two umbrellas

I enjoyed The Chess Artist by JC Hallman on various levels. First and foremost, because I know the author, the voice echoes, ghostlike, as if I were having another conversation with him. (This is my first encounter with reading a book written by a friend.) I enjoyed the storytelling, as I would a conversation, something that I rarely find in non-fiction and one of the reasons that I don’t read very much of the genre. Yet, by the end of the book, the voice was no longer an echo of past conversations but that of a guide through the intricate history of chess – as it was, as it is, and what it may become. I will shamefully say that I’ve never played chess and rarely did I find it a hindrance in understanding the depth behind the subtitle: “Genius, Obsession, and the World’s Oldest Game.”

A cursory read will find the book’s structure erratic – constantly changing in time, scene, and characters – hovered around the travels of the author and his friend, Glenn, a chessmaster. The books travels from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Kalmykia, a tiny country nestled between Russia and Chechnya (thanks to the map in the front of the book), whose president believes that chess should become a religion while its people are fighting desertification and the failures of capitalism, to Princeton, to prison. A further look will see the structure of the book is not to tell the story of two men on their journeys, yet it does reveal much about the level of friendship that can be had and lost in travel as well as the reality of their intentions: one, a writer determined to uncover the history and the mystery of the game; the other, a chessmaster determined to sink into his own idiosyncracies, who already feels the mystery of the game. I have to wonder if the two are still friends.

However, there is still more. The beginning of the book had me questioning whether or not chess could be a religion. Kalmykia’s president believes it to be so; yet, many question if the beauty of the game is in its logic, its history, its mathematics, or its art. What is chess like? Hallman writes:

The uselessness of similie was apparent in Kalmykia. You couldn’t say that the little flags that hung outside Buddhist temples were like those that hung at used car lots because in Kalmykia they weren’t. You couldn’t compare the wriggling shoulders of traditional Kalmyk dancers to those of strippers spinning their pasties because there were no strippers in Kalmykia. And you couldn’t say that every telephone in Kalmykia – like the one that sat on Muzraeva’s ugly desk – was like a child’s toy because that was all they had. Metaphors didn’t work. But it was just this plastic gadget, flimsy and made as though for tiny hands, that started to ring…

It was then I realized that chess is not like anything. It has not become a religion because it is not worshipped although it can transcend above the board and its players. It is not like art although people thoroughly believe in its beauty. Hallman writes: “Chess is pure because it was worthless, useless.”

The Chicago Sun-Times has an interesting end of the year literary wrap-up, which includes a “best books” list, (brief) commentary on the American literary state, and snippets of interesting literary events of 2005.

Here’s a sampling:

SHOWDOWN AT ST. ANDREW’S CORRAL. Cary McNair, a wealthy film producer, demanded that Annie Proulx’s stunning short story “Brokeback Mountain” — about two gay cowboys — be yanked from the 12th grade reading list of St. Andrew’s School in Austin, Texas, or he’d withdraw his $3 million donation to the building fund. The courageous school refused to give in and McNair took back his donation, but writers everywhere came to the school’s support and it easily made up the money elsewhere. (The movie wasn’t bad, either.)

THE INBRED WORLD OF BOOK REVIEWING. Stung by a snarky review of his novel Until I Find You in the Washington Post, John Irving complained that the reviewer, Marianne Wiggins, had an unacknowledged “prior association” with the author — a no-no on many book pages (including this one). “Had we known that Irving had dedicated one of his earlier novels to Marianne Wiggins’ ex-husband, Salman Rushdie, and had we known that Irving and Wiggins had socialized in the past, we would not have made the assignment,” the Post said in a rare apology. “Socialized”? Hmm.

PUSILLANIMITY PRIZE. To the New York Times, for refusing to print the title of chess champion Jennifer Shahade’s book Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport in two articles on the same day — including the op-ed piece she wrote at the Times’ request.

THIS IS A DEMOCRATIC NATION? Turkey put its most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, on trial for telling unpleasant truths about Turkey.

The subtlety of distance suspends the narration in Housekeeping above time and place. The narrator grows into a character of isolation and Robinson takes us through her ironic journey of going nowhere until she is old enough to realize that she belongs to no where but within herself. Ruth, the narrator, and her sister Lucille grow up in Fingerbone – a nondescript town in a nondescript time – under the guidances of various female relatives after their mother leaves them on their grandmother’s doorstep before driving herself into a lake. Lucille grows to want to become “normal” where Ruth grows to understand her solitude. What is fascinating about this book is its ability to ignore the outside world. There is no interest in connecting to it even when transience sets in. When people do enter Ruth’s narrative it is a jarring reminder of the vulnerability that is risked in revealing yourself to others.

Ruth and Lucille are raised for most of their lives by their Aunt Sylvie, who maintains eccentric housekeeping rules: eating without the lights on, collecting tin cans, sleeping with her boots under her pillow – a throwback to her days of drifting on trains from town to town. The sisters begin to develop their own sense of housekeeping: Lucille begins to make friends in town and at school and wants to conform to society; Ruth continues to isolate herself and finds that her self is the only house that she’ll need to keep.

Robinson’s prose stands out in its quiet ability of distance that creates the pervasive isolation that Ruth endures and then ultimately embraces. Ruth often conjectures within her experiences. Yet, as Ruth removes herself from these situations – “the brisk and ruinous energies of the world,” she returns to them and grounds herself in her isolation and anonymity.

I toyed with the thought that we might capsize. It was the order of the world, after all, that water should pry through the seams of husks, which, pursed and tight as they might be, are only made for breaching. It was the order of the world that the shell should fall away and that I, the nub, the sleeping germ, should swell and expand. Say that the water lapped over the gunwales, and I swelled and swelled until I burst Sylvie’s coat. Say that the water and I bore the rowboat down to the bottom, and I, miraculously, monstrously, drank water into all my pores until the last black cranny of my brain was a trickle, a spillet. And given that it is in the nature of water to fill and force to repletion and bursting, my skull would bulge preposterously and my back would hunch against the sky and my vastness would press my cheek hard and immovably against my knee. Then, presemably, would come parturition in some form, though my first birth had hardly deserved the name, and why should I hope for more from the second? The only true birth would be a final one, which would free us from watery darkness and the thought of watery darkness, but could such a birth be imagined? What is thought, after all, what is dreaming, but to swim and flow, and the images they seem to animate? The images are the worst of it. It would be terrible to stand outside in the dark and watch a woman in a lighted room studying her face in a window, and to throw a stone at her, shattering the glass, and then to watch the window knit itself up again and the bright bits of lip and throat and hair piece themselves seamlessly again into that unknown, indifferent woman. It would be terrible to see a shattered mirrow heal to show a dreaming woman tucking up her hair. And here we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement. They mock us with their seeming slightness. If they were more substantial – if they had weight and took up space – they would sink or be carried away in the general flux. But they persist, outside the brisk and ruinous energies of the world. I think it must have been my mother’s place to rupture this bright surface, to sail beneath it into very blackness, but here she was, wherever my eyes fell, and behind my eyes, whole and in fragments, a thousand images of one gesture, never dispelled but rising always, inevitably, like a drowned woman.

New York magazine offers that JT LeRoy is not who he claims to be (although he doesn’t claim to be anyone, really). The SF Chronicle asks: Does it really matter? Greil Marcus sees the real problem:

“What it all signifies to me is a deepening mistrust of the imagination, or the driving out of fiction by nonfiction…

“People will read fiction about a gender-confused teenage or preteen parking-lot hustler — but only if they can believe that what they are reading is true. Then they can celebrate the person as an artist while avoiding having to actually engage with art.”

I am glad that I am not the only one who noticed that six of the sixty-one non fiction books were written by NYT staffers – not to mention there were only thirty-nine fiction titles, but that is another issue that leads to my weekly disappointment in the NYTBR. The NYT has an article from the public editor discussing the literary nepotism, both of which I find disappointing.

READERS, it seems to me, are generally well served by the Book Review screening process. In some situations, I think the editors probably could have done more to find a reviewer less vulnerable to the perception of a conflict.

The conflict then becomes self-promotion, much to the detriment of literary writing (both fiction and non fiction), even if some of the Times authors have well written books. The author, Bryon Calame, spends most of article defending the “reviewing” process thus skirting the issue of the “selection” process.

New York magazine has the year’s best ‘end of year’ list for its creative categories and not so typical choices.

• Transplant friendship
• Robert Novak leaves CNN for Fox News.

Speaking of truth or the lack thereof, the NYRB has an article relaying the “balance” in American journalism.

Still, there remained firm limits on what could be reported out of Iraq. Especially taboo were frank accounts of the actions of US troops in the field —particularly when those actions resulted in the deaths of Iraqi civilians.

On the same day The Times ran its front-page story about the two thousand war dead, for instance, it ran another piece on page A12 about the rising toll of Iraqi civilians. Since the US military does not issue figures on this subject, Sabrina Tavernise relied on Iraq Body Count, a nonprofit Web site that keeps a record of casualty figures from news accounts. The site, she wrote, placed the number of dead civilians since the start of the US invasion at between 26,690 and 30,051. (Even the higher number was probably too low, the article noted, since many deaths do not find their way into news reports.) The Times deserves credit simply for running this story—for acknowledging that, as high a price as American soldiers have paid in the war, the one paid by Iraqi civilians has been much higher. Remarkably, though, in discussing the cause of those deaths, the article mentioned only insurgents. Not once did it raise the possibility that some of those deaths might have come at the hands of the “Coalition.”

This is typical. A survey of the Times’s coverage of Iraq in the month of October shows that, while regularly reporting civilian deaths caused by the insurgents, it rarely mentioned those inflicted by Americans; when it did, it was usually deep inside the paper, and heavily qualified. Thus, on October 18 the Times ran a brief article at the bottom of page A11 headlined “Scores Are Killed by American Airstrikes in Sunni Insurgent Stronghold West of Baghdad.” Citing military sources, the article noted in its lead that the air strikes had been launched “against insurgents” in the embattled city of Ramadi, “killing as many as 70 people.” A US Army colonel was cited as saying that a group of insurgents in four cars had been spotted “trying to roll artillery shells into a large crater in eastern Ramadi that had been caused when a roadside bomb exploded the day before, killing five US and two Iraqi soldiers.” At that point, according to the Times, “an F-15 fighter plane dropped a guided bomb on the area, killing all 20 men on the ground.” The Times went on to report the colonel’s claim that “no civilians had been killed in the strikes.” In one sentence, the article noted that Reuters, “citing hospital officials in Ramadi,” had reported “that civilians had been killed.” It did not elaborate. Instead, it went on to mention other incidents in Ramadi in which US helicopters and fighter planes had killed “insurgents.”

The AP told a very different story. The “group of insurgents” that the military claimed had been hit by the F-15 was actually “a group of around two dozen Iraqis gathered around the wreckage of the US military vehicle” that had been attacked the previous day, the AP reported.

The military said in a statement that the crowd was setting another roadside bomb in the location of the blast that killed the Americans. F-15 warplanes hit them with a precision-guided bomb, killing 20 people, described by the statement as “terrorists.”

But several witnesses and one local leader said the people were civilians who had gathered to gawk at the wreckage of the US vehicle or pick pieces off of it—as often occurs after an American vehicle is hit.

The airstrike hit the crowd, killing 25 people, said Chiad Saad, a tribal leader, and several witnesses who refused to give their names….

Readers of the Times learned none of these details.

Death and the horrors of war do not sell advertising space. It’s no wonder many Americans are “cushioned” through the language of television and print news. Jean Baudrillard writes:

It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary…

How long will the simulation of truth be comfortable and in some cases even excused?

Harold Pinter, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, took his acceptance speech as an opportunity to speak unspeakable truths about the United States. You can find the full text here (of course a British newspaper).

In 1958 I wrote the following:

‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

…

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

Unfortunately, a British author making these statements will not raise too many eyebrows here in the States. Even the NYTBR sugarcoats Pinter’s language. For further interesting reading, take a look at Understanding Power by a discerning American.

Joan Didion is working on turning The Year of Magical Thinking into a one woman broadway show.