felisoberto Hern·ndez. To be honest, it's disconcerting.

Money
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Keith Gessen

"He'll be promoting the book on his blog!" the publisher tells his writer over seared ahi tuna. "Which, you see, is read by other bloggers!"

Memoir and Criticism
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Vivian Gornick

At the same time, the liberationist movements—which, as politics, have appealed urgently to me—have produced only novels and memoirs of testimony, not literature. I can think of no novel self-consciously feminist or gay that has achieved the kind of largeness that gives us back both world and self.

Publishing
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Gerald Howard

Almost single-handedly, through her passion for reading, her masterfully devised book club, and her signature template of trauma, healing, and reintegration, Oprah has retrofitted much of the corpus of literary fiction to the requirements of the culture industry.

The Novel
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Benjamin Kunkel

One underexplored thesis is that the American psychological novel that might have gotten underway after Faulkner and Ellison was badly hampered by the postwar institutionalization of psychoanalysis and its widespread public acceptance as a discourse. Now that psychoanalysis has lost so much ground to sociobiology and psychopharmacology, so that all that survives of it in public is the blunt repetition of a few therapeutic nostrums, it seems conceivable that the novel in America might achieve its old European role as the main venue for psychological investigation.

Reader as Hero
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Marco Roth

Liberals are now told that corporate bosses, policemen, and politicians have feelings that must be respected; that we must care for the strikebreaker, the prison guard, and the executive's wish for privacy. To do anything else would be elitist.

But would it be uncivilized? Becoming a responsible citizen and even an adult is precisely about knowing when to judge and condemn and when to sympathize and care.

FICTION PORTFOLIO

Two Stories
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John Haskell

Because the most rudimentary form of communication is the expression of desire, I was feeling the shark's desire, and one of the things it was desiring was my annihilation.

Melodramatic Installations
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Ilya Kliger

Oliver's thin face with light blue eyes and greenish skin is lost in the play between the blue of the pillow and the identical blue of the seas and oceans on the map. As for the rest of him, his body has been rendered so slight by his illness that it could be mistaken for folds in the blanket.

Three Stories
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Rebecca Schiff

We exchanged additional pics, birthtowns, sibling counts. We mentioned coffee, but decided on drinks. Coffee always gets mentioned. Drinks always wins.

The Joy of Edge Tools
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Misha Hoekstra

After a common dream, which naturally reflects their blended fears and desires, the boys are unyoked and restored to their separate awarenesses. Able to cooperate now, they soon discover how to pleasure themselves by toggling a certain bit on their lower fitting with Misha's boxhook. Pressed on this manifestation of their carnal nature, the mother demurs and again channels the father, this time for advice.

REVIEWS

On Houellebecq and Ishiguro
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Marco Roth

The outlines of the Houllebecquian cliche machine appeared before he'd written a novel. In an essay on H. P. Lovecraft, he isolated what he called an aesthetic of disgust, and in the years since he has done his best to describe the ordinary human business of watching pornography, fucking, and going on package vacation tours in the same light as Lovecraft described multidimensional aliens and demonic cults.

On William T. Vollmann
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J. D. Daniels

All the disaster novelist has to do is run his mouth. Disaster itself does the heavy lifting. Hitch your wagon to the Holocaust, then cue the strings; and who dares to mention, in that hallowed context, that your instruments are not in tune?