Time to get to Spain -- and soon

If I ever get to Spain -- Lord willing -- the world-famous trio of Madrid art galleries is the one thing I see in the capital (Barcelona's where I really want to spend a good deal of time).

But I'm having a hard time figuring out which of the three galleries is highest on the must-see list. All of them pack a punch, but the Thyssen-Bornemisza seems to put on some of the most intriguing exhibitions in Europe. And now a special exhibition is forthcoming on the endlessly fascinating Eros vs. Thanatos, with an equally disturbing, but also fascinating twist: Sexual Desire and Death. (Pictured: Giambattista Tiepolo's "The Death of Hyacinth.")

"The Tears of Eros" will run from Oct. 20 to Jan. 31, 2010, with works taken from Georges Bataille's early 20th century ideas and writings on the subject. From the promo:

"The exhibition focuses primarily on 19th-century European painting and sculpture, including the work of Canova, Ingres, Delacroix, Millais, Moreau and Rodin, but also looks back to earlier periods, in particular the Baroque with Rubens and Bernini."

Oh God, am I there! Would I love to be! But wait, there's more:

"In addition it looks at later art, for example, the presence of 19th-century erotic themes in Surrealism and its wake. Figures and episodes derived from classical mythology and from the Judeo-Christian tradition make up this survey, which is organised into two principal sections: From Temptation to Sacrifice, which looks at the presence of death in erotic passion through themes such as the Birth of Venus, Eve and the Serpent, the Temptations of Saint Anthony, and the Kiss, and a second section entitled The Eternal Sleep, which analyses the subject of death and dying transformed into a trance similar to amorous ecstasy, present in themes such as Apollo and Hyacinth, Venus and Adonis, Mary Magdalen and the skull, and the “beautiful suicide victims”, Cleopatra and Ophelia."

Got to find a way to get there.

An oasis of comfort amid the banality

I had to unplug and flee the Web for a while today in an escape from the incessant Wacko Jacko Palooza.

At a bookstore I found a new copy of "The Best and the Brightest," David Halberstam's epic portrayal of the architects of American policy in Vietnam. Yesterday Robert McNamara died. You might have missed it, given that all-news were dedicated to one story, one story only.

The late Halberstam, a fierce critic of celebrity obsession but comfortable in the public eye, thankfully didn't witness the farcical media circus from Los Angeles. He's been one of my favorite journalists, and it was that book that set him on the course for a fabulous career as one of the best historical authors of our times.

The new introduction to this edition of "The Best and Brightest" had me excited anew for the passion, wisdom and erudition Halberstam brought to every writing project. The deep love of craft for writing is not lost on many people who pen (or type) words for a living, but I've not found many better expressions of it than here.

I'd like to share a few examples that had me feeling a whole lot better about what it is that I do, and how I would like to proceed, in my line of work. Halberstam remains a true inspiration as he explains how he came to the book idea, and to a life as an author:

"That had been a quantum leap not merely in terms of time and space, but, more important, in terms of freedom. . . . The only failings would be my own."

"It was, as much to my surprise as to [those of his friends], the easiest thing I had ever done. I had replaced the need for immediacy with the something far more powerful, an obsession. . . . I never regretted the deadlines, never missed the office."

"The great liberation for me was the ability to escape the limits of form. So it was that the interviews became more than mere source material, they became part of an education. . . . Now something more complicated was happening to me -- I was becoming caught up in the excitement of history, in the pull of the past."

"Writing the book was the most intellectually exciting quest of my life. Each day for the three and a half years the book took to write, I simply could not wait to get to work. Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing, but I was caught up in something else, the actual doing."

And the last paragraph is the very best:

"The great pleasure for me was an inner pleasure: it was very simply the best I could do. In my own mind, I had reached above myself. There were no skills I possessed which were wasted, and there were skills which I found in doing it which I had never known of before, of patience and endurance. If a reporter's life is, at its best, an ongoing education, then this had been in the personal sense a stunning experience, and it had changed the way I looked not just at Vietnam, but at every other subject I took on from then on. I had loved working away from the pack, enjoyed the solitude of this more different, lonelier kind of journalism which I was now doing. I had gotten not just a book which I greatly valued from the experience, but a chance to grow."

Where's Tina Fey when her nation really needs her?

Or, Sarah Palin, we already miss you:

The complicated simplicity of writing

The silly iGoogle gadgetry that I've smeared across the home page of my browser includes a daily literary quote that I've found to be one of the better creative inspirations around.

For the past three days it's displayed some terrific quotes that have helped me bulldoze through some serious roadblocks I've encountered recently in my non-work writing. I'll end this post with those three quotes in just a bit.

I picked up William Zinsser's "Writing to Learn" not long ago, ostensibly to help me sharpen the craft of Web writing and blogging, though it wasn't written specifically for any platform. The thesis is quite useful -- namely, using writing to explore new subjects and make sense of knowledge, essentially to further a self-directed, liberal education. He's used this approach to overcome a longtime aversion to hard sciences and is fascinated by how scientists, physicians, psychologists and other non-liberal arts academicians have employed the "writing across the curriculum" approach as a key element of their teaching.

Lifelong learning is what I call it, because at this point in my life I can't envision sitting down for any more "book learnin' " in a formal classroom setting. I'm nearly 50, took my last academic class 26 years ago, and haven't looked back. In fact, a wise history professor who taught that class told the departing seniors, "your education is only beginning." That has become a mantra for most of my professional and creative exploits as an adult, and I think every young college (or high school) graduate would do well to receive that message.

If I ever wanted to do something as unlikely (for me) as to teach, clearly I would have to revise my stance. A former newspaper colleague who's roughly my age recently earned a Master in Fine Arts degree and I admire her patience. Despite the interest in the subject matter, I know I couldn't have gone through with that.

Perhaps it's the institutional culture that I'm averse to more than anything. Some people operate well in them, some absolutely need them while I'm part of the crowd that simply can't bear to exist in them. That I did for nearly 20 years at a big newspaper company still astonishes me. I cannot imagine entering another one.

So I'm continuing my education into being a writer, not just for the Web age but as a means to keep learning about new topics, ideas, events and people. Zinsser's formula isn't that difficult for professional writers to comprehend, but its utter simplicity took me aback a little:

"Keep thinking and writing and rewriting. If you force yourself to think clearly you will write clearly. It's as simple as that. The hard part isn't the writing; the hard part is the writing."

After a quarter century of writing on deadline, and having to think quickly rather than fully, this is refreshing to absorb. I've found myself repeating those ingrained habits while blogging (as I am doing now) and I may never get fully out of the practice of whisking off something in short order. It's mixing that kind of writing with more contemplative, exploratory writing that I am to accomplish as I evolve as a writer and a journalist in this new stage of my career. It's a more personalized form of writing, but I don't want this to be all about me.

Again, Zinsser's message is very, very simple: Take ownership of what you write, gutting out ambiguity, redundancy, misuse of words, vagueness, jargon, pomposity, clutter, unnecessary adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and phrases, etc.:

"Information is your sacred product, and noise is its pollutant. Guard the message with your life."

And I'm sure I've violated all those no-nos already.

One of Zinsser's favorite writers was the humorist S. J. Perelman, whom he met while teaching at Yale in the late 1970s, near the end of Perelman's life. Zinsser sums up the talk Perelman gave to his students, and this is apt for any student of writing, and especially when the inevitable struggles with writing occur:

"What Perelman was finally talking about was craft. Writing is a craft, and a writer is someone who goes to work every day with his tools, like the carpenter, or the television repairman, no matter how he feels, and if one of the things he wants to produce by 6 p.m. is a sense of enjoyment in his writing, he must generate it by an act of will. Nobody else is going to do it for him."

I've read just through Part I of the book; surely there will be more great insight that I will address here in future posts.

Now for those closing quotes that have me amped up, and that I want to keep in mind when there isn't the mad flourish to write, as I feel now. First, from Italo Calvino:

"What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts."

And Ernest Hemingway:

"A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a buzzard or a hawk or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl."

And finally, Ezra Pound:

"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."

Nothing too elaborate about any of those ideas. But damn hard to realize.

America's literary exceptionalism

Israeli-American writer and translator Aviya Kushner, who's undertaking reading the Bible in English after many years of studying it in Hebrew, thinks that Americans aren't uninterested in foreign matters or even reading books about foreign places. But she laments that they quite often want others "to do the heavy lifting required to make a cultural connection."

That means novels about foreign places by Americans, and virtually no literature in translation. As the United States now has a president with at least one foreign parent, shouldn't our interest in seeking out authentic, non-Americanized voices be on the rise?

It 'taint necessarily so, as she lays out in a lengthy piece in the Wilson Quarterly that ties in some of our other cultural peccadillos:

"We don’t have much time, so we want a taste, some fast food to go. And so we read ethnic literature the way we down an ethnic meal. We can get a burrito almost anywhere, but it’s often mildly spiced, adjusted just for us, and wrapped for those in a rush. So we’re eating a translated burrito, and we’re reading a world prepared especially for us. But we don’t believe anything is missing. After all, we eat 'ethnic' food, and often."

The time crunch can't explain away American reluctance to go to the direct source of cultural difference. We're reading less, in part, because of our hurly-burly ways (not much different from the rest of the developed world). There's plenty of buzz about the Amazon Kindle becoming the next great digital phenonenon, and one that could further undercut the decline of the newspaper and publishing industries.

But more than anything, what I think Kushner is describing is the nagging trait of American exceptionalism applied to literature, especially literature written in another language. This shouldn't come as a surprise given our exceptionalist tendencies with food, music, art, sports and many other aspects of American life. We welcome those from around the world, but only if they're willing to bring what they have and fold it into the American experience, which is constantly evolving.

This is also the substance of Barack Obama's narrative. His Kenyan father came to America in search of educational opportunity, and left behind a son who after some time and soul-searching forged a unique American identity for himself. And used it to become not only the first African-American president, but perhaps the most internationalist one we might ever have voted into office.

What isn't unique is that he shares an American story with millions of immigrant stock (probably most of us). His pursuit of being an American, in his own way, has held so much appeal.

Kushner laments what she sees, I suppose, as a watered-down globalism:

"It’s easy to miss the subtitle factor as we congratulate ourselves on our globalized worldview, our ethnic restaurants in every downtown. Sure, we see some Spanish, on subway doors, and in political speeches when the candidate wants some Texas votes. But it’s a bit like learning about the Middle East by listening to Shakira, a Colombian/Italian/ Lebanese pop singer. You get a little bit of the rhythm, but not the whole thing."

I don't begrudge her the first point. We do seem to think -- and I'm exaggerating just a bit here -- that because we eat more ethnic food (and more food in general), know a little Spanish because of a talking dog in a taco commercial and now have a Kenyan-Kansan president with an Indonesian half-sister who's married to a Chinese-Canadian this is proof of some international enlightenment.

But I'm not sure what she expects the typical American citizen, living in the United States, to do to acquire a more authentic global perspective. Reading international literature certainly could foster some greater understanding, but I hope this isn't her only corrective:

"What is going on in our reading habits is that we want to know, but we want to go home at night to an Anglophone dorm, instead of negotiating with a French-speaking neighbor to stop cooking that awful- smelling thing at 3 am. We want someone to address us directly, to write something just for us. Bilingual writers can slip in locales that speak to us, or brand names we recognize, or concerns that we have as Americans, such as whether sending an elderly parent to a nursing home is a reasonably compassionate choice. That’s why they tend to fare better than writers whose work is translated, who focus on whether that new yurt was worth the cow- price. No matter that it’s the same big issue: whether the cost is justified, whether the larger goal justifies the sacrifice. We want those concerns translated into familiar terms. We want to see our lives, our exact worries, already there on the page."

Again, I think her expectations are quite a bit high for everyday Americans to become such literary adventurists. What she doesn't address here is how novel-reading by Americans is not especially high, regardless of whether it's in translation:

"America, protected by water on two sides and friends on two borders, is at a crucial point in its history. We are at war in a part of the world that speaks Arabic, a language woefully underrepresented in American schools and bookshelves. For the first time, an immigrant tongue— Spanish— is close to becoming a second language. From the beginning, America’s future has depended on deep curiosity, not just the look and sound of it. We have gone to the continent’s edge, we have gone to the moon, we have created forms of government that were previously just dreams. The pioneers knew it, the colonists knew it: There are certain things we must know personally if we want to create a dream of a future."

The new administration has the tough task of trying to become more internationalist in its diplomacy. That's got to be one of the first steps toward encouraging greater cultural curiosity among Americans toward the rest of the world, as it is. And now how we demand they see us.

But it's always going to run into the persistent mindset of exceptionalism, which remains the greatest impediment to the aspirations Kushner envisions.

For what it's worth, I do try to read in translation. But it's not about doing so in the spirit of internationalism, but because I like reading these particular authors: Pessoa, Vargas Llosa, Mann, Flaubert.

Yet I also confess probably three-quarters of the literature I read comes from American, English, Irish and Canadian authors.

So Aviya, I'm guilty as charged.

There are some good sites devoted to the subject of international literature, such as this one and this one.

Some nourishment for the brain, belly and soul

Nothing particular to get off my chest this week, just a roundup of some good work on the Web pertaining to some of the major literary figures of our time, among other items:

-- 20 years after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, are writers in Britain still feeling the chill -- and the fear -- of radical Muslim protests? Hanif Kureishi is an exception to the self-censorship.

-- James Baldwin, in all his complications, is examined in The New Yorker by Claudia Pierpoint Roth, with the focus on his expatriate life, and the conflicting parallels he shared with another African-American writer in Europe, Richard Wright. There are so many excerpts to point out, but one that strikes me is the distraction some artists cannot deflect when it comes to political involvement. For Baldwin, the civil rights movement in the 1960s simply could not be passed up, though it came with a tremendous price:

"Baldwin’s biographer and close friend David Leeming suggested to Baldwin, in the mid-sixties, that 'the anarchic aspect' of his daily existence was interfering with his work. But the most widely credited accusation is that his political commitments had deprived him of the necessary concentration, and cost him his creative life."

-- I've never been to Montreal, but this very hip guide to Canada's most European precinct -- and the second largest Francophone locale behind Paris -- makes me pine to get there soon. Maybe in the spring?

-- Once upon a time, William Faulkner and Don DeLillo both wrote for Sports Illustrated. Now the troubled Time Warner property -- like so many in the media industry -- is craven for other star attractions. And not just for the obvious reasons. Apparently the annual swimsuit issue, which will soon go on sale, accounts for 11 percent of the magazine's revenues. In this economy, the Sisterhood's complaints will be fainter than ever. Those "Goddesses of the Mediterranean" have never been more welcome.

-- Even though it's never been cheap and is no great affordable shakes after its economic collapse, Iceland and its fish-centered cuisine are a lot more enticing now to North American and European tourist wallets.

-- The famous jazz record label Blue Note is trying to figure out what's next as it turns 70.

Toward a new definition of literacy

Being generationally caught between two media cultures has the effect of questioning the values of both on a constant basis, sometimes to a perpetually confusing degree.

In my avocational life as a Web professional I show little hesitation in diving into the deep end of digital media, commerce and culture. Besides that, its exhilarating and cheap technology (such as free blogging software) makes it easy for anyone to explore their own intellectual and cultural interests as they see fit, in infinite ways.

But when I'm not at work, the lure of offline immersion is even greater. I've felt that pull this week as I wearied of the dizzying habits of some online acquaintances who live to Twitter, send instant messages and communicate with one another in an invented language of early adopters and innate geeks that will never be my first tongue.

Evenings I try to set aside for deep reading, for a more measured, deliberate intellectual stimulation. Lately those topics have revolved around the nature of literacy, books and literature and how the digital age is already influencing them all.

Unhappily, so much of the material I've come across is firmly in one camp or another -- either bemoaning the digital onslaught, or triumphing its arrival and bidding good riddance to what it's about to replace.

A good example of the former is from Christine Rosen of The New Atlantis magazine, who wrings her hands about the intellectual development of a younger generation given to grabbing clumps of information by quick-clicking on keyboards. She offers up a verdict on the fate of reading that if realized does indeed bode badly for the culture:

"Despite the attention once paid to the so-called digital divide, the real gap isn’t between households with computers and households without them; it is the one developing between, on the one hand, households where parents teach their children the old-fashioned skill of reading and instill in them a love of books, and, on the other hand, households where parents don’t. As Griswold and her colleagues suggested, it remains an open question whether the new 'reading class' will 'have both power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital,' or whether the pursuit of reading will become merely 'an increasingly arcane hobby.' ”

But she also spends far too much time dismissing outright any benefits of digital literacy, and a different -- but not better or worse -- way of developing the mind. The richness and depth of linking, of offering context, outside sources and a range of views to a work -- typically, in a blog post -- are not examined at all. Rosen is obsessed with the scourge of "screen reading," which to her is simply inferior to the printed word.

I can't imagine ever finding much value in reading books electronically, since I'm an inveterate highlighter and scribbler in the margins. The Kindle will never cut it for me. There is no tactile pleasure in that. But as for possibly publishing a book, I'm not so viscerally opposed to going the online route. The quandary is that I would be asking readers to do something I don't see myself doing.

And I do think Rosen makes another valid point when she writes:

"If reading has a history, it might also have an end. It is far too soon to tell when that end might come, and how the shift from print literacy to digital literacy will transform the 'reading brain' and the culture that has so long supported it. Echoes will linger, as they do today from the distant past: audio books are merely a more individualistic and technologically sophisticated version of the old practice of reading aloud. But we are coming to see the book as a hindrance, a retrograde technology that doesn’t suit the times. Its inanimacy now renders it less compelling than the eye-catching screen. It doesn’t actively do anything for us. In our eagerness to upgrade or replace the book, we try to make reading easier, more convenient, more entertaining—forgetting that reading is also supposed to encourage us to challenge ourselves and to search for deeper meaning."

Digital triumphalists proclaim that a print-oriented culture rooted in books offers only one-way, often arrogant communication, leaving the reader frozen out. To suggest that books need to die in their present form so they can be somehow "reinvented" is simply philistine. That's not what books are. Why not just admit to not being interested in reading them, or not having the patience to do so?

What we have here are adamant polemicists who have no interest in bridging the cultural gap. We live in a relentessly fast-paced, edgy society that is slowing down now only in the wake of a calamitous recession. This is the perfect time to reflect and soak in the still waters of timeless, long-form culture.

At the same time, print-oriented thinkers and artists have to grapple with the inexorable march of the Web. They must become digitally literate -- and yes, learn to understand the dynamics of "screen reading" -- if they want to influence the future of culture.

A very big part of me will always relish the joy of solitude. But to lambaste those who express themselves on MySpace as all being of a type -- and a generational one, primarily -- is to squander the opportunity to help shape how those young minds are formed. And to nourish all of us seeking to deepen our understanding of contemporary culture, in all its complexities.