American Book Review

Page 2 As we head to press in late April, we're reminded that literature matters. George C. Minden has gone to his great reward and the New York Times dedicates a quarter-page to the man who, on behalf of the CIA, "put 10 million Western books and magazines in the hands of intellectuals and professionals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union." Prior to the creation of the International Literary Center in 1956, US propaganda had been comprised mainly of mass leaflets dumped from high-altitude balloons; from this we conclude that literature is more effective than leaflets, at least when it comes to the CIA's intention to "offer an alternative, culturally engaging reality that had the implicit effect of promoting Western culture." The obituary lists some of the artifacts distributed: "The material ranged from dictionaries, medical texts and novels by Joyce and Nabokov to art museum catalogs and Parisian fashion magazines ." Let's forget the haute couture. And (for sake of discussion) Nabokov. But Joyce. They sent them Joyce. So we head to press (non-profitjournal production takes so long that hot-air leaflet-dumps seem tempting. . .), and we're reminded that literature matters. We who natter on listservs find ourselves again discussing a May 2005 list by Human Events of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Century." Human Events claims to be the oldest conservative weekly (founded 1944), and notes with zero irony that their "objective" reporting has made them "leaders in exposing liberal media bias." Some gems: The Communist Manifesto (1848; listed as #1): "Engels was the original limousine leftist." Democracy and Education (1916; #5) "encouraged the teaching of thinking 'skills.'" Betty Friedan (#7) was a "Stalinist Marxist and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects...with J. Robert Oppenheimer." Keynes (#10) is blamed, with FDR, for our current budget deficit, and Comte's (#8) "metaphysics" (their scare quotes) is "defined as the French revolutionaries' reliance on abstract assertions of 'rights' without a God." Then too an attack on Dewey's writing ("pompous and opaque prose"); and the last line of the commentary on Beyond Good and Evil ( 1 885; #9): "the Nazis loved Nietzsche." Honorable mention goes to Adorno, Foucault, de Beauvoir, Darwin, Gramsci, Freud, and...Nader. (Which of these does not belong.) So. We're headed to press (leaflets, anyone?) and we're reminded, etc. I'm just back from the &Now/Lake Forest Literary Festival hosted by Davis Schneiderman and colleagues, and the fret among the hundred-and-fifty conferees circled the problem of how next to make art reflective of an "alternative, culturally engaging reality"— while still disrupting official "Western culture." Organized around the historical concession that, invariably, that which is next is happening now, thé festival featured a palpable discomfort among prose writers (poets were fewer; perhaps poetry suffers less from the what-next problem). In several sessions artists read in front of a screen displaying a film, a slide show, the contents of their laptops, etc.; these performances were memorable less for the literary art than for that miserable moment when the artist clicks and turns her back to the audience while she peers at the screen, begging it to do as told. Of late, possibly distracted by burgeoning technologies, our notions of making that which intervenes has had more to do with click-and-drag than with language. Keynoter William H. Gass informed us that "any transgression is progress," but "it has to be more than just a fuck-you to tradition"; and if our transgressive work does not seem harmful enough, we should "go to the fundamental sources of the art and bring them back to our time. "The real avant-garde," he concluded, "stays avant-garde." By way of example he cited Finnegan's Wake (1939). Joyce. They sent them Joyce. Dewey wishes he wrote opaque prose. Most publishers/distributors of innovative prose have little truck with works that disrupt the fundamental attribute that makes prose prose: the sentence. "We can't afford," Gass said, "to act like tourists when we visit a piece of writing. We really need to get inside the...