This is the second of 3 Quarks Daily’s Monday columns. Abbas started us off in fine form last week with a wholly fabricated yarn about his meeting with the president of Sri Lanka and talking to her about cake. He even presented some doctored photos.

I will change gears a bit with some real information about places that actually exist. In this case, Paterson, New Jersey. Now you may ask, with some puzzlement and bemusement, why Paterson. Especially if you’ve been there. Granted, history has not been so kind to Paterson. A once booming industrial town known as Silk City, it was recently described to me by a resident as ‘a complete shit hole’.

But it isn’t a complete shit hole. It is a special place. I’m not sure exactly what it is about Paterson that makes it special but I’ll try and jot down a few notes in that direction.

First of all, Paterson is wonderful because it is a ruin and ruins are beautiful. But that is too aesthetic and trite. The shallow romantic love of ruins is wistful and nostalgic, full of longing. I am talking about a love of ruins that is more like the attitude that Walter Benjamin took toward the Parisian arcades of the mid-19th century.

Ruins are interesting because when a world falls apart you have that much more of an opportunity to understand it. It lays itself bare. And Paterson isn’t just any kind of ruin, it is an American ruin. This is the city that William Carlos Williams wrote a five volume poem about. He picked Paterson as the place where he could write according to his precept “no ideas but in things.” He was trying to find an American idiom, like Whitman. He was trying to deal with America.

Paterson became Paterson because of its beautiful falls. But it wasn’t their beauty that mattered, it was the power to turn the mills. The weird American dynamic between nature and the city is right there in about two hundred yards of Paterson real estate, from the Great Falls down the street to the forgotten and decaying mills. A few blocks away can be found the truly sad and melancholic park in honor of Lou Costello (of Abbott and Costello fame). There, the drunks flout the posted suggestion that alcoholic beverages be consumed elsewhere.

In all that has fallen apart about Paterson, New Jersey, there is much that comes together. Paterson is about the meanness, and stupidness, and brutality that is America. The very failure that is Paterson is kind of perfect. But there is something tantalizing about it too. There is that infinite potentiality of Americanness lurking just beneath the surface of Paterson. It seems like that was what intrigued Williams too. Why can’t Paterson be more like what it gives you in glimpses and glimmers? Of course, that is a question that goes beyond Paterson to human civilization in general. But who wants to talk about human civilization in general. Right now, we have Paterson.

Have a lovely week.

Even though we are for the most part a “links” blog, the editors of 3 Quarks Daily have decided that we will take turns writing a short column each Monday, where we can talk about whatever we feel like. No one else wanted to do the first one so it has fallen to me by default, and I’ll take this opportunity to just ramble on about a bunch of things…

Last fall, the President of Sri Lanka, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, gave a very good speech on conflict resolution at the Asia Society in New York City, at which I was present, and in which, among other things, she commented that:

Conflict resolution has become today, a high profile subject taught in universities and lectured on, at many a seminar and conference. Experts in this field are held in awe in some circles in many countries. Yet, conflict resolution is not new. It has only been packaged differently in our age.

Afterwards, there was a reception and a friend introduced me to the President, to whom I said that although she was right about there being a lot of fancy repackaging of age-old wisdom in the academic field of conflict resolution, there have been some interesting intellectual developments, in mathematics, for example, which do provide new tools for avoiding or even resolving conflicts. As an example, I brought up cake theory.

Cake theory basically looks at methods of how to divide a cake among n persons so that each of them feels they got a fair share. For example, for two persons, one method would be to have one person cut the cake into two pieces, after which the other person gets to choose which piece she wants. This obviously gives the first person great incentive to carefully cut the cake into equal halves, otherwise she will get stuck with the smaller one. It gets a little more complicated for greater numbers of persons, but the problem has been solved for arbitrary n.

One method for dividing the cake into an arbitrary number of portions is described in the Wikipedia this way:

Another method begins with the first person portioning off 1 / n of the resource (for n people). Each following person then examines the portion in turn, removing a part for themselves if they believe the portion to be larger than 1 / n. The last person to remove part receives the portion. The process continues until the entire resource has been fairly divided.

The problem may be modified by requiring the division to be envy-free: that is, each recipient should not only believe that they have at least 1 / n of the resource (according to their measure) but that no other recipient has received more than they have.

The President seemed interested, so I went on to point out that this method has already been used in the Law of the Sea Treaty to divide under-sea mining resources between industrialized and developing countries:

The Convention of the Law of the Sea, which went into effect in 1994, incorporates such a scheme to protect the interests of developing countries when a highly industrialized nation wants to mine a portion of the seabed underlying international waters. The country seeking to mine would divide that area into two portions. An independent agency representing the developing countries would then choose one of the two tracts, reserving it for future use. [See more here.]

At this point, Madam President’s philistine handlers decided that she had been subjected to a long enough insane-sounding harangue on “cakes” and “the sea” by me, and she was dragged off to be introduced to someone more polite. But she was interested, and subsequently had my wife, Margit, and me over to the Presidential Palace in Columbo for drinks when we were visiting friends in Sri Lanka later in the year.

Anyhow, we had a great time in Sri Lanka, and were saddened to hear that, among so many lives and so much else, the beautiful old hotel we stayed at on the beach in the coastal city of Galle was destroyed by the tsunami. But even that most horrific of disasters may have a silver lining in terms of our theme of conflict resolution, making possible more fruitful negotiations between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers (the LTTE): there is more about that here.

I was reminded of all this by a great post yesterday at Something Similar by Jeff Hodges, about The Fair Division Calculator.

Have a good week!

It’s official: H.P. Lovecraft isn’t just some creepy schoolboy’s secret literary fare anymore, but a bona fide Amercian Author. At least that’s how I read the Library of America’s recent publication of Lovecraft’s Tales, edited by Peter Straub. Why all the sudden interest in Lovecraft? The Believer recently published French enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq’s essay on Lovecraft and intends to publish Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life at some point soon. (Lovecraft is to Houellebecq what Poe was to Baudelaire; I’m not sure what it is about ornate American works of terror that so rivets the French imagination, but hey.) Nick Mamatas of the Fortean Bureau has already pointed out that Lovecraft entered “the Canon” (if you’re worried about such things) when Penguin published his work. Meanwhile, Laura Miller finds both Lovecraft and his admirers a little loathsome in her firm but pretty fair Salon review. Miller rightly dwells on Lovecraft’s pathological racism (see, e.g., Lovecraft’s “Rats in the Walls”), but that never slowed down the Canonization of Chandler or Jack London either. More provocatively, Miller asks Why Lovecraft? when Edmund Wilson doesn’t have a Library of America volume yet.

The answer, I think, has something to do with Lovecraft’s strange enduring influence, his weird mythology the nightmare American version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s steadily increasing stock, which is something other than strictly literary. I have one Lovecraft theory, rather political in nature, which I wouldn’t go out on a limb to defend. When a continent is conquered by war, slavery, and racial extermination, the landscape, only seeming to lack a persistent cultural memory, could come back to haunt us, with monsters bred out of the sleep of reason. In this sense, I see Lovecraft in a line with William Burroughs, whose conclusion from a superficial and exoticized look at the native culture of Central and South America, in addition to the white madness that displaced it and the native peoples of North America, was that America was simply an evil land. It is surely right to place Lovecraft’s externalized demons back into his head, biographically speaking, but there’s something odd and inexplicable about his cultural persistence. What it boils down to, perhaps, is not only that America is haunted, an “old world” also (at last, the truth admitted), but also that in Lovecraft we see the ultimate denial and dramatic reversal of the original American Dream of Starting Over in an Edenic land of boundless possibility and natural beauty.

On a recent trip to London I rekindled an old passion for stamps and stamp-collecting, that ultimate nerd hobby whose very name, “philately,” is a sure-fire ticket to the deformation of any young boy’s social life. At the newish British Library, there’s a fantastic stamp collection located in the prestigious area of the, er, well, it’s actually in the cafe. You can browse it while inhaling the remnants of other peoples’ lunches.

Of particular note were the World War II collections, including stamps from Nazi occupied countries, the “Judenpost” of the ghettos, and the various underground Polish postal systems. The Polish government-in-exile created stamps in London for circulation in occupied Poland depicting various liberating aircraft and tanks. (Polish political prisoners also sent letters from Auschwitz, according to this illustrated article.)

The Poles also had an underground post operating under the noses of the Germans, complete with time-date stamps, an entirely alternate system. The punishment for discovery was death, so that there is something immensely civilized about the use of official stamps and seals on the underground letters. The Model Collection displays various Allied stamps in the Occupied Zones of Germany set up by Yalta. Stamps with Hitler’s image on them had to be recycled, and each of the occupiers had different systems for attempting to oblierate the image using various ink blots and geometrical patterns.

For the past two years or so there’s been an interesting discussion going on about how to review books. On one side of the divide are Dale Peck’s Hatchet Jobs and the genre of the polished and witty negative book review that is supposed to be more entertaining than the book itself. There is also a mode of philistinism setting in that involves the rubbishing of challenging books, epitomized by B. R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto and Jonathan Franzen’s regrettable attack on the late William Gaddis in the New Yorker. The other main development is the philosophy of reading set out by Heidi Julavits in the inaugural issue of The Believer, which attacks the “snarkiness” of much contemporary reviewing, where fatuous savagery and faux-learned ridicule have replaced any serious consideration of authors and ideas. In this spirit, The Believer recently published a long “letter” from Rick Moody defending Nicholson Baker’s novel Checkpoint from a swipe in the New York Times Book Review. The Moody/NYTBR agon brings to mind the old clash between Eggers and the Times dwelt upon at length in this Slate item.

These debates have come home to roost in the form of Charles Taylor’s new Salon.com review of Nick Hornby’s new book, The Polysyllabic Spree, the first title from Believer Books. The book collects Hornby’s hilarious Believer columns over the last year and is a gem. Hornby is one of the funniest writers around, and the idea of his column, “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” is brilliant insofar as it allows him to write about whatever books he has happened upon, old or new, classic or oddity, rather than reviewing current titles alone.

Taylor has written a weird review of the book for Salon that can be read in its entirety here. It is written in praise of the book but against the mentality of The Believer, which he describes nastily as a kind of literary Up With People. Charles Taylor, who I presume is neither the great Converse sneaker-king nor the Canadian philosopher nor the Liberian war criminal – unless he is a very busy man indeed – argues that “Where [The Believer] deserves credit for bucking a trend that is harming contemporary criticism isn’t in its attitude toward negative reviews but in the freedom it has given Hornby for his column.” His argument is strange because it makes it seem as though Hornby’s accomplishment has nothing to do with The Believer or was acheived in spite of its editorial direction.

He is also referring to the fact that The Believer doesn’t print soley negative book reviews, and asked Hornby not to explicitly name books he hated when he discusses them in his columns. Is this a problem? I happen to know from personal experience that The Believer isn’t in the business of puffery, or producing good reviews of bad books. In fact, the purpose of The Believer’s newish one-page reviews section is to draw attention to literary fiction that isn’t ordinarily picked up by larger book reviews. At any rate, all this wouldn’t be worth going into if it didn’t open up some bigger issues about reviewing. Personally, I don’t mind extremely negative reviews, because sometimes they get me intrigued and upset and stir things up. I had never read Rick Moody, for example, until Dale Peck described him as “the worst writer of his generation” – a clearly false statement since there must be someone Moody’s age writing copy for douche ads. But now I’m going to read Moody. There’s nothing more curiosity-inspiring than attempted censorship or apoplectic castigation, and when somebody at Slate trashes Wes Anderson’s new film The Life Aquatic I get myself to the theatre as fast as I can. There’s another matter, of course, which is that some of the best nonfiction ever written, such as Mark Twain’s “Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” takes the form of negative reviewing.

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that negative reviews are a branch of humor writing, and that the best comedy comes at the expense of the powerful, pompous, and pretentious, or what Laurence Sterne called “false gravity” in Tristram Shandy. I would argue that novelists as a rule are not the enemy, and that crushing a first-time novelist or a person trying to express something is a little like pushing a baby stroller down the subway stairs.

On the other hand, a critic’s first duty is honesty, and if there is no way out of an assignment then it does nobody any service to soft-pedal something one has taken a strong dislike to. Snarkiness is the mediocre mind’s second-rate, knee-jerk response to the culture of puffery and hype; in fact they are two sides of the same problem (and feed off one another) rather than true adversaries. My utopian suggestion would be a restoration of the concept of real criticism – independent, honest, passionate, partial, and decently paid – rather than the devolution of book reviewing into a badly-paid arm of publishing PR or the smarmy posing of middling minds who percieve contemporary literature as an endless river of bilge that threatens the sanctity of their precious critical faculties.

I’m not sure if it’s due to sunspots or historical circumstances, and I know my friends who write fiction and poetry will be unhappy that I’m saying this, but it seems to me that nonfiction is sometimes more exciting than fiction right now. Certainly the stastistics show a decline in fiction sales even while publishers are putting out 17% more titles. (Bowker has the full story.) Biography, history and religion showed double-digit increases for 2003. Some account for this as a post-September 11 reaction – unprecedented American interest in the outside world. It is also possible to view the trend aesthetically and suggest that perhaps fiction hasn’t been keeping pace with current events. (Indeed, how can it?) If this turns out to be the Age of Nonfiction – for talent follows the money – then this could explain the increasing interest in what is detestably called “Creative Nonfiction.” (Detestable because all writing ought to be “creative,” and because “creative” is a cruel term for good writing, so that the phrase “Creative Nonfiction” is doubly appalling from an artistic point of view.) Aldaily.com recently posted a link to an essay called “The Age of the Essay” by Paul Graham. Graham, famous for his work on Spam and Spam filters, has this to say about writing essays:

“What should you think about? My guess is that it doesn’t matter – that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it. One possible exception might be things that have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them, like working in fast food. In retrospect, was there anything interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins?”

Read the whole essay here.