Today, I ventured out to San Francisco. After meeting with Bart for breakfast and getting some tips from him about how to get to the Golden Gate Bridge and some of the other things I might want to hit, I took off in the pickup truck I rented (it was the cheapest thing available, and it was that or maybe an Expedition, which is so expensive that filling up the gas tank for that requires like a co-signer, a passport, and notarization of various imposing documents in triplicate). I stopped by a bookstore at the very cool mall in Palo Alto to get a map of San Francisco (would you believe ten smackaroonies for a map that doesn’t even fully obscure your windshield when you open it up all the way?). The map turned out to be worth every penny.

From the mall, I struck out heading north on Highway 101, which apparently runs from Seattle down to Mexico, with the bridge as my northernmost and intended first stop. Lucky for me, 101 takes you straight through to the bridge, though there’s a little dicey city street negotiation on the way. All in all, it was very simple, though, the only real hitch that I began to get really low on gas in the middle of SF, and there wasn’t exactly an abundance of gas stations (if I had rented the Expedition, I’d've had to stop to fill up every 100 yards, which with all the notarization and draining of blood from turnips and rending of garments and removal of arms and legs would have become time consuming and logistically/physically problematic in a hurry). But I found one at last and continued on my journey. I knew I was getting close at one point, but I forget whether I had caught a glimpse of the bridge or just saw a sign saying the bridge was close or just heard the humming chorus of bridge angels above the traffic noise, but whatever the case, I tried calling both Mleeka and my parents to let them know that I was almost there.

Which sounds just absurdly dumb, I know, but for anybody reading this who doesn’t know me, let me explain that I have a bit of a bridge fetish, with the Golden Gate bridge as the primary object of that fetish. It’s actually more a “feats of engineering” fetish with bridges as a special interest and this bridge in particular as the sort of Platonic ideal of all things bridge. Illustrating the breadth of my infatuation with the bridge are the following points:

• One of the cool “smart” TV stations a few years ago played a documentary about the bridge over and over again, and I watched it over and over again, memorizing facts and being generally sort of obsessive about the whole thing.
• A few years ago, I bought a sort of artistic rendering of a schematic of the bridge and its terrain and measurements that hangs on my living room wall across from the second piece in the series, of the Brooklyn Bridge, which I bought shortly after making the first purchase.
• My parents one Christmas managed to lay their hands on a canceled bond that was used to raise funds for building the bridge. I’ve been meaning for years to get the thing framed (it’s beautiful and looks like big old money in all its green-inked ornament), and Mleeka finally found a frame last week that would allow you to see both sides of the bond, so it’ll be hanging on the wall soon.
• Umm, I called both my wife and my parents as I approached the bridge to tell them that I was about to cross it, and it felt almost as if I was calling to say I’d just won the Tour de France or something.

So yeah, it’s sort of a fetish, and boy was it indulged today. The bridge is freaking huge. Its whole length from beginning to end is more than 8,000 feet, and the actual span over water is most of a mile. As you’re nearing the end of the bridge, trying hard not to veer into other lanes because you’re looking up at the amazing towers and cables, you see a sign telling you that the curb-side lane goes to Vista Point. I opted for that lane, which took me to parking and a vista (surprise) overlooking the bay and giving a nice length-wise view of the bridge. I hung out there for a few minutes getting the view from afar, but then I took off for the bridge itself, which conveniently has nice big railed-in sidewalks designed to accommodate tourists, bikers, etc. I walked from the north end of the bridge to one of the towers, stopping frequently to look up at the cables and pausing for a few minutes at the tower to sort of take in the grandeur of this astonishing structure. The rivets holding the thing together have heads the size of golf balls, and from the tower (but at road level, of course), it takes eleven seconds for falling spit to become so small that you can’t tell whether it’s hit the water or is just too distant to see. The huge cables for the bridge are composed of a sort of honeycomb of bundles of small cables. If I remember correctly, each bundle has something like 81 maybe quarter-inch cables in it, and then the bundles are bunched together into a huge cable three feet across that is then spiraled around by a single strand of the small cable. In total, there are 80,000 miles of cable in the bridge. The vertical cables are substantially smaller, about the size of my fairly beefy upper forearm and impossible to even come close to getting one hand around unless you’re Andre the Giant, and each vertical strand that seems to be one strand from afar is actually four of them arranged in a square with six or eight inches between the corner cables. When you’re close to the end of the bridge, you can grab one of these vertical cables (also composed of smaller cables twisted together) and yank it back and forth really hard, and though it doesn’t really move, you can tell that it’s sort of vibrating just the tiniest bit all the way to the top. If you lean against the outside rail, it hums and vibrates with the rush of traffic, and if you cock your head back to look up to the top of the towers, you feel like you’re going to pitch over backward into the bay. From the bridge, you can see Alcatraz sitting right there in the bay, and beyond that, the Bay Bridge, which I didn’t go on and which isn’t quite as impressive as the Golden Gate bridge, but which really is a pretty nice bridge in its own right; and while I was there, I started a quick informal count of the sailboats on my side of the bridge and stopped at 70 with plenty more to go.

As I was out there, I couldn’t help thinking back to an ambition I had once to write something about the bridge. I know Hart Crane’s already done it, or something very similar. Mine was going to be an elaborately symbolic meta-poetics piece probably positioning the bridge as a sort of Eolian harp (see the bit on humming above) but also as a built structure, as something spanning two points poetic-line-like. I think there was also going to be something about the way the cables were run, going back and forth, back and forth across the bay on a sort of suspended pulley apparatus once the first line was ferried across and how this represented the back and forth of a poem across the page. It would have been horrible and forced, and I’m glad I never managed to write it.

But there was something inspiring about being there, about seeing this marvel of engineering. I staggered around looking upward, shielding my eyes from the sun and talking aloud to myself, thinking hard about the ingenuity it took to design and build the thing, the ambition and the power of the human drive that makes things like this possible. I thought up all sorts of flowery phrases I might use in writing about the experience, and of course they faded as the day pressed on, and I’m glad of it, because then my account would have been imbued more with artifice than with truth and appreciation and the sort of boyish wonder that makes it impossible for you not to spit off the bridge even while feeling very reverent about being there (try something like this at a funeral). I could have stayed there all day.

But I had other things to do. It was close to 2:00 when I wrapped up and crossed the bridge again, and as I was meeting Bart for dinner at around 8:00, it was about time to grab some lunch. He had recommended that I hit pier 39 on the waterfront, so I got out my trusty map and wound my way over there. I was too dumb and cheap to find long-term parking, and the only meters I could find nearby were half-hour meters, so I parked a couple of blocks away and hauled ass up to the wharf, where there were booths selling tickets for Alcatraz tours and ferry rides. There was a guy sitting on the ground playing some small bongo drums with a coffee can in front of him to collect donations, and I saw little old men walking around together holding hands. There was a guy with sort of a rickshaw (not really a rickshaw but sort of a bicycle rickshaw), and there were lots of tourists with windblown hair. Bart had recommended getting some crab, so I went to a place on pier 39 called “Crab House” that was really very expensive. But I was in a hurry and didn’t want to go hunting around for another place, so I sat down and ordered a salad that I believe they called a Foggy Wharf Salad. It’s basically mixed greens with tomato chunks, dressing, and one of several meats. I got the crab, and it turned out to be a very good salad, whatever their dressing was (something with ginger in it, I think the guy said) really giving it some zing, though I don’t know that it was a $15 salad, even if at $15 it was one of the least expensive things on the menu. It was a weird sort of restaurant, with sort of hokey plastic crab decorations but a wait staff dressed very sharply and a touch on the snobby side. I plowed through the salad in about five minutes and virtually ran back to the truck to find the meter just expired. I had to pee, so I put in a couple more dimes and walked a couple of blocks over to make use of the Sheraton’s fine facilities. On the way (this is the only reason I mention the bathroom trip, my body functions probably not generally of great interest to anybody reading this account), I passed two gentlemen in Hell’s Angel-like garb, but one of them had a necktie on under his leather vest and jacket, and it was a really incongruous, memorable image.

Next stop, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which took a while to get to because I kept taking wrong turns and going around the wrong block and missing the turn into a parking lot and so on. I finally got there at about 3:30 and didn’t leave until closing time at 5:45. It’s an amazing museum with lots of really cool pieces, and I wish I could remember the names of some of my favorites. I really like a lot of the abstract stuff, and I find paintings that have paint just gobbed on thickly very appealing. There was one such painting in grays and black with paint several inches thick in places that looked more like a wall sculpture than a painting, and its explanatory blurb said that there were some 500 pounds of paint on the canvas. I saw pieces by Mondrian, Picasso, Rothko (underwhelming), Matisse, O’Keeffe, Warhol, Kahlo, Pollock, and other famous names that elude me for now, but there were also lots of really cool things by people I had never heard of (which doesn’t mean much because I don’t know much about art). One exhibit featured design as art and included a motorcycle, various chairs, and a Macintosh titanium G4 as pieces. Another was a tall (I’m talking 30 or 40 feet tall) room with the sound of running water and a sort of clumsy paint-by-numberish forest scene on most of the wall space (with the unpainted edges actually trailing off into the outlines and numbers of a paint-by-numbers design). Then there’s a window high up with prison bars and blue (sky) visible outside. The water turns out to be coming from a big sink attached to one of the walls. There’s also a box of rat poison under the sink and stacks of bundled newspapers lying around. It turns out that each separate element of the combined piece is listed as a separate piece, but they all coalesce to form a jarring and humorous exhibit. You walk into the room and find yourself looking up the high walls and hearing the water and then chuckle as you see that the water’s coming not from a babbling brook as the walls might suggest but from an almost industrial sink. Then there’s the prison and the idea of being trapped in this forest and this fractured reality. I found this one to be very satisfying and memorable. At one point, as I was walking away from some cubist pieces, I found myself wondering if there’d be anything by Duchamp, and no sooner did I turn around than I nearly knocked “Fountain” off its pedestal. Very cool. There were so many things I wanted to remember and document from this experience. It was just so visually and mentally stimulating to see this wide array of art, much of which defied decoding in any usual comfortably structured way. It’s really hard not to try to attach meaning to art and not to try to map abstract pieces to processable reality, but once you realize that these aren’t necessarily the objectives, it can be very pleasurable just to look at pieces of art and enjoy their visual offering.

It was starting to get dusky when I left the museum, and I wanted to start back for Palo Alto before it got too dark. I wound my way back to 101 by a different route than I had taken in (my location now being substantially different), passing through some slummy areas complete with limb-deficient men on crutches and in wheelchairs hobbling/wheeling themselves out from under overpasses through stopped traffic looking for donations. This sort of ruined for me a feeling I had begun to have during the day that San Francisco was a sort of perfect city, easily navigable with lots of neat shops and attractions and some really cool architecture and as far as I had seen no bad areas or crazy people lying possibly dead and covered with newspapers in the middle of the sidewalk. I’m floating on this cloud of satisfaction and riding off into the sunset when here comes this toothless guy with one of the legs of his dirty jeans rolled up into a hollow nub having a hard time managing both his crutches and his donation cup. And after him a guy missing an arm. And after him a guy in a bathrobe wheeling his chair along with his one good leg and looking really haggard and probably sincerely in serious need. I can’t really doubt that these guys have a legitimate need, but it puts me now in mind of the gypsies in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (which by the way Disney royally fucked up and you really ought to read the actual macabre book, which is good and ultimately disturbing in an “A Rose for Emily” sort of way that, well, Disney won’t be going there any time soon) who have like prostheses and other elaborate ways of making people think they’re cripples when in fact they’re just making a living by playing on people’s sympathies. (And then there’s also an X Files episode in which there’s this little scabby legless Indian guy who scoots around on one of those boards you slide around on under a car while doing repairs and who crawls up into people’s asses to sort of use their bodies for a while until they’re pretty much drained and then I guess he’s back on his squeaky little auto-mechanic apparatus again.) But as I pass these guys, feeling both guilty and a little angry (for various reasons), it occurs to me that of course every city, and especially major cities, have these areas. San Francisco, with its hillsides lined domino-like with white houses, with its sort of quaint wharf area and its trolley cars and electric buses and manageable streets and awe-inspiring bridges, with its many beautiful cultures, its thought-provoking art museum, with all the great things that San Francisco has and is, it is of course still a big city, and, like my own provincial little Knoxville, it can’t all be sunshine and flowers. Even Knoxville has a homeless shelter and people shivering under overpasses.

It was a great day, maybe one of the most satisfying I’ve had in years because of the bombardment of ideas and spectacles. One thing I had hoped to do but opted not to in the end was to run by the City Lights bookstore, which Ferlinghetti founded and can apparently still be found at sometimes with his red pickup parked outside. I stopped by Borders in Palo Alto tonight and read a little bit of Ferlinghetti to make up for the loss. I’m considering trying a run down to Monterrey for a little Cannery Row pilgrimage before I leave on Wednesday, but I’m not sure it’ll happen. Whether that pans out or not, today’s activities have made the whole trip very much worth my while, and I can’t articulate adequately how glad I am that I managed to put aside my worries and venture out.

Via Jason Kottke, I ran across today a column by William Safire entitled “Kiduage” in which he goes over some recent slang neologisms. Some of them, such as “fo shizzle” and “hella,” I was already familiar with (so they must not be so neo, as I’m definitely not up on the trends of youth speech). Other, such as “crunk” (crazy drunk) and “marinating” (replacing “chill out”) I hadn’t run across. I believe I had heard but had forgotten (inexplicably) about “dropping the kids off at the pool,” a phrase for defacation, the vivid and often crude naming of which is one of my guilty pleasures (I’ll spare you examples of my own virtuosic neologisms).

As a bonus, Safire mentions one of my former professors (Connie Eble) as a source he tapped to find some of these phrases. Just a few years ago, I suppose I was one of the students helping to provide examples of such phrases; I believe I recall that Eble had us do a survey or at any rate to provide her with some slang terms we were familiar with.

In A Frolic of His Own, William Gaddis presents a court ruling, with all its suits and counter suits and legal mumbo jumbo, surrounding the problems a piece of sculpture causes a community. If I remember correctly, it’s initially perceived as an eyesore and then traps a dog, so it’s considered a public menace. There’s much todo over ownership of the art and responsibility for the dog’s whereabouts, etc., and it’s really absurdly funny. The details aren’t all the same in this real life situation, but I find the circumstances similarly amusing.

Googling for Vollmann and David Foster Wallace over lunch, I found this pair of reviews. I’m 1/3 of the way done with Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels and am considering rereading Infinite Jest when I finish up. I might give Oblivion another read first. I agree, for what it’s worth, with Green’s assertion that “Good Old Neon” is the best story in the book. I think there are thematic ties between this story and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive pertaining to the instant bridging life and death. Maybe I’ll get into that sometime.

I recently picked up Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, the first volume in a three-volume piece of historical fiction entitled The Baroque Cycle. I had read Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon a few years ago and found it interesting and fairly engaging, if not earth-shattering stylistically. It was well enough written, with a good story and tight enough prose, but it fell short of a standard set for me at the time by David Foster Wallace. It was a good enough book, but it lacked something I couldn’t put my finger on, a sort of polish. Where DFW and others made me want to go out and write books of my own, Stephenson didn’t.

I’m finding the same to be very much true of Quicksilver, so much so, in fact, that I’ve put the book down 170 pages in. Again, it’s well enough written, but it feels to me as if the prose tries too hard to be clever or engaging without being either to a very great degree. I found myself dragging myself through the book in hopes that there would be a payoff later (and I’m sure there would have been, if not a grand one), when, given a severe limitation on my reading time right now, I can’t very well justify reading a book unless it’s doing the tugging.

At the same time that I bought Quicksilver, I bought a book entitled You Bright and Risen Angels, by William T. Vollmann. I found this book by watching the “others who bought this title also bought this one” feature at Amazon.com. I wanted to branch out and try somebody I hadn’t heard of who it seemed stood a chance at least of being somebody I’d find interesting. And interesting this book is. It’s another (very) loosely historical novel that treats of the history of electricity (taking many liberties), a supposed war between insects and human beings, the taming of the West, and other things I haven’t gotten to yet. Marked by midstream changes of point of view and generally unconventional prose, it promises to be an engaging, if not a straightforward or traditional, read.

As I was reflecting on this last night, and trying to take particular note of some of the things I was liking about this book that I didn’t like about Stephenson’s, it occurred to me that the strangeness of the prose itself was a big factor. I enjoy reading things that are hard to decipher. That’s why I find DFW and William Gaddis to be so worthwhile.

A substantial part of the enjoyment we derive from reading is anticipating what’s going to happen next in the plot, trying to figure out what the author’s got up his sleeve and how he’s going to get us from point A to point B (if we’ve already figured out, as careful readers often do, what point B is ultimately going to be). Authors like DFW, Gaddis, and, apparently, Vollmann provide additional enjoyment because they keep you guessing not only with regard to plot but also with regard to the very method of storytelling. In J R, Gaddis forbids you to read in a conventional way: You have to learn to read the book as you go along, picking up cues about how to understand the action as the book progresses. DFW, with his footnotes and fragmented endings and $40 words, keeps you guessing about what he’s doing so that the fun includes not only trying to interpret the story but also trying to interpret how he’s telling the story. So too with Vollmann, as in this book the narrator seems to have a rotating point of view, as the story itself takes on a weird form, I find myself trying to figure out where he’s going, why he’s telling the story in the way he is. And it’s fun.

This is not to say, by any means, that fiction that’s not so hard to read isn’t worthwhile. I do find myself leaning toward the less traditional stuff of late, however. When I consider the 800 or 900 pages that Stephenson spread Quicksilver (only the first third of a longer work, recall) across and I weigh the satisfaction I anticipate deriving from it against the satisfaction I would derive from a harder book of comparable length, there’s simply no comparison. It occurs to me to draw a comparison here between running a marathon and competing in a triathlon: Both are worthwhile and difficult endeavors, but one might be considered more broadly satisfying to some because its completion calls for a greater variety of skill and engagement.

I recently happened to be on the receiving end of an out-of-the-blue $300 gift certificate to Amazon. This was very convenient, as there were a couple of books I had been wanting. On top of the books, I picked up a couple of magazine subscriptions that I wouldn’t otherwise have bought (one of which my subscription to had just run out). Purchases included the following:

• The Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace (already had this, but it’s apparently on permanent loan to a friend I haven’t seen in a couple of years)
• Oblivion: Stories, David Foster Wallace (his newest)
• Pippi in the South Seas (for Lennie)
• Pippi Goes to School (for Lennie)
• Fox in Socks (ostensibly for Lennie; really more for me)
• Baby Whales Drink Milk (Mleeka wanted this one for Lennie)
• Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi: A Math Adventure (for Lennie)
• Crossroads of Twilight, Robert Jordan (for Mleeka)
• JR, William Gaddis (I read this a few months ago but wanted to own it; it’s one of the most dazzling books I’ve ever read)
• Agape Agape, Gaddis (his last)
• The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Ocassional Writings, Gaddis (rounds out my collection of all of his work)
• A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science and Love, Richard Dawkins
• You Bright and Risen Angels, William T. Vollmann (seemed sort of up my alley; I’ve never read this guy before)
• Quicksilver : Volume One of The Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson (I read Cryptnomicon a few years ago and thought it was tolerably decent, so figured I’d try this out.)
• Mencken Chrestomathy, H.L. Mencken (I’ve been meaning to read more of him for some time, and this collection is a nice sampling of his work on a range of topics.)
• The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two, James Sears
• The Great All-American Wooden Toy Book (I’d like to make some toys for Lennie and Zac and Ella.)
• My First Magic Set (for Zac, whom I’m going to try to teach to do magic tricks if he’s interested)
• Harper’s Magazine (David Foster Wallace has written a lot for them, and it seems like probably a good magazine, so I thought I’d try out a subscription.)
• Poetry (Probably the oldest and best-known respected poetry magazine going. My subscription recently ran out and I was too stingy to renew, but this windfall allowed me to go ahead and pick up a two-year subscription.)

Whew, lots of reading to get done. I always love getting new books and never know where to start. I just like holding them, having them all stacked up on the coffee table. When I finally got time last night to look at the books, I had trouble deciding whether to go ahead and dig into the not-so-short stories in Oblivion or to pick up the shorter Gaddis essays or the Mencken collection. And then of course I wanted to go ahead and begin rereading The Broom of the System, which made me want to dive right back into another reading of Infinite Jest, which, with my various commitments and spending time with the baby, etc., will take me about six years to get through this time. Ah, to be independently wealthy.

David Foster Wallace, one of my very favorite authors, gives us this story in his newest collection Oblivion. I desperately want to read this book but will have to wait for the library to get it (I think I’ll call tomorrow and ask them to) or for it to come out in paperback. I found the link at the blog of one Maud Newton, which I happened across when doing a search on DFW.

While we’re on Wallace, check out this article about a piece he did for Gourmet about the Maine Lobster Festival in which he apparently stood up for the ethical treatment of lobsters in pretty typical verbose fashion.

I’ve read several books in the last couple of years that irritated me because they represented my general position on things but were poorly edited. When I say poorly edited, I don’t mean that there was a typo or two. I can’t remember the last time I read a book free of typos; typos aren’t great, but they happen, and running across a couple of them doesn’t spoil a book for me. When I say poorly edited, I mean that there are gross errors of grammar and (sometimes) structure, or just a failure to trim the text down to what’s relevant and useful, that renders the book a poor representation of my position. If a salesperson’s pitch is full of grammatical flubs and is poorly organized, he’s not as likely to sell to me as he is if his pitch is coherent and sharp. Likewise, if a prominent person purveying an idea I support does so poorly, it irritates me because it’s a failure to present the idea in the best light possible.

Two such books I’ve read recently include The Fundamentals of Extremism (a collection of essays) and Can We Be Good Without God? The latter was fairly well structured and was by and large a good read, but it was riddled with typographical and other minor errors. I was reviewing the book for the publisher (Prometheus), and after reading it, I sent a couple of pages of suggested corrections to the editor. I know this seems smug and self-congratulatory, but that’s really not how I intended it. I just want the next edition (if there is one) to be improved so that the ideas aren’t immediately stripped of credibility by issues easily caught and more easily resolved. The former book was a different case altogether. A collection of essays by different authors about the religious fundamentalist movement in America, it naturally had some inconsistencies of tone and style. These are forgivable. And it had the usual (probably more than the usual) frequency of typos and grammatical anomalies. These were borderline forgivable. What really bothered me about what I read of this book (I couldn’t bring myself to finish it) was its density in places and its distribution of information, often internally redundant, that I already knew. This last circumstance doesn’t necessarily condemn the book; after all, it may just be that I know more about these issues than your average person or that the book is in fact targeted toward those (the fundamentalists and those curious about them) who do need to learn these facts from just such a book. There was no one thing about this book that was wholly unforgiveable, but the various things I perceived as problematic about the collection render it to my mind not a book that I would hold up proudly as an instrument supporting my worldview.

Another poorly edited item that comes to mind here is a tee-shirt I saw a few years ago containing a pithy comment (which I forget) the cleverness and punch of which were undercut by a glaring and painful apostrophe error that screamed “those who support this position are too stupid to express the position beyond a first-grade reading level; the position itself must therefore be unsophisticated.”

Part of the problem, of course, is that non-mainstream thinking is often published by non-mainstream vendors. A tee-shirt produced by a major organization stands a greater chance of being well-edited than a shirt whose message is composed of adhesive felt letters by an enthusiastic if grammatically-challenged individual. Random House has a much greater budget and astronomically more resources to throw at editing books than Prometheus or, say, The Atlanta Freethought Society.

Which brings me closer to where I actually intend to go. The AFS published Massimo Pigliucci’s first non-technical book, Tales of the Rational. It’s a book in the same basic vein as Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World that seeks to reclaim science from religious fundamentalists, and as noted above, books that aren’t likely to gain a major foothold in the maintream readership (and a book proscribing religion as a way of understanding the world by someone just making a name for himself surely is one of these) aren’t typically picked up by major publishing houses. And so they’re often not the best-edited books. This is surely the case with Tales of the Rational, another offering that I put down partway through because I was so irritated by the simple errors. Reading books like this makes me want to call the authors and volunteer to read them (free of charge) prior to publication to fix the errors that would otherwise slip through the cracks; I want, in short, to ensure that editorial failure doesn’t undermine the good ideas in such books.

I recently got my hands on a copy of Pigliucci’s latest book, Denying Evolution, which purports not only to explain where the fundamentalists are wrong about evolution, but also to propose that the general failure among the public to understand the theory is largely the fault of scientists and educators rather than of malicious and darkling evangelists. Denying Evolution is published by Sinauer, by no means one of the gargantuan presses (they have only about 100 titles under their belt), but one that specializes in scientific texts, with an emphasis (they say) on quality. So far, I find this emphasis to be pretty much on target. I’m about 40 pages into the book, and I’ve found only one typo (”crationism” should be “creationism” in Figure 1.1 on page 6). The editing seems to be very good by and large, not only in terms of correcting any typos that may have appeared in the manuscript, but also in terms of pacing the text and ensuring that maximum information is purveyed in minimal space in prose that is very readable (unlike The Fundamentals of Extremism, for example, which is dense and uneven within and across essays).

So far, the book is one I would be happy to send out as a general ambassador for my ideas, one I don’t necessarily wish I had gotten my hands on before it was sent to the press. It starts with a brief history of Pigliucci’s motivation for becoming active in the evolution debate — a pretty understandable entanglement for a young evolutionary biologist suddenly thrust into the wilds of Tennessee, home of the Scopes trial. Pigliucci then gives a history of the evolution/creationism debate, suggesting that it it perhaps hotter now than it has been at various times since Darwin published his ideas in the mid 1800s. I found the history interesting and pretty concise, and I learned some things. My only beef with it is a mild unevenness of analysis. For example, Pigliucci questions what’s behind the hotness of the debate in the American South, noting that in the years following Darwin’s publication, the number of scientists in the South was roughly equivalent to those elsewhere in the country. But the debate hasn’t been between scientists and scientists so much as between the religious and the secular, in many cases between the more and the less literate. And illiteracy and the lack of a general desire to live the examined life has been documented in the South by such figures as H.L. Mencken, whom Pigliucci mentions later in his history for his report on the Scopes trial. The issue I’m getting at here is a tendency (common among authors of all stripes, probably, in all honesty, out of a sort of time-efficiency necessity) to examine only the immediately relevant portions of a person’s work. Mentioning Mencken in connection with this debate without bringing up his often vicious condemnation of the South as a den of stupidity and cultural/intellectual laziness amounts to incomplete analysis.

Of course, Southern culture isn’t Pigliucci’s focus, and so it’s not necessarily appropriate for him to write a dissertation on Mencken, but it strikes me as name-droppish to mention a prominement figure without giving a more full consideration to his notions. And, looking at the lengthy index of names invoked in the book, I can’t help wondering if this will be a problem throughout.

This is a pretty small beef, though, and certainly not one to bar my continued reading of the book. Besides, for all I know, Pigliucci does give further consideration to the elements of Southern culture that have led to its poor reception of evolutionary theory. In any case, so far, I don’t think this book is a victim of poor editing, and I look forward to plowing ahead.

For the first time in years, I recently read a book that could probably be called pulp fiction. Or maybe bestseller fiction, as pulp fiction may be more specific. The book was Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress, a thriller about cryptography. I read plenty of this sort of book in high school — Grisham and Crichton among the top authors — but switched into literary mode during college and never turned back.

While I can’t say that I found Brown’s book especially rewarding to read for its own sake, I am glad I read it because it helped me to see that there’s a huge difference between bestseller fiction and literary fiction. That’s not to say that one is objectively better than the other; they simply serve different purposes. But boy is there a big difference, and reading Brown’s book helped me put my finger on at least a part of what that difference is.

Perhaps the most obvious difference is that bestseller fiction is plot-driven, while literary fiction tends to be style-driven. I think many people tend to view literary fiction as fiction with a message, but that’s not a sufficient demarcation between the two genres. After all, any number of lessons could be taken from Brown’s book without even pulling away too many layers of the onion, and if you peer deeply enough into pretty much any piece of written work, you can interpret it to have some sort of ethical or life lesson. Bestseller fiction almost always has a fast-paced plot, and the writing itself is more or less homogenous among authors. Dan Brown and Michael Crichton are interchangeable. Only their plots differ.

William Gaddis and John Steinbeck (two of my favorites), on the other hand, differ substantially. Their tones and their cadences, the ways they break up their books, their pacing, their diction — all of these things are unmissably different between the two authors. When Gaddis tells a story, you feel as if you’re there amid the cacophony of voices; Steinbeck’s stories feel more narrated and comfortably paced. There’s no mistaking one author for the other because they’re so stylistically different. They woulld tell the same story in vastly different ways, where in bestseller fiction, I suspect the same story would be told in very similar ways among different authors.

Literary fiction also allows authors to experiment more. David Foster Wallace, for example, ends one of his books in the middle of a sentence. And some of Gaddis’s work is almost wholly dialogue. While much recent literary fiction does maintain a semblance of a plot line, it’s often not as linear and clear as what you find in bestseller fiction. Gaddis, DFW, and Thomas Pynchon provide superb examples of this. The effect is that the books are harder to read and that you wind up investing more in the reading of these books; in my experience, the bigger the investment, the bigger the return on investment.

Which is why I prefer literary fiction. I admire things that dazzle me with their complexity and ambitiousness. And so I admire the cleverness that goes into contriving the plots for bestseller fiction, but I admire more the authors who contrive such plots and present them in original and thought-provoking ways. The difference between bestseller fiction and literary fiction might be likened to the difference between a compact car and a luxury car. Both serve very useful purposes; I just happen to prefer the latter because I believe it is of a higher quality, and I derive more satisfaction from its use.

I just got the March edition of Poetry magazine. I’ve only read the first few poems, stopped in my tracks as I was by the five poems by one Atsuro Riley. My first thought upon reading his poems was “there’s something of Gerard Manley Hopkins in this guy’s stuff.” Consider the following example

– Mama, mainly: boiling jelly. She’s the apron-yellow (rickracked) plaid in there, and stove-coil coral; the quick silver blade-flash, plus the (magma-brimming) ladle-splash; that’s her behind the bramble-berry purple, sieved and stored.

This quotation from “Map” is one of several that makes me think of Hopkins for a number of reasons. First note all the hyphenated words (dare I call them kennings?). A very quick review of some of Hopkins’s more well-known works netted me the following such hyphenations:

• dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon
• bow-bend
• blue-bleak
• gold-vermillion (all from “The Windhover”)
• couple-colour
• Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls
• fathers-forth (all from “Pied Beauty”)
• Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded
• dapple-eared
• rarest-veinèd
• neighbour-nature (all from “Duns Scotus’s Oxford”)
• sóng-strain
• wheat-acre
• crush-silk
• blood-gush blade-gash
• Flame-rash
• broad-shed
• Tatter-tassel-tangled
• laced-leaved
• Foam-tuft (all from “The Woodlark”)

All of Riley’s poems published in Poetry include at least a couple of these nonstandard hyphenations. He could certainly have arrived at such hyphenations without any influence from Hopkins. He could have been, as Hopkins likely was, influenced by the Anglo Saxon poets in whose honor I proposed the term kennings for these lexical constructs.

But there’s more of Hopkins in Riley’s work. Note for example Riley’s complex internal rhyming and his ample use of alliteration and assonance. Similar sound pairings within the one line I quoted above include the following:

• Mama / mainly (alliteration)
• boiling / jelly (just similar sounds)
• boiling jelly / apron-yellow (meter and a near-rhyme)
• rickracked / magma-brimming (inverted [or "chiastic"] vowel sounds)
• coil / coral
• blade-flash / ladle-splash
• bramble / berry
• boiling jelly / bramble-berry (meter, alliteration, near-rhyme)
• stove-coil / quick silver (chiastic alliteration)

And these are just a few of the more obvious ones within one line. Compare the quotation above to the following stanza from Hopkins’s “Inversnaid”:

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

Or the first stanza of one of the most linguistically enticing poems I can call to mind, “The Windhover”:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Between this poem and the quote from “Map” above, I can’t help noticing a syntactic similarity as well — “the apron-yellow (rickracked) plaid in there” could almost be an echo of “and striding / high there” And there’s also something of Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” in Riley’s poem, the unusual, vivid, at times oblique descriptions of things, that closing “sieved and stored” making me think of Hopkins’s “landscape plotted and pieced.”

Still, I haven’t pointed to anything that couldn’t have occurred in a vacuum without any knowledge whatsoever of Hopkins. I’m not done yet. One of the things that has bothered me the most about Hopkins’s poems is his stilted language and, in particular, his decision to dictate using accent marks how his poems should be pronounced, how certain words should be stressed. I’ve always sort of thought that if you couldn’t put your words together in such a way that your lines were metrically sound without mangling the syntax or requiring nonstanard pronunciations, you should take another stab at it. The best example of my beefs with Hopkins can be found in “Spring and Fall”:

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves, líke the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Áh! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Note the various accent marks and the first two lines in particular. Now compare to the first two lines of Riley’s “Strand”:

Alphabet, sluice the porch.
Bind (and try to braid) our river-wrack and leavings.

If we go by Hopkins’s notation, “Margaret” is pronounced pretty much like “alphabet.” Further, if you get rid of the parenthetical part in Riley’s second line, the first two lines of the poems are almost identical rhythmically, if you forgive the lack of a feminine ending in Riley’s first line, and of course the endings of the second lines are similar. Hopkins’s poem deals heavily in leaves (and their falling) as a metaphor for death. Riley’s poem is about his dead father and includes lines like “Leaf. Leave. Leaves. Leaving. Left.” I think there may be other echoes of Hopkins in the poem as well, and there’s the progression of the poem’s lines, starting with “Alphabet” and “Bind” and ending on “Yesterdaddy” and “Zag” (with no other consistent linear progression through the alphabet in the poem), suggesting a beginning and an ending, a life and a death couched in terms of a child’s sing-songy lesson. Certainly there are some thematic similarities between the two poems.

I don’t know that I’ve proved conclusively that Riley’s work is informed directly or consciously by Hopkins’s, but I think it’s a good bet. As I mentioned above, I’ve never liked Hopkins all that much in spite of his ear for similar sounds (which I do appreciate). The jury’s still out on Riley. I do and I don’t like what I’ve read so far. I’m definitely going to read his poems some more so that I can make up my mind, and his getting me to want to do so says something about how engaging his work is. It may be the case that in a literary environment in which poetry has of late tended to be more about expression than about lexical craftmanship, a more modern and worldy poet with roots in the tonguey earth of Hopkins’s work and a mouth for linguistic innovation can make a pretty good go of it.