In Denial: Free Speech and Holocaust Conspiracy Theories

People are sick of the myths and alibis. — Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust”

***

A book that I am currently reading, “120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature” by Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald and Dawn B. Sova, divides the works into four categories: books that were banned for political reasons, religious reasons, sexual reasons and social reasons. The book contains about 20 titles that I have already read and several that I would like to read in the future, including “All Quiet on the Western Front,” about World War I; “Andersonville,” about the Confederate-manned, Yankee prison camp in the Civil War and “The Satanic Verses,” by Salmon Rushdie, which resulted in a fatwa being issued on Rushdie’s life for supposed blasphemy against the Muslim faith.

While I may write additional blog articles on subsequent chapters in the book on censorship, I wanted to add a few thoughts about what undoubtedly is one of the controversial of controversial works in the whole collection — “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry” by Arthur R. Butz. Many books in the collection were flagged by various religious groups or school districts for either coarse language, racial stereotypes, political views or other controversial content. Butz’s work is a piece of revisionist history — to call it “revisionist” is being both generous and polite — claiming that the Holocaust and the systematic extermination of Jews in Germany and other parts of Eastern Europe was a “propaganda hoax.” Butz, who has a background in control sciences and electrical engineering — not history — is currently a professor at Northwest University, which has protected his right to espouse his personal views while condemning those same views.

It is to the credit of the authors of “120 Banned Books” that they don’t make value or moral judgments about the works they are describing. They simply provide a summary of the narrative arc of the novel or thesis of the nonfiction work, whichever is appropriate, and then outline in some detail the censorship histories of each work. The authors’ handling of Butz’s work is no different.

According to “120 Banned Books,” Butz’s contentions about a conspiracy theory related to the Holocaust are far and wide, and the book attacks nearly every major detail we know about the Holocaust — information, in other words, that makes the Holocaust one of the more egregious offenses against humanity in the history of, well, humanity.

Butz argues that the judges who worked during the war crime trials after World War II had already made up their minds about the presumed guilt of the defendants, which implies that the trials were unjust. Butz questions world Jewish population figures at the time of the planned extermination and the sources by which those numbers were devised. He writes:

… in the demographic argument for a five or six million drop in world Jewish population, the sources and authorities for the figures used are Community and Jewish and thus, essentially useless.

Butz contends that about 750,000 people were resettled from Germany to other areas, while many others died because of disease and starvation, not an attempted wholesale extermination. He said it was likely that a “fair number” died during the resettlements, while others relocated to others areas, like the United States and parts of Europe or the Middle East.

Typhus, Butz said,

plagued the German concentration camps since early in the war. A typhus epidemic at the Belsen camp, for example, is cited as the major cause of death, resulting from a “total loss of control” at the end of the war, not a “deliberate policy.”

noting that disease caught the Germans off guard, and they were unprepared to handle such catastrophic loss of life, which is presumably one reason, according to Butz, that so many piles of unburied bodies were scattered across the Germans landscape and the historical record.

Butz discredits the number of Jews the Germans supposedly killed, citing “inconsistencies and implausibilities” in estimates ranging anywhere from 750,000 to 7 million. He alleges that the area did not have enough crematoria to handle such a large influx of bodies.

As the authors of “120 Banned Books” point out, Col. Rudolf Hoss, who ran Auschwitz, confessed that 2.5 million people were murdered at that concentration camp alone. This was a revised figure. He previously claimed the number was 3.5 million. Needless to say, when killing human beings becomes almost as routine as your morning coffee or brushing your teeth, when women and children are treated like dogs, spat upon, called names, murdered and then are unceremoniously tossed into mass graves like their lives meant less than nothing on a daily basis, it’s easy to see how Hoss and other Nazi officials could have gotten confused as to whether the number of people killed at Auschwitz was 2.5 or 3.5 million in lieu of record keeping. In the calculus of human lives in the Nazis’ depraved sense of morals, what’s difference does a million lives here or there make? A million multiplied by zero is still zero.

But Butz goes farther. He claims that the infamous gas chambers were actually used to disinfect clothing in order to kill lice, which carry the typhus bacteria. This might be one of the more shocking and absurd claims. Here is Butz:

… all ‘survivor literature’, sincere or inventive … report the same basic procedure involved in entering a German camp: disrobe, shave hair, shower, dress in new clothes or in old clothes after disinfection.

Far from exculpating the Nazis for their role in the gas chambers, Hoss has testified that this was a lie concocted by the SS to fool the victims into willingly walking into their own death traps so, presumably, the guards would not have to go to the trouble of forcing them into the buildings. That said, I don’t know why this ruse was even necessary. Surely, the victims could see the writing on the wall. They saw the haggard appearances of their Jewish brethren. They saw the rampant sickness and hunger. They heard the screams. They were forced to march all over the German and Eastern European landscape, sometimes with no shoes or in extreme weather conditions, at the whim of the Nazis. The SS had no problems forcing the Jews to do other tasks, and many had to dig their own graves. So, marching or forcing them into the chambers should have been just as routine as the other mindless, inhumane things they did to the Jews.

Finally, Butz traces the figure that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi to various sources in articles from The New York Times and to the World Jewish Congress, which he said gave an estimation that there were 5,721,800 “missing” Jews to the International Military Tribunal. He claims the Americans and British embellished the numbers of Jews that were killed as a “propaganda basis for their war,” presumably as a way to gin up support to attack Germany and oust the Nazis.

***

I want to be careful to say that I am not presenting a comprehensive picture of Butz’s views as he lays them out in “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.” Perhaps at some point in the future, I will read Butz’s full thoughts on the Holocaust, if it’s even worth my time — I’m not sure that it is — but in this blog entry, I think I have fully represented Butz’s view as summarized in the book on censorship, and lest someone claims that I have taken his views out of context, I think it’s fair to say these were clearly were Butz’s views, and the views of other Holocaust deniers, at the time he wrote the book, and as I understand it, these are still his views, namely that the Nazis had no state-mandated policy to exterminate the Jews, thus no “final solution;” that the gas chambers were not killing centers; that the Germans did not kill 6 million Jews; that the Jews who did die fell victim to starvation and disease; and that the trials of 24 top officials of the Third Reich after World War II were carried out unfairly on the presumption of guilt and their testimony was largely invalid.

Given enough time and space, I could dispute all of these views, but many people have done this before, and Butz’s arguments have been roundly criticized and debunked since the book’s publication in 1975. On the question of whether the Nazis received a fair trial and whether their confessions were given under duress, and can thus be discarded, I offer the following passage from the BBC:

This, however, ignores the fact that some of the more detailed confessions were written after the perpetrators had been sentenced to death. It also ignores the fact that many of the perpetrators described – sometimes in great detail – what happened, but insisted that they either had nothing to do with it or were forced by their superiors to participate.

Thus this argument fails to take into account the statements of Nazis such as the Commandant of Birkenau concentration camp, Rudolf Höss, who described the mass murders that took place in his camp in a document written after he had been sentenced to death. It also fails to account for Adolf Eichmann who, in the memoir he wrote during his trial, spoke of the gassing of the Jews.

It also fails to take into account, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen does in detail in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” the large number of everyday Germans — local police officers, civic leaders and church officials who either openly supported the wholesale persecution and murder of Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe — who were fully on board with the Nazi regime’s plan and even took part in some of the killings themselves, either directly or indirectly. Although Goldhagen’s book was published 20 years after “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,” one could conclude, without even considering the reams of first-person testimony we now have about how utterly devoted much of the German collective was or how devoted they eventually became to antisemitism and the extermination project, that it would be impossible to fabricate such large numbers of photos of mass graves, physical evidence attesting to the “final solution” and Nazi propaganda material and meeting minutes that document the Third Reich’s intentions to eliminate the “Jewish problem,” not just to resettle them elsewhere.

More than that, it would be impossible to imagine a scenario in which the Nazis could have carried out their heinous acts in a vacuum without widespread support from the populace. The sheer scale is unprecedented and had to have involved much of the entire country. If that is hard to fathom, that an entire country could be caught up in an antisemitic and murderous fervor, one only need consider the embedded hate against the Jews that began centuries before with the death of Christ and continued into the early 20th century. The Germans and other antisemites branded the Jews as Christ-killers, even though the Romans ultimately killed Jesus, at least as the story goes in the Bible, and in Hitler’s time, they were largely blamed for the economic recession that struck the poor and working class people of Germany. Antisemitism was deeply embedded, not just in Hitler’s Third Reich government, but in the entire nation. It was a powerful, destructive force. The idea that the final solution was a manufactured genocide in order to start the war is belied by the evidence, both cultural and actual.

Nonetheless, as offensive as Butz and the Holocaust deniers claims are, not only to Jews, but to lovers of humanity who think all life is valuable regardless of sex, gender, race or religion, the entire point of a book like “120 Banned Books” is to suggest that we must protective people’s right to be offensive, and we must protect people’s right to, if they choose, counter the offensive material with either mockery or facts. The prohibition of thought does not move society forward; in fact, it acts as a regressive force, and as we know, the repression of thought has led to and fed some of the most dictatorial regimes in history.

Butz continues to be employed at Northwestern because in the college and in this nation, and others that value free thought and expression, supports his right to speak his mind, whether we think he’s wrong or not. I will end with a statement from Northwest University’s former president Henry S. Bienen, who served in that role for 14 years before retiring in August 2009:

Northwestern University Associate Professor Arthur Butz recently issued a statement commending Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s assertion that the Holocaust never happened. Butz is a Holocaust denier who has made similar assertions previously. His latest statement, like his earlier writings and pronouncements, is a contemptible insult to all decent and feeling people. While I hope everyone understands that Butz’s opinions are his own and in no way represent the views of the University or me personally, his reprehensible opinions on this issue are an embarrassment to Northwestern.

There is no question that the Holocaust is a well-documented historical fact. … Butz is a tenured associate professor in electrical engineering. Like all faculty members, he is entitled to express his personal views, including on his personal web pages, as long as he does not represent such opinions as the views of the University. Butz has made clear that his opinions are his own and at no time has he discussed those views in class or made them part of his class curriculum. Therefore, we cannot take action based on the content of what Butz says regarding the Holocaust – however odious it may be – without undermining the vital principle of intellectual freedom that all academic institutions serve to protect.

[Cover image credit: “Holocaust Memorial” by DeviantArt user Good Mythical Miles.]

I was inspired by what the artist behind the artwork above had to say about the tragedy of the Holocaust and thought it was apropos to share part of it here:

I drew this, it’s supposed to be in reference to the dehumanization of the Jewish people in the concentration camps and their fight to retain their identity. There’s a lot of tiny things in it inspired by details in the class lectures and the books we read, but the biggest one is that the numbers are supposed to be projected onto the sculptures from a distance, so the viewer blocks the numbers from reaching the figures and instead sees them on their own person, and becoming part of the piece themselves.

Book review: ‘Blood Meridian’

Note: This review contains a small spoiler, in that I hint at the ending, but don’t spell out precisely what happens to the protagonist. Neither does McCarthy.

***

The New York Times Book Review once said, “(Cormac) McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame.”

I would say that’s pretty much true with exceptions made for William Faulkner, Thomas Woolfe, John Steinbeck, Phillip Roth and a handful of others, but it’s most certainly true for contemporary American authors.

Credit: “Blood Meridian” book cover artwork by Fish-man at DeviantArt.com.

Credit: “Blood Meridian” book cover artwork by ECTmonster at DeviantArt.com.

Cormac McCarthy’s command of the English language, his flow, word choice and ability to craft excellent sentences that pull you along, almost in waves, until you feel their full force by the end, is impressive. Readers can turn to nearly any page in “Blood Meridian” and can find these nuggets in all their stark clarity and emotive power — passages like:

They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.

The difference between literature and rote fiction, in my view, is that literature doesn’t just tell a story; it has an elusive quality that demands second and third and fourth reads. It’s contemplative, philosophical and timeless. Although this is my first foray into McCarthy, I’d be willing to bet that “Blood Meridian” will stand the test of time.

This novel, which has been described as a kind of anti-Western, follows the trail of a character named “the kid” as he leaves his Tennessee home, heads out west and gets involved with a crew known historically as the Glanton gang, a sundry band of outlaws who initially collect Native American scalps for money and later, apparently just for the hell of it.

Also afoot is an erudite, brutal, perverse, prophesying and borderline supernatural character named Judge Holden, who concludes ultimately that human existence, much like the blood-soaked plains in the novel, is awash with violence from start to finish, and if untold numbers of massacres and scalpings didn’t drive this point home, the fate of the kid certainly does.

Here is the judge laying out the main points of his thesis:

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

And here:

The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

I’m not so sure that war is god anymore than god is god, but is the second part of this really that far off base? I don’t think so. We humans typically come to the height of our influence on the world somewhere between our 20s and 50s, if we are lucky, and then begin the slow wriggling crawl down the other side of the mountain where we at last meet inevitability, such that the primary symbol in “Blood Meridian” is the dying of the sun, smoldering out on the horizon in orange and red and cooling off the wasted earth.

This is “Blood Meridian’s” contribution to the literary canon. Fatalistic and hedonistic though it may be in parts, particularly embodied in the person of the judge, it offers an honest look at humanity’s capacity for violence and our ultimate frailness and mortality, as if being forced to stare into the sun, even if we want nothing more than to turn away.

[Rating: 4.0]

[Cover artwork from this piece by Fish-man at DeviantArt.com. The full artwork is embedded above.]

Completed reading list: 2011-2015

Since at least 2011, I have, along with a former co-worker, kept a list of books completed each year, along with dates, the number of pages per book and the number of pages per year. My cohort has since changed jobs and moved to a different state (as have I), so we haven’t really continued what I previously dubbed as our friendly office read-off between the two of us, but I have continued my own list. Here’s a brief recap: In 2012, I read about 5,000 pages, and in 2013, the total came to 7,616. Last year, I managed 7,925 pages.

This year, since I haven’t had the influence of Blake in my ear five days a week in quite awhile — he seemed to inspire me to read more nonfiction — I have reverted, if “reverted” is the right word, to my old ways of reading more fiction than history, but I still mixed in several substantive nonfiction works. My favorite nonfiction book for 2015 was “Ratification” by Pauline Maier (my second reading), and in fiction, my pick is “O Lost” by Thomas Wolfe, which is the unabridged version of “Look Homeward, Angel,” the epic semiautobiographical work set in a fictionalized Asheville, N.C.

The reason I have continued keeping a detailed list of books, including dates and page counts is because it challenges me to try to read more each year, and I can track how specific interests have changed over time. Following is my list for this year — I just finished my last book today — and for posterity’s sake, I’ll go ahead and post lists for the previous four years, with page totals, completion dates, etc.

2015

1. “Game of Thrones” Book II by George R.R. Martin; started November 2014; did not finish by Dec. 31; 194 pages in 2015.
2. “Demons” by Fyodor Dostoevsky; started Jan. 10, 2014; finished Jan. 25; 681 pages.
3. “Dark Bargains: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution” by Lawrence Goldstein; started Jan. 21; finished Jan. 31; 195 pages.
4. “Ratification” by Pauline Maier; started Jan. 31; finished Feb. 25; 768 pages.
5. “The Ghost Writer” by Phillip Roth; started Feb. Feb. 21; finished Feb. 24 (?); 131 pages.
6. “Giants” by John Stauffer; started Feb. 28; finished March 14; 314 pages.
7. “Dreams from My Father” by Barack Obama; started March; finished early April; 442 pages.
8. “The Call of Cthulhu” by H.P. Lovecraft; started April 18; finished April 29; 360 pages.
9. “Blindness” by Jose Saramago; started about April 30; finished May 4; 326 pages.
10. “American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers and the Making of a Nation; started May 5; finished May 10; 250 pages.
11. “Underworld” by Don DeLillo; started May 10; June 6; 830 pages.
12. “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates; started Aug. 15; finished Aug. 16; 98 pages.
13. “Game of Thrones: A Storm of Swords” (Book III) by George R.R. Martin; started June 6; finished Aug. 30; 1,261 pages.
14. “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins; started Aug. 23; finished Sept. 13; 368 pages.
15. “O Lost” by Thomas Wolfe; started Sept. 6; finished Oct. 22; 662 pages.
16. “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt; started late October; finished Dec. 6; 559 pages.
17. “Flags in the Dust” by William Faulkner; started Dec. 20; finished Dec. 31; 433 pages.

Total: 7,872; average per book: 463.

2014

1. “War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells; started Jan. 1; finished Jan. 9; 160 pages.
2. “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski; started Jan. 3; finished Jan. 29; 662 pages.
3. “All On Fire” by Henry Mayer; started Jan. 30; finished March 9; 632 pages.
4. “The Planets” by Dava Sobel; started March 10; finished March 17; 231 pages.
5. “Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson” by Darren Staloff; started March 17; finished April 6; 361 pages.
7. “The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier” by Scott Zesch; started April 9; finished April 20; 300 pages.
8. “The Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follet; started March 16; finished May 25; 973 pages.
9. “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris; started May 25; finished May 26; 114 pages.
10. “A Manuel for Creating Atheists” by Peter Boghossian; started (?); finished in April; 280 pages.
11. “Beyond the River” by Ann Hagedorn; started late April; finished May 27; 279 pages.
12. “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” by David Wroblewski; started June 1 (?); finished July 22; 640 pages.
13. “Novus Ordo Seclorum” by Forrest McDonald; started July 23; finished summer 2014; 293 pages.
14. “Possession” by A.S. Byatt; started September; finished Sept. 27; 555 pages.
15. “Needful Things” by Stephen King; started summer 2014; finished Oct. 5; 736 pages.
16. “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov; started October 2014; finished October 2014; 309 pages.
17. “Game of Thrones” Book I by George R.R. Martin; started November 2014; finished Dec. 11; 862 pages.
18. “Intruders in the Dust” by William Faulkner; 227 pages.
19. “Game of Thrones” Book II by George R.R. Marti; started November 2014; did not finish by Dec. 20; 611 pages.

Total: 7,925; average per book: 417.

2013

1. “Cleopatra: A Life” by Stacy Schiff; started Jan. 1; finished Jan. 20; 324 pages.
2. “Reconstruction” by Eric Foner; started Jan. 21 (?); finished March 31; 612 pages.
3. “The Oedipus Cycle” by Sophocles; finished April 7; 251 pages.
4. “Why I Am Not A Christian” by Bertrand Russell; started March; finished April 7; 259 pages.
5. “The Portable Nietzsche,” edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann; started April 6; finished May 6; 687 pages.
6. “Absalom, Absalom!” by William Faulkner; started May 7; finished June 5; 303 pages.
7. “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter; started May 7; finished June 29; 396 pages.
8. “Judgment Days” by Nick Kotz; started July 20; 434 pages.
9. “Big Chief Elizabeth” by Giles Milton; started July 20; finished Aug. 16; 344 pages.
10. “The Fiery Trial” by Eric Foner; started Aug. 14; finished Sept. 8; 336 pages.
11. “The Negro Classics” by Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson; started Sept. 28; finished Oct. 4; 511 pages.
12. “V.” by Thomas Pynchon; started Sept. 8; finished Sept. 28; 533 pages.
13. “Half Slave and Half Free” by Bruce Levin; started Oct. 4; finished 6; 255 pages.
14. “The Dante Club” by Matthew Pearl; started Oct. 5; finished Oct. 10; 380 pages.
15. “Six Women of Salem” by Marilynne K. Roach; started Oct. 13; finished Oct. 26; 400 pages.
16. “God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World” by Walter Russell Mead; started Oct. 27; finished Nov. 13; 413 pages.
17. “Vineland” by Thomas Pynchon.; started Nov. 15; finished Dec. 1; 385 pages.
18. “Go Down, Moses” by William Faulkner; started Dec. 1; finished Dec. 11; 383 pages.
19. “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells; started Dec. 9; finished Dec. 13; 104 pages.
20. “Morgan: American Financier” by Jean Strouse; started Dec. 14; finished Dec. 31; 689 pages.

Total: 7,616; average per book: 381.

2012

1. “Grant” by Jean Edward Smith; finished late January; 428 pages (628 total, 200 pages read in 2011).
2. “The Killer Angels” by Michael Shaara; finished Feb. 12; 374 pages.
3. “General Lee’s Army: From Victory To Collapse” by Joseph Glatthaar; 475 pages.
4. “This Mighty Scourge” by James McPherson; 272 pages.
5. “State of Denial” by Bob Woodward; finished April 2; 491 pages.
6. “The Greatest Show On Earth” by Richard Dawkins; started late March; finished May 13; 437 pages.
7. “Madison and Jefferson” by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg; started May 16; finished July 21; 644 pages.
8. “From the Temple to the Castle” by Lee Morrissey; started May 13; finished July 22; 144 pages.
9. “Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism” by Bruce Scheulman; started mid-July; finished Aug. 19; 245 pages.
10. “You Can’t Go Home Again” by Thomas Wolfe; started Aug. 19; finished Oct. 10; 743 pages.
11. “Grant and Sherman” by Charles Flood; started Oct. 10; finished Nov. 7; 402 pages.
12. “The American Civil War” by John Keegan; started Aug. 19; finished Dec. 31.

Total: 5020; average per book: 418.

2011

1. “Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1920” by Gillis Harp; 264 pages.
2. “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris (reread); 114 pages.
3. “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights” by David S. Reynolds; 592 pages.
4. “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho; 165 pages.
5. “Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life” by George Eliot; 794 pages.
6. “1491;” 403 pages.
7. “Thomas Jefferson Vs. Religious Oppression;” 150 pages.
8. “Night” by Elie Weisel; 120 pages.
9. “1421: The Year China Discovered America” by Gaven Menzies; finished in the spring; 491 pages.
10. “From Sea to Shining Sea: From the War of 1812 to the Mexican War, the Saga of America’s Expansion” by Robert Leckie; finished in late spring; 623 pages.
11. “The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson” by Charles B. Sanford; finished in summer; 179 pages.
12. “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” by James McPherson; finished in summer; 384 pages.
13. “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South” by Albert Raboteau; finished in summer; 321 pages.
14. “Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society” by John Andrew III; finished in August; 199 pages.
15. “Union 1812: The Americans who Fought the Second War of Independence” by A.J. Langguth; finished Sept. 7; 409 pages.
16. “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788” by Pauline Maier; finished Oct. 2; 489 pages.
17. “The Federalist Papers” by Madison, Hamilton and Jay; finished Oct. 30; 527 pages.
18. “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism” by Susan Jacoby; 370 pages.
19. “The Theory of the Leisure Class” by Thorstein Veblen; 400 pages.
20. “Erewhon” by Samuel Butler; 260 pages.
21. “The Anti-Federalists: Critics of the Constitution 1781-1788” by Jackson Turner Main; 286 pages.
22. “Grant” by Jean Edward Smith; 200 pages, (628 total, 428 in 2012).

Total: 7,740; average per book: 352.

Total since 2011: 36,173.

A first read of Stephen King

I did feel, however, that I demanded something different (something more?) from a novel than I guessed most of the readers of Stephen King did. (Not that this made me morally superior, just more demanding, a high-maintenance reader.) – Dwight Allen

***

As I am 240 pages into my first – and probably last – Stephen King novel, “Needful Things,” I find myself agreeing with every sentiment in this column about what separates fiction from literature, and why King simply doesn’t measure up, and as far as I’m concerned, he can’t hold Thomas Pynchon’s literary jockstrap.

I’m actually not looking forward to reading more in this book because A) it is needlessly long and B) it is endlessly dull and formulaic. A small town in Maine. A creepy new business owner comes to town. Stupified locals buy his trinkets that just so happen to fulfill their most base desires. Creepy guy gets creepier. And I can only assume, the shit gets weirder, and I don’t care. I’m sure some zany stuff is afoot, but King hasn’t made me invested in the characters, so I also don’t care what happens to them. I could put the novel down right now and happily move on with no desire to know what happens next. That’s a bad sign for an author of King’s calibre.

As such I really don’t get King’s mass appeal. Is everyone’s lives so boring and depressing that they can be fulfilled by even the most basic escapist fiction? I mean, this novel, so far, has no heart, it doesn’t examine any higher truths about humanity or the human condition, it is written in language most middle schoolers could follow and the plot itself plods along at an uninteresting snail’s pace. If the majority of people read novels simply for a compelling plot, boy are they missing out on the truly enriching and soul-fulfilling experience of actual literature, which this is not.

As Dwight Allen put it:

King may be an adequate enough escape from life, if that’s all you require from a book of fiction, but his work (or what I’ve read of it) is a far cry from literature, which, at its best, is, sentence by sentence, a revelation about life.

A “sentence by sentence … revelation about life” is what I require from literature, and this is not literature.

Book review: ‘The Story of Edgar Sawtelle’

Note: This review contains some spoilers.

I initially rated this book three stars, but after giving it some thought and when comparing it to literary classics — the standard by which I judge all novels — I downgraded it to two stars.

sawtelle

This highly ambitious work, a loose retelling of Hamlet in rural Wisconsin, didn’t quite the deliver, both on the quality of the writing and the plot. At times, the writing approached the exceptional, particularly when we got to see the point of view of Edgar’s dog, Almondine, or when Edgar saw his dead father, but those moments were fleeting. More times than not, the plot seemed to drag a bit, especially during Edgar’s time away from home in the forest with the dogs. Other than Edgar and perhaps Gar, the father, the characters seemed a bit flat. Claude, Gar’s brother, could have been a complex character as the scheming deviant, but his motivations aren’t fleshed out very well. How does a guy go from a blacksheep-type figure in the family, who has some arguments with his brother, to a calculating killer? Why is Claude so caught up with Trudy? Was he motivated by jealousy or lust or was he just a sociopath? After the incident with Gar, why is Trudy so resigned to stay with her dead husband’s brother, especially at the expense of her own son’s sanity? Are there no available males back in town?

In 640 pages, these questions could have been more fully explored, but they weren’t, and these are the nuances that separate classic literature from some works of modern fiction that, thanks to low expectations from the public, somehow make it on the best seller list.

While Wroblewski did a good job developing the deep relationships between Edgar, Trudy, his father and Almondine, I don’t think we saw enough of that between Trudy and Claude, which is a pairing that was central in the novel’s conclusion. As for the rest of the plot, the logistics at the end were difficult to visualize. Are we to believe that a blinded policeman, Glen, would or even could pin down a caring mother, while her son risked his life trying to reclaim documents from inside a burning barn? While Claude clearly had evil intentions, we get the impression that Glen wanted to kidnap Edgar for questioning, not be complicit in a murder, so once Glen realized that he had become tangled up with Trudy on the ground, even if he was in immense pain, why did he not just release her?

All that said, the imagery and the descriptive language at the end was stellar — a high point in the writing — and I liked how Wroblewski wraps up the novel from the viewpoint of the remaining Sawtelle dogs. Unlike some reviewers, I don’t knock the book simply for being a tragedy because life, one way or the other, almost always ends in tragedy. But for all its high ambition in summoning the muse of Shakespeare, the book fell a few degrees short in my estimation.

House of Leaves book review

I purchased “House of Leaves” by Mark Danielewski more or less on a whim during a visit this past fall to New York City. The book was displayed prominently on a shelf at the Strand, and I guess because of some good marketing work, I was intrigued enough by the cover and a quick flip through the interior that I decided to pick it up. I purchased the full color paperback edition.

leaves

The book is a type of book within a book as the fictional author Zampanò, an old blind man, pens the portion of the narrative dealing with the mysterious house on Ash Tree Lane that is larger inside than it is on the outside. The protagonist, Will Navidson, a photojournalist, has apparently made a film documenting the strange happenings within the house, including neverending passageways, receding stairways and stairs that protrude seemingly from nothingness, a crypt-like coldness inside the house and a unexplained growl. The film is supposedly called The Navidson Record, and it details the unknown horrors Navidson and his crew face when they venture into the bowels of the house. The side story follows the life of Johnny Truant who, along with his friend, Lude, discovered Zampanò’s papers about the house after the old man kicked the bucket. We learn that The Navidson Record apparently never existed.

The two narratives, Truant’s personal struggles with anxiety, drugs, his clinically insane mother and general listlessness, along with Zampanò’s story about the house, are separated by different fonts so readers can tell who is saying what. But the different fonts are among the least confounding aspects of the novel. Fairly early in the book, readers will notice strange typography, unusual textual arrangements on the page, black boxes, mirrored text, nearly blank pages with only a word or two and a relentless barrage of footnotes, and during parts of the book, readers are met with the tedious task of turning the book to and fro in all directions to read the words on the page.

Critics have criticized some of these elements as needlessly obtuse, and I agree to an extent, but they are not without purpose. The intricate network of destination-less passageways and stairways to nowhere Navidson and his friends encounter are mirrored by the text in the book itself and the black boxes on the page and the mirrored text illustrates elements in the plot. In music, this is called word painting. For instance, if the character is going down a staircase that seems to be receding endlessly downward, the text will appear at the very bottom of the page. For spiraling staircases in the house, the text is all over the page. While these elements do illustrate elements in the main plots — and I appreciate the symbolism — I do agree with some critics that this approach makes reading the book a rather disjointed and tedious affair, not to mention all the footnotes citing fictional sources.

All that said, I was surprised by the number of people who said they thought this was a challenging work even surpassing the obscure writing of Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon is far more challenging in my view. Sure, “House of Leaves” is, perhaps, more abstract in some ways than Pynchon with all the footnotes and seemingly random typography, along with multiple narrators and different languages, but Pynchon mainly relies on English and his novels are among the most difficult to decipher in all of literature. I found “House of Leaves” relatively straightforward, at least for those who have the ability to follow a complicated plot line. Although I will say that, at times, it was needlessly tedious and at times, disjointed. Still, I think it should and will go down as a literary classic.

[rating:80/100]

Detour into fiction

On a whim, I picked up a 2000 book called, “House of Leaves,” by Mark Danielewski while on a trip to New York this past fall at The Strand bookstore on Broadway Street. As readers of this site well know, I’m not too high on modern fiction, especially in the vein of James Patterson, Tom Clancy and the like. I read quite a bit of Dean Koontz back in the day in high school and college, and I just found a lot modern fiction, at least at that time, formulaic and uninspired. Maybe I’m wrong in that characterization, but that was just my impression.

house of leaves

I did, however, as my reading list from last year indicates, spend some time getting to know Thomas Pynchon. As it happens, I’ve had Pynchon in the back of my mind since a college English professor of mine back at Clemson passed along a recommendation. Coming from Lee Morrissey, the person who is at least partially responsible for my love of literature and rhetoric — not to mention architecture — Pynchon was a must-read at some point in my life. I can’t say why it took me so long to crack open a Pynchon novel, but I can say it was worth the effort, even though classifying “V.,” Pynchon’s first novel, as “difficult” might be putting it mildly.

In any event, I seem to have renewed my affinity for fiction, although I’m still not going to bother with Patterson or Clancy because I don’t read for entertainment. I read nonfiction for information and historical context; I read literature for sublimity.

I’ve just started “House of Leaves” this week and will obviously withhold judgment until the end, but I am captivated by the narration and the “book within a book” feel, as well as the contrast between Zampanò, the de facto and fictional author of “House of Leaves,” and the other, seemingly darker narrator, Johnny Truant, who is telling us about his discoveries of the cult film, “The Navidson Record,” after the death of Zampanò.

I say all that to say this: Truant’s introduction to the book, which lays out the context by which Zampanò’s novel begins, is one of the most compelling single chapters of fiction I have ever read. Below are the final two paragraphs leading into Chapter 1, as Truant has just told us how his friend, Lude, found Zampanò dead in his apartment and the impending dread that is about to unfold in the story, dread that the reader is met with abruptly on the book’s first page by the single line, “This is not for you,” floating amid a sea of white space at the top of the page.

Here is as stunning a summary on the human condition as you will ever find:

You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You’ll care only about the darkness and you’ll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you’re some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you’ll be afraid to look away, you’ll be afraid to sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You’ll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you’ll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you’ve got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.

And then the nightmares will begin.

— Johnny Truant

October 31, 1999

Hollywood, CA

It’s enough to make you shutter.

Office read-off 2013

Below are the results of the 2013 office read-off between Blake and myself. Blake’s details are listed as page count, publication year and date completed. Details for my list are shown by the start and finish date and page count. I have provided links for the works we thought were the strongest.

Blake

  1. “George Washington’s War” — Robert Leckie, 660, 1992, 1/19
  2. Beyond the River” — Ann Hagedorn, 279, 2002, 3/17
  3. “The Man Who Would Be King” — Ben Macintyre, 291, 2004, 4/13
  4. The Captured” — Scott Zesch, 300, 2004, 4/20
  5. “Selling the President, 1920: Lasker & Harding” — John A. Morello, 102, 2001, 4/23
  6. Nellie Taft: Unconventional First Lady” — Carl Sferrazza Anthony, 411, 2005, 5/8
  7. “Eisenhower” — Alan Wykes, 157, 1982, 5/11
  8. Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding” — Darren Staloff, 361, 2005, 5/26
  9. “Means of Ascent” — Robert A. Caro, 412, 1990, 6/4
  10. “Words from the White House” — Paul Dickson, 179, 2013l, 6/6
  11. “Grover Cleveland: Study in Character” — Alyn Brodsky, 456, 2000, 6/17
  12. “Renegade: The Making of a President” — Richard Wolffe, 334, 2009, 

    6/28

  13. The Hunting of the President” — Conason and Lyons, 373, 2000, 7/11
  14. “Rothstein” — David Pietrusza, 387, 2003, 7/18
  15.  “A Good Life” — Ben Bradlee, 499, 1995, 7/26
  16. “Dominion of Memories” — Susan Dunn, 224, 2007, 8/3
  17. “Old Hickory” — Burke Davis, 386, 1977, 8/11
  18. “Presidency of James Earl Carter” — Burton I. Kaufman, 214, 1993, 8/18
  19. “The Kennedy Brothers” — Richard D. Mahoney, 377, 1999, 8/24
  20. “Founding Myths” — Ray Raphael, 277, 2004, 8/31
  21. “Island of Vice” — Richard Zacks, 366, 2012, 9/12
  22. “Last of His Kind” — Charles Robbins, 153, 1979, 9/19
  23. “Fraud of the Century” — Roy G. Morris Jr., 256, 2003, 10/1
  24. “The Devil in the White City” — Erik Larson, 390, 2002, 12/29

Jeremy

  1. Cleopatra: A Life” by Stacy Schiff, started Jan. 1, finished Jan. 20. – 324
  2. “Reconstruction” by Eric Foner, started Jan. 21 – 612, finished March 31
  3. “The Oedipus Cycle” by Sophocles, finished April 7. – 251
  4. “Why I Am Not A Christian” by Bertrand Russell, started March, finished April 7 – 259
  5. “The Portable Nietzsche,” edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, started April 6, finished May 6 – 687
  6. “Absalom, Absalom!” by William Faulkner, started May 7, June 5 – 303
  7. “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter, started May 7, finished June 29 – 396
  8. Judgment Days” by Nick Kotz, started July 20 – 434
  9. “Big Chief Elizabeth” by Giles Milton. Started July 20, finished Aug. 16 – 344
  10. The Fiery Trial” by Eric Foner – Started Aug. 14, finished Sept. 8 – 336
  11. “The Negro Classics” by Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson. Started Sept. 28, finished Oct. 4 – 511
  12. “V.” by Thomas Pynchon. – Started Sept. 8, finished Sept. 28 – 533
  13. “Half Slave and Half Free” by Bruce Levin – Started Oct. 4, finished 6 – 255
  14. “The Dante Club” by Matthew Pearl – Started Oct. 5, finished Oct. 10 – 380
  15. “Six Women of Salem” by Marilynne K. Roach – Started Oct. 13, finished Oct. 26 – 400
  16. “God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World” by Walter Russell Mead – Started Oct. 27, finished Nov. 13 – 413
  17. “Vineland” by Thomas Pynchon – Started Nov. 15, finished Dec. 1 – 385
  18. “Go Down, Moses” by William Faulkner – Started Dec. 1, finished Dec. 11 – 383
  19. “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells, Started Dec. 9, finished Dec. 13 – 104
  20. Morgan: American Financier” by Jean Strouse, Started Dec. 14, finished Dec. 31

Total page count — Blake: 7,844, Jeremy: 7,616.

Short book review: ‘Six Women of Salem’

salem

This is a short book review I prepared for Good Reads on Marilynne Roach’s 2013 book, “Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials.”

While Roach does provide interesting accounts of these six women’s lives and grounds the reader firmly in 17th century New England, this is a tedious and sometimes confusing read, and the “fictionalized” sections compounds the problem. Some reviewers said they could not finish the book because of the dry prose. I did manage to finish, but it was a challenge to do so. I really wanted to move on to another book about halfway through, so in that regard, Roach wasn’t able to hold my attention the way other colonial histories have done.

I was also looking for a little bit more analysis of witchcraft itself and why the “spectral” hysteria on that scale was more or less isolated to the Boston area in 1692. Roach stuck rigidly to the narrative of the six women and didn’t provide much of a big picture look at the political and religious contexts of witchcraft at that time in history.

All that said, I’m glad I gave the book a chance because I definitely learned a good deal about the accusers, the condemned and the afflicted, and I appreciate Roach’s diligence in digging up all the old records to be able to compile such a detailed narrative, even if the finished product left something to be desired.

[rating:2.0]

World War Z film review

[Note: This review includes some spoilers.]

If you thought a movie like “World War Z,” released June 21 in the United States, was a touch out of character for an actor like Brad Pitt, whose movie resume runs the gamut from “Moneyball” to “Fight Club” and “Inglourious Basterds,” you wouldn’t be in the minority.

World_War_Z

Pitt has been right at home playing the roles of many idiosyncratic, nuanced characters — perhaps none better than Tyler Durden and Mickey O’Neil — but a former United Nations investigator turned apocalyptic zombie killer, not so much. Nonetheless, leaving no genre-stone unturned, Pitt, with his legions of writers and production prowess, has given us a different sort of zombie thriller, one in which the undead move just as fast — or even faster — than we who are among the living, are inexplicably angered by loud noises and as bizarre as this may seem, demure when confronted with terminally ill patients.

The film opens as many thrillers: In the soft confines of a domicile surrounded by a wife and kids. The protagonist — and really the only character with any semblance of depth, and that’s being generous — is Gerry Lane, a retired U.N. official who wants nothing more than to continue the quiet life as a homemaker in Philadelphia. Within minutes, disaster strikes and the family witnesses a series of unexplained explosions up ahead on the highway. Philadelphia, and most other major cities in the United States and the world, has been overrun with zombies, which military personnel refer to as “zekes.” Avoiding certain death several times over, Lane and his family manage to escape aboard a military helicopter and seek shelter at a Naval base 200 miles off the coast of New York. After nudging from one of his former U.N. co-workers and the confusingly named Thierry Umutoni, Lane agrees to go on a global chase to find the root of the zombie problem, which officials deduce is some sort of malignant strain of a virus.

After a brief and terrifying trip to South Korea that proves to be a largely fruitless endeavor, Lane flies to Jerusalem, which we learn, received some preemptive knowledge about the zombie outbreak and quickly finished a wall to fortify the city. While in Jerusalem, Lane finds out that city officials learned about the zombies from an Indian communique. The man Lane meets there uses some strained logic to explain why Jerusalem made such a huge decision to build a wall based only on rumors about a zombie attack. In  Jerusalem, Lane comes no closer to finding out the source of the infection.

Here is where some of the most stunning visuals in the movie take place, and even more so if you purchased the 3D movie. Responding to the music, singing and other commotion inside the city, zombies along the perimeter of the wall, which looked to be about 500-1,000 yards tall (just a ballpark), begin scaling the structure in mass and progressively climbing on top of each other to try to get over the wall (See cover photo). They eventually clamor over the wall and begin attacking the people inside the city. During this sequence, with thousands of zombies cluttering the streets, one gets the sense that Lane, along with a young woman soldier he saves, should have been dead several times over. It is here also that Lane notices an oddity: The zombies run right past someone who is terminally ill, a nugget of truth which eventually figures into the climax. During one escape attempt, personnel in a helicopter attempt to lower the plane to allow Lane and the woman to enter, only to have the helicopter be overrun with zombies and go down in flames. They eventually make it a landing strip and board a Belarus-based airliner.

I won’t reveal too much of the ending, but suffice it to say that all is not well aboard the plane, and like all other zombie movies to date, viewers were no closer to learning about the mysteries behind the undead in the beginning of the film than they were at the end.

I still don’t know what the fascination is with zombie movies, but I will give Pitt and the crew credit for this offering: At least they endowed the zombies with some qualities that are somewhat unique to the genre, although “World War Z” is not the first introduction to zombies who can actually run (See “Flight of the Living Dead“) instead of shuffling along and dragging their feet. Although their aversion to sound, which was never explained either, took away from the enjoyment of seeing the main characters mow down the undead by the hundreds, this trait did provide the possibility for some chilling fight scenes in which Lane had to, more quietly, engage the monsters in hand-to-hand combat.

As for the plot and character development, let’s face it: Until that frightening day when science can actually enduce a real-life form of zombiosis, movie makers will never be able to explain any supposed “cures” without some strained logic (Pitt’s crew at the World Health Organization developed a vaccine to “camouflage” people from the zombies), but if you were willing to suspend disbelief, the movie was worth the time just to see the visual — I have never seen anything like it — of thousands of bodies crawling over each other and building a living wall, so to speak, of the undead. That visually stunning moment was worth two hours of my time and the price of a matinee.

Human depth, measured in flesh, is about as deep as this movie goes, however. As far as the characters go, this has to be one of Pitt’s weakest roles and performances. I might remember Gerry Lane a year from now solely because I just wrote a review about his fight against zombies. I will remember Tyler Durden and Mickey O’Neil because of Pitt’s immersion in the characters. In “World War Z,” Pitt was immersed in zombies, that’s for sure, but with the character, Gerry Lane? Not so much. It was almost as if Pitt was acting — pun intended, of course — on cruise control. But that’s not Pitt’s fault. Then again, since Pitt co-produced the film, I guess it kind of is.

So, in essence, the take away lesson from Pitt’s latest epic: If you can only manage to come down with a dreadful case of severe acute respiratory syndrome, lymphoma or sickle cell anemia, you might be able to survive an impending zombie takeover, assuming that you, with your newfound pathogen, live long enough to see it.

[rating:61/100]

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