The Elegant Variation

WEDNESDAY MORNING PAPERS DIDN'T COME or WHY FRANCE WILL NEVER AGAIN BE A WORLD POWER

One of the things I do with the waning days of summer is indulge in my silly obsessions.

The latest has to do with my quixotic attempts to obtain a few loaves of a particular kind of French bread I love.  It's called Harry's brioche tranchée, which is basically sliced, toaster-ready brioche.  I need to be clear - this is not a fine bread product.  It's no Poilane, not by a longshot.  Frankly, it's scarcely a notch above Wonder Bread but I have a sentimental attachment to the stuff.  Whenever I go to Paris, or friends go, or Parisian friends visit, several loaves of Harry make the transatlantic crossing.  Of course, they always emerge squished and misshapen from my suitcase but that only seems to add to the charm.  There's nothing quite lilke a pot of French press coffee and a slice of Harry's with raspberry jam.

I'm usually good about rationing it out so that I'm not too far from a trip when the last of it goes.  But it's gone and the next trip is probably at Christmas.  So - as I have before - I hopped on the internet to see if there was any way I could buy some of the stuff online and have it shipped.  I found a few French grocery sites where it was for sale but not for international shipment.  In the end, I found an email address for the corporate HQ and sent off a polite note, expressing a willingness to pay any overseas shipping and handling charges the order might incur.  And I waited, hopefully.

Foolish, foolish boy.  After all, this is France.

The response came yesterday from a Customer Service representative who shall remain nameless.  The entire reply read:

"I am sorry.  It is impossible."

Now, anyone who has spent any time around the French can imagine the inflection there - "C'est impossible!"  As though I was asking that the Eiffel Tower be picked up and moved three feet to the left.  Now, tell the gang at Poilane that "it is impossible" to ship a loaf of bread across the ocean - something they're very happy to do (via Fedex, no less) if you're willing to fork over forty bucks.  Which I am, and have been.

Now, anyone who knows me knows that I'm scarcely a flag-waving jingoist, and in fact I'm quite the Francophile.  But do you honestly think that if that folks at Wonder Bread somehow determined there was a buying audience in France, that an international e-commerce website wouldn't have gone up yesterday?   By all means, mes cheres amis, complain about the influx of American culture.  And lament the day that France's cultural influence declined.  But just remember - ce n'est pas impossible; vous êtes paresseux.

I bet you Sarkozy could get me some Harrys ...

EIGHT DIAGRAMS INTERVIEW

We're the latest interview subject over at the excellent Eight Diagrams.

Wayne: Despite the fact that literary blogs are often used as an example of how traditional book review pages are dying, you and other literary bloggers frequently quote from those pages. You have said that it seems de rigeur for others to blast the New York Times Book Review, but you yourself admire the publication. Which book review pages do you admire and why? Any specific reviewers?

Mark: We don’t only quote from them, we contribute to them! I think the New York Review of Books and Bookforum are the two best American book reviews out there and should be on the bedside table of any serious fiction reader. I also think TLS and London Review of Books are superb. They are unfailingly serious, thoughtful, insightful. They’re given breathing space and assigned to writers who are elegant and inventive. At BEA, Heidi Julavits said that “Eight hundred word reviews are bullshit,” and although that might be overstating it a bit, it’s only a bit. There’s nothing quite like the luxury of space in which to flex one’s critical muscles. Among the daily papers, I think Oscar Villalon does fine work with the San Francisco Chronicle. The Boston Globe and Washington Post also offer above par coverage. The Nation and The Atlantic do quite well, as does the New Yorker. As for specific reviewers, my admiration of James Wood is scarcely a secret. I’d also add Daniel Mendelsohn and Louis Menand into the top ranks of critics. I think Michael Gorra is consistently thoughtful; I also admire Stephen Metcalf, Ruth Franklin, Walter Kirn and Adam Kirsch (when he’s not writing about blogs). Richard Eder, too. If we stretch the list to include the likes of Cynthia Ozick, and Joyce Carol Oates, then I could go on and on an on … What is common to all these great critics, I think, is considering works in their context – taking a long view, whether of an author’s entire body of work or the state of a genre. It’s about running long and deep and having the chops to full it off.

TUESDAY AFTERNOON IS NEVER ENDING

Whilst we're off sunning ourselves and ping-ponging between Jane Gardam's Old Filth and the long awaited third volume of John Richardson's titanic A Life of Picasso (about which, more post-break), you should pop over and check out the "Recommendations from Under the Radar," pulled together by the tireless Colleen Mondor over at Chasing Ray.

A LITTLE WELL-EARNED R&R

We're going to enjoy the waning days of summer and more or less close up shop here until just after Labor Day.  We do have a backlog of interesting or amusing (or both) sites to pass along, so we'll pop by here daily and stick something up here so you'll have a reason to keep popping in, but the meat and potatoes will return after the holidays.  (Oh, we've finally cracked upon Old Filth and it's all that they're saying.  The perfect book with which to bid adieu to the summer.)

Today we direct you to check out The Smart Set, a new online magazine which has the good fortune to include a fine essay by MIchael Gorra on Florence and Henry James.

I’ve come to give a lecture on America’s Florence, on the 19th century colony of expatriates that clustered on the hill of Bellosguardo, a mile south of the Arno, with a particular focus on Henry James, who not only set some of his work in Florence but wrote a lot of it here as well. He began his first novel, Roderick Hudson, in a flat on Piazza Santa Maria Novello; the building’s ground floor now contains a gelateria, with what I’m told is housing for an NYU study abroad program on the floors above. He wrote “The Aspern Papers” in a villa on Bellosguardo itself. And The Portrait of a Lady got its start in a hotel overlooking the Ponte Vecchio, with a view across the river to a line of half-ruined old houses that he described as “battered and befouled… cracked and disjointed,” but so different from the brownstones of his Manhattan childhood as to “create their own standard of felicity.” Today they look felicitous enough on their own, some of the city’s most expensively rehabbed property.

THE INDIAN CLERK WEEK ENDS: GIVEAWAY

You've been reading about it all week.  Now your chance to win a copy of David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk is upon you at last.  A signed copy no less, inscribed by the author to one lucky TEV reader. 

In the unlikely event you've been away all week and only came by for the giveaway, you can find out everything you need to know about this wonderful title right here.  So let's give away a book.

The first reader who can prove the Riemann Hypothesis ... no, no, no, we keed.  Everyone knows the rules.  Drop us an email please, subject line "PRIMED FOR LEAVITT."  We'll take all entries until 3 p.m. PST, at which time we'll turn to the Random Number Generator - especially apt this week - to anoint a winner.  As ever, please include your full mailing address and previous winners remain ineligible.  And if you don't win the book, please pop over to Powells and pre-order it.  Surely, we've convinced you by now.  (And feel free, in your emails, to let us know what you think about the whole one-book-a-week model.  We'd enjoy the input.)

UPDATE: Congratulations to Jerry Pace of Atlanta, GA.  And thanks to all who made this a memorable week around here, especially David Leavitt for his fine stint as guest blogger.  Have a great weekend, all.

GRACE PALEY DIES

As has been widely noted, Grace Paley has died.  We interrupt our Indian Clerk week to direct you to Maud Newton's lovely remembrance.

Now that I live in New York City, I realize how rare it is for a writer to be so genuinely warm to someone who has nothing to offer but enthusiasm. And with Grace Paley’s death, it’s more rare than ever.

THE INDIAN CLERK: FURTHER READING # 1

Throughout The Indian Clerk, we're reminded how different the world of hundred years ago was, especially in the area of communications.  Beginning with the first letter from Ramanujan, dozens of letters and postcards traverse continents at the large end of the scale, and buildings at the small end.  But one of the most interesting of these communications comes about two-thirds of the way through the book, when Hardy is fretting over the whereabouts of Thayer, a young man with whom he's had a fling that ended badly and who is now away at war.  Here's the setup:

What I could not do, hard as I tried, was forget him. At least once a week I visited the hospital on the cricket grounds—ostensibly to offer words of support and reassurance to the injured soldiers, really to see if by some miracle Thayer might show up, once again, in one of the wards. Things had changed in the intervening year. In addition to the sisters, uniformed members of the Medical Unit of the Officers Training Corps paced among the beds. They were surgical dressers or clerks. As I moved through the vast expanse of the hospital, I would pretend to a purely academic interest, ask them to explain the treatment methods they were testing out, when in fact all I wanted was to find Thayer. But he was never there. Occasionally I might strike up conversations with some of the other lads. With surprising frequency these took a flirtatious turn. But I could not muster enough enthusiasm to follow up on the leads I was offered. For Thayer had claimed me. I suppose I must have been in love with him. I wanted no one else.

Under the best of circumstances, hope has a short lifespan. During wartime its lifespan is shorter still. At midnight on New Year's Eve, 1917, I raised my glass to the sky (I was alone in Cranleigh, Gertrude and Mother asleep) and declared valiantly that I had given up on Thayer. It was a new year, and I would move on.

Shortly after that, word does, in fact, show up in the form of a Field Service Post Card, an example of which is pictured below. 

I first became aware of these fascinating forms in Paul Fussell's landmark The Great War and Modern Memory (which Leavitt notes in his acknowledgements).  Here's what he has to say about them:

Infinite replication and utter uniformity - those are the ideas attached to the Field Service Post Card, the first wartime printing of which, in November, 1914, was one million copies.  As the first widely known example of dehumanized, automated communication, the post card popularized a mode of rhetoric indispensable to the conduct of later wars. ... The perversion of a fully flexible human rhetoric betokened by the post card has seemed so typical not just of the conduct of later wars but of something like their  "causes" that satirists have made itone of their commonest targets.  In Heller's Catch-22 Colonel Cathcart writes form-letters of condolence implicity requiring the recipient to strike out "what does not apply":

Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr and Mrs. Daneeka,
   Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action.

According to Fussell, parodies of the card were a staple of everyone from Siegfried Sassoon to Evelyn Waugh.   He further suspects that Edmund Wilson was "paying distant homage in the semi-facetious post cards" he would send that "listed a number of things which 'Mr. Edmund Wilson does not do,' like granting interviews, reading manuscripts, delivering commencement addresses, receiving honorary degrees, etc., each with a small box to be checked."

If you'd like a greater understanding of the world that Hardy and Ramanujan inhabited, one marked by "the unparalleled literariness of all ranks who fought the Great War," you'll want to read this indispensable book, winner of both the National Book Award and the NBCC Award.  You can also read the World War I correspondence between lovers Harold McGill and Emma Griffis, at Dear Miss Griffis, the site from which the image above is taken.

THE INDIAN CLERK: FURTHER READING # 2

Speaking of Siegfried Sassoon, another group of books that Leavitt notes his acknowledgements is Pat Barker's brilliant World War I trilogy - Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (which won the 1995 Booker Prize).  Here's what he has to say:

Yet it was from a sequence of novels - Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road, all published by Plume) - that I got the most vivid sense of the ways in which homosexual love was expressed, exploited, and manipulated in England during the Great War.

In the novel, as in history, Sassoon finds himself at Craiglockhart, a war hospital for the treatment of "shell shock", as a consequence of his landmark "Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration."  In an early interview with Dr. William Rivers, Sassoon essentially outs himself by acknowledging the impact of The Intermediate Sex on his life.

"Yes.  I've had patients who swore their entire lives had been changed by it."

"Mine was.  At least I don't know about 'changed'.  'Saved', perhaps."

"As bad as that?"

"At one point, yes.  I'd got myself into quite a state."

By the interview's end, we're given a grim sense of what's to come.

Rivers began polishing his glasses on his handkerchief.  "You know, I realize Ross's caution probably seems excessive.  To you.  But I hope you won't be in too much of a hurry to dismiss it.  There's nothing more despicable than using a man's private life to discredit his views.  But it's very frequently done, even by people in my profession.  People you might think wouldn't resort to such tactics.  I wouldn't like to see it happen to you."

"I thought discrediting my views was what you were about?"

Rivers smiled wryly.  "Let's just say I'm fussy about the methods."

By the end of the first volume, Sassoon is on his way back to the front, unable to single-handedly turn the tide of the prejudices of the day.  He fades into the background in the subsequent volumes, in which Barker's fictional creation Billy Prior steps up to the center stage for an unforgettable, devastating denouement.

The Regeneration Trilogy is available in a single volume and constitutes Barker's crowning achievement - some of the strongest English language fiction of the past twenty years.  (It's exciting news to learn that Barker returns to the World War I setting for her new novel , due out next year in the US from FSG.)  We know we've recommended it before but we can't do so highly enough.

THE INDIAN CLERK: FURTHER READING # 3

If you're of a mind to delve more deeply into the maths of The Indian Clerk, you do well to read one of these four volumes devoted to The Riemann Hypothesis, and recommended by Leavitt himself, in his order of preference:

1. Marcus du Sautoy, The Music of the Primes.  You can read a fine article by du Sautoy in Plus Magazine, which serves as a fine introduction to Riemann.

Riemann had found one very special imaginary landscape, generated by something called the zeta function, which he discovered held the secret to prime numbers. In particular, the points at sea-level in the landscape could be used to produce these special harmonic waves which changed Gauss's graph into the genuine staircase of the primes. Riemann used the coordinates of each point at sea-level to create one of the prime number harmonics. The frequency of each harmonic was determined by how far north the corresponding point at sea-level was, and how loud each harmonic sounded was determined by the east-west frequency.

2. Dan Rockmore, Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis.  Rockmore and his book were favorably noted by The Washington Post, which observed that "math is hot."

To understand how someone can spend hours, days, years wrestling with an insoluble problem, you have to look at the world through a mathematician's eyes. That's where Rockmore comes in. He's not one of those fluky-flakey number nerds you read about. He's a hiker, a tennis player, a distance runner. He's got a loving family, a Manhattan pied-à-terre and patience enough to explain math to the unmathematical. He is an expositor who scored higher on his verbal SATs than on his math and he has agreed to spend the afternoon walking you through some of the toughest concepts in math -- literally.

3. Karl Sabbach, The Riemann Hypothesis.  About which we can find next to nothing.

4. John Derbyshire, Prime Obsession.  You can sort through a variety of reviews, including this one from the American Journal of Physics.

Presented in a conversational style, but with the meticulous attention to detail of a well-composed detective novel, Prime Obsession tells of the origin, evolution, and significance of a mathematical conjecture with deep ramifications throughout many fields of mathematics and surprising physical implications still to be explored fully. Seamlessly the author weaves together the "world lines" of Riemann and the eminent mathematicians who either motivated or followed up on his work, explaining carefully and readably the essential mathematical contributions made by each.

We were hoping to dig up a reasonably straightforward description of the Riemann Hypothesis but as Andrew Wiles noted, "The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis. But it's not a problem that can be simply stated."  This one seems to be the most accessible introduction we can found out there.

Riemann conjectured that all nontrivial zeros are at Re(z)=1/2. Although this has been shown to be true for more than the first billion nontrivial zeros, the conjecture remains open. A proof would establish new results in number theory, for example on the distribution of primes. The fact that Riemann Hypothesis holds for billions of nontrivial zeros does not guarantee anything. As noted by I. Good and R. Churchhouse in 1968, in the theories of zeta function and of primes distribution, one frequently meets terms like log log x, a function which increases extremely slow. The first nontrivial root not on Re(1/2) might have an imaginary part y such that log log y is of the order say 10. Then y would be 1010,000, a definitely unreachable number, computationally.

Which, to be honest, doesn't mean shit to us but has apparently been catnip to generations of mathematicians who struggle to prove it to this day.

(Personally, we think the best mathematical proof we've ever come across comes from Thomasina Coverly in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.  She's been given a copy of Fermat's Last Theorem by her tutor Septimus to keep her quiet for a few hours.  As you may know, Fermat was famous for having written in the margin of his copy of Arithmetica "To write the cube of a number as a sum of two cubes, or the fourth power as a sum of two fourth powers, or any power above 2 as a sum of two like powers, is impossible. I have a truly wonderful proof of this fact, but the margin is too narrow to contain it."  Thomasina's reply, prescient given the events of the play, follows:

THOMASINA: Oh!  I see now!  The answer is perfectly obvious.

SEPTIMUS:  This time you may have overreached yourself.

... THOMASINA: There is no proof, Septimus.  The thing that is perfectly obvious is that the note in the margin was a joke to make you all mad.)

Join us tomorrow when we'll be offering up a signed copy of The Indian Clerk for our Friday giveaway.

On Literary Envy

What writer--or reader--hasn't experienced it? That stab of alarm at seeing someone else praised, or that surge of schadenfreude at seeing someone else trashed. And afterwards, the faint stench of guilt rising like steam from the wound, with its odor of corroded metal. (Note to self: Stop trying to sound like John Banville.)

I confess it: I have been guilty of the cheapest sort of envy. For example, there is a writer--she shall remain nameless--whose success, both in terms of sales and reviews, baffles me. What, I wonder, is everyone seeing that I'm not? Am I blind? Or has she sold the world a bill of goods the cheeziness of which only I detect?

In any case, every time this writer publishes a book, I have a panic attack. When someone says how wonderful she is (this happens 99% of the time) I beat my fists. When, on rare occasions, someone criticizes her, I cheer.

I don't know her. I'm sure she's a perfectly nice person. I'm sure she works as hard as I do, and tries as hard as I do to believe in herself. She probably has betes noires of her own.

About a decade ago I wrote something on this subject. In "The Term Paper Artist," a novella in my collection Arkansas, I have my hero, a writer named David Leavitt, cogitate on the fact that potential Nobel prize winners are as likely to experience fits of envy as are unpublished poets: "we are speaking, here, of the emotions of vacancy, which scale neither enhances nor mitigates; for panic and emptiness (the words are Forster's) always feel like panic and emptiness, no matter the degree."

I hereby invite readers of TEV to share their tales of literary envy--their own envy or that of others. A call for confessions, or perhaps an opportunity for us to remind one another that we are all in this human dilemma together. And that's something we can't be reminded of often enough.